The string of confessions coming out of Fox News is shaping into a pattern of greed and deceit that ought to attract some attention from their viewers. You know, the people who regard Fox as a beacon of truth in a mediasphere contaminated by alleged liberal propaganda. What should those people think if Fox admits that they have been playing them for chumps and are only interested in squeezing them for advertising dollars?
That is precisely what Fox has admitted on several recent occasions. Here are some of the more egregious examples:
Roger Ailes: I’m not in politics, I’m in ratings. Rupert Murdoch: I’m not averse to high ratings. Glenn Beck: I could give a flying crap about the political process. […] We’re an entertainment company. On the surface, it appears that these are stipulations that the ideological prejudice of Fox News is a calculated ploy to garner the sort of devoted viewers that translate into higher ratings. If that’s true, then Fox’s viewers ought to feel manipulated and insulted by this blatant exploitation, not to mention the offense at having been deliberately misinformed.
However, there may be an entirely different reason for these recent assertions. Fox has been taking a considerable amount of heat lately for their glaringly unbalanced and unprofessional coverage of the news. They are losing advertisers on some of their top programs. There are thoughtful conservatives expressing their distaste for the hysterical extremism the network has come to represent. And they are becoming the laughing stock of broadcast journalism.
Consequently, it may be the intention of the Fox hierarchy to separate themselves from their disreputable and embarrassing departure from ethical journalism. And by asserting that their mission the whole time was to provide entertainment and increase ratings, they think they can shield themselves from the charges of shoddy and biased reporting. They are saying, in effect, that they have not been taking sides politically, they have merely been staging a performance aimed at an audience hungry for theater.
That’s a lose/lose argument. In effect they are conceding that they produce shoddy journalism, but they’re only doing it to lure gullible viewers. So this argument shows neither an appreciation for ethical reporting, nor respect for their audience. And the sad thing is that their audience will never accept or understand this, even if they were to hear about it. Which is unlikely if they stay tuned to Fox News.
Personally, I don’t buy this argument. While it is obvious that Fox plays to the gut for entertainment value, the political bias runs so deep that it could not possibly be incidental. So in the end, Fox is guilty of both exploitation and partisanship. It’s the worst of both worlds.
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It’s Official: Rupert Murdoch Is A Senile Old Coot
The chairman of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has endured many decades as a right-wing purveyor of tabloid pseudo-news enterprises around the world. His power and influence has been felt in the halls of governments and the boardrooms of corporations. His opinions have been sought after and received with great deference. But that’s all over now.
In an appearance at a forum for the public affairs TV series, The Kalb Report, Murdoch exhibited clear signs that he has lost touch with reality. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post was there and reported some examples of Murdoch’s mental decline. It begins with the ludicrous assertion that the staff at his competitors MSNBC and CNN “tend to be Democrats” but that his own Fox News presenters “are not Republicans.” He did not, however, bother to identify a single Democrat at his rivals’ networks, and when pressed, he was also unable to name one on his own.
More importantly, Murdoch seems to have completely forgotten that he employs the most recent vice-presidential candidate of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, as well as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee. And let’s not forget other avowed Republican Fox Newsers Karl Rove, Rick Santorum, Dana Perino, Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris, Laura Ingraham, John Bolton, Dan Senor, Linda Chavez, and Oliver North. Fox is lousy with Republicans, but in his diminished capacity Murdoch is so confused about the political affiliation of his crew that he can declare aloud and in public that there aren’t any such people working for him.
In another departure from reality, Murdoch was asked if it was ethical for Fox to promote the Tea Party movement. For anyone paying attention it is clear that Fox became a virtual publicity machine for the Tea Baggers.
They aired numerous interviews of Bagger spokespeople including their chief strategist and fundraiser, Dick Armey. They had reporter Griff Jenkins riding along on the Tea Party Express bus. They dispatched their top anchors, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, and Neil Cavuto, to host Tea Party events across the nation. They even branded branded some of the events as “FNC Tea Parties.” But Murdoch’s response to the inquiry was rife with bewilderment:
“No. I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party. But I’d like to investigate what you are saying before condemning anyone.”
Either he never watches his own network or his memory and comprehension skills have utterly collapsed. He must also not be paying much attention to that Internet thing. For several months Murdoch has been promising to put all of his online news content behind a pay wall. He has spoken out harshly against what he deems theft by news aggregators like Google. Never mind that he can stop Google from indexing his web sites anytime he wants with just a few lines of code. At the Kalb forum he reiterated his opinion saying…
“We will be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that’s it. Followed by a subscription form.”
You would hope that someone on his staff (or his nurses) would advise him that that is exactly what they do now. If you search Google for news content, you will get only a headline and a couple of sentences. Then you can click the link to go to the full story on the content owner’s web site. Contrary to his misconception, this drives traffic to Murdoch’s site, it doesn’t steal anything. And what Murdoch doesn’t acknowledge (if he even remembers) is that he owns web sites that actually do steal content from other news sources. His Fox Nation, for example, is a news aggregator that does not pay for the articles it features, but reprints much more than a couple of sentences from them – sometimes the whole article.
The general tone of this interview ought to be disturbing to Murdoch’s family and doctors. He really appears to be suffering from an acute cognitive failure. These are not the sort of logical missteps made by someone who has built an international media empire. Murdoch is either profoundly distracted or is losing the mental acuity to perform his duties. It may be time for him to consider stepping aside and let his kids screw up the world for awhile.
Addendum: Additional reporting on the Kalb interview reveals that Murdoch…
- …doesn’t consider Sarah Palin to be a journalist. (Duh!)
- …believes that Greta Van Susteren is a Democrat. (Never mind her adoration of Sarah Palin for whom her husband is an advisor)
- …thinks the iPad will save newspapers. (Right. A $600.00 device possessed by a fraction of American households, that will charge extra for subscriptions, is going to replace a news source that was delivered for pennies a day to any American doorstep)
Keep ’em coming, Rupert.
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Republican Senator To Town Hall: Don’t Be Biased By Fox News
In a stunning demonstration of clarity, another right-winger has had an epiphany with regard to the influence of Fox News on the public at large and on the Republican Party in particular. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn is joining David Frum in questioning the primacy of Fox News. This is an enlightened stance for the arch-conservative senator because it recognizes the reality that for the past few years, as Fox’s ratings have increased, Republican support has fallen off a cliff. Last year I wrote a fairly detailed analysis of how Fox News is Killing the Republican Party where I noted that…
Fox has corralled a stable of the most disreputable, unqualified, extremist, lunatics ever assembled, and is presenting them as experts, analysts, and leaders. These third-rate icons of idiocy are marketed by Fox like any other gag gift (i.e. pet rocks, plastic vomit, Sarah Palin, etc.). […and that…] By doubling down on crazy, Fox is driving the center of the Republican Party further down the rabid hole. They are reshaping the party into a more radicalized community of conspiracy nuts. So even as this helps Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line, it is making celebrities of political bottom-feeders.That can’t be good for the long-term prospects of the Republican Party.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is not your ordinary Republican. He is amongst the most extreme faction of the fundamentalist wing of the party. He is a member of the secretive politico-Christian cabal known as “The Family,” and a resident of its scandal-plagued C-Street House. He is a fierce opponent of abortion. He endorsed Alan Keyes for president in the 2000 Republican primary. He is a prolific abuser of the senatorial “hold” that allows members to anonymously block legislation. And now this icon of rightist orthodoxy is committing the ultimate sacrilege. It began with a response to a constituent at a town hall gathering who complained that the health care bill would result in people going to jail for not purchasing insurance. Coburn corrected her her saying that…
“The intention is not to put anybody in jail. That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that aint the intention.”
Coburn also defended the conservatives’ favorite target for demonization, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, against the knee-jerk hecklers in the crowd. He insisted that she was a “nice person” and then again called out Fox News for cultivating a culture of incivility:
“What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what’s going on and make a determination yourself. So don’t catch yourself being biased by FOX News that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don’t know what they don’t know.”
But Coburn didn’t stop there. He went on to encourage his audience to seek out diverse sources of news and information and not to be locked in to the narrow perspective of a single, agenda-driven enterprise. He appealed to them to…
“…stay informed on the issues. Don’t just watch Fox News or CNN. Watch ’em both. […] I do a lot of reading every day and I’m disturbed that we get things like what this lady said, and others have said on other issues that are so disconnected to what I know to be the facts. And that comes from somebody that has an agenda that’s other than the best interests of our country.”
Coburn has just asserted that Fox’s agenda is unpatriotic. He may face some pushback from Sean Hannity on that. Glenn Beck may brand him a communist. But what we are witnessing here is not a political reversal by Coburn. He is still the ideological Dark-agist he has always been. What’s happening is that he has recognized the fact that Fox News has been demonstrably harmful – not to the interests of the country (which it has) – but to the interests of his Party. He is afraid that the fringe brigade will overtake the mainstream conservatism that he espouses and drive voters to the Democrats, the Tea Baggers, or discourage them from voting at all.
When someone as far right as Coburn sees this light, then the truth has floated up close enough to the surface that it will be hard for others to ignore. Including Fox News. If the mini-trend of Frum and Coburn (and Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson and …) continues we may see some programming changes at Fox. The question is which direction? If Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes want to advance their conservative interests, and those of the Republican Party, they had better tack hard to the center. Their current course is headed straight into a perfect storm of tea bags, birthers, McCartheyites, militias, and secessionists. But if they want to sustain their ratings dominance, they have to keep feeding the fanatics that make up their base.
Fox has been the king of the ratings hill for several years, yet that has not helped them electorally. It was in those years when Fox’s audience was expanding that Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. It was in those years that Barack Obama was elected president and Democratic congressional majorities increased. And most recently, Fox was unable to hold back passage of the health care bill despite incessant promotion of the anti-reform troops (pundits, politicians, and protesters) and a barrage of false reporting on the substance of the legislation. This couldn’t be clearer evidence of the conflict between Fox’s success as a television network and its success as a partisan public relations agency.
This is going to be interesting. The folks at Fox are as devoted to their wealth as they are to their agenda. In fact, the two are nearly inseparable. They use their wealth to advance their agenda, and they push their agenda to increase their wealth. But they are going to have a hard time threading this needle. It’s a choice between market position or issue advocacy. Or, put another way, it’s a choice between Glenn Beck or electoral victories. They can’t have both. The decision may tear them apart. There have already been sharp division between factions at Fox, most notably when Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law announced that he was “ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard…” for journalistic standards.
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.
Update: Sen. Coburn sought Bill O’Reilly’s absolution on Monday. His appearance on the program was a mixed bag in that Coburn tried to maintain his critical stance on Fox, but also kiss up to O’Reilly. O’Reilly, on the other hand was his idiotic self. He declared with absolute certainty that no one on Fox ever said that someone could go to jail for not having health care under the Obama plan. Of course, that was easily disproved. In fact, Glenn Beck said it on O’Reilly’s show. It don’t come funnier than this, folks.
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Sarah Palin’s Real American Fluff Gets Soft Reception
See the entire Malice in WonderlandIf Fox News thought they had the next big thing locked up when they signed Sarah Palin, they may be having second thoughts today.
The broadcast of Sarah Palin’s Real American Fluff Pieces, a collection of old clips that were supposed to be inspirational, probably did not inspire much excitement in the Fox News executive suites. The audience, while besting the competition, was not particularly impressive for Fox. In fact, Palin had fewer viewers than Greta Van Susteren’s On the Record, the program she preempted. There were only about 2 million real Americans tuning into Palin’s show (472K adults 25-54). That compares to Van Susteren’s 2.3 million viewers (654K 25-54) last Thursday and 2.1 million (559K 25-54) average for the first quarter of 2010.
From a critical perspective, the reviews are in, and they aren’t lighting up the Fox Towers. Most of the comments employ adjectives like “tame,” “canned,” “stiffness,” “innocuous,” and “disconnected.” If this is her out-of-town tryout, she isn’t going on to Broadway.
It’s fair to assume that Palin is well compensated for her efforts on behalf of Fox News. I haven’t seen any disclosures of her salary but she gets a minimum of $100,000 for speaking engagements, so you can bet she got a gold-plated contract from her pal Rupert Murdoch. Nevertheless, her numbers would have put her in seventh place in the cable news rankings following Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Special Report w/Bret Baier, Van Susteren, and Fox Report w/Shepard Smith. She did manage to beat Neil Cavuto and an O’Reilly rerun.
Somehow, I don’t think this is what Roger Ailes had in mind when he dropped a pile of cash on her. Of course, this is not her only duties at Fox. She also provides commentary to programs like Van Susteren’s and O’Reilly’s. Well, commentary may be too generous a description. It’s more like a litany of platitudes and cliches that she probably wrote on her palm. Even her colleague Chris Wallace dressed her down on the air – to her face – saying, “Well, you’re not a very good analyst.” Palin responded by inviting Ailes to fire her. That notion might have entered his mind this morning when he saw the overnights.
Yesterday’s program got off to a rocky start when one of the featured guests, LL Cool J, revealed that he had never spoken to Fox or Palin and that the interview was a two year old clip that he had not given permission to rebroadcast for this purpose. Fox responded by insulting him and cutting him out of the show. Shortly after, Toby Keith, another featured guest, made the same complaint as LL Cool J. Oddly enough, the white country singer was neither insulted nor edited out, as the black rapper/actor was.
Fox News is the most profitable division of Murdoch’s News Corp. Over the past few years their ratings have grown and they’ve renegotiated richer contracts with cable operators. But business decisions like the Palin signing are not going to add to the company’s future prospects. They are already suffering the embarrassment of having their second highest rated program, Glenn Beck, going to air with advertising for diet pills and gold recyclers because Ford and Wal-Mart don’t want to be associated with him.
Under the circumstances, I’m not sure that Murdoch and Ailes can possibly think that they are getting their money’s worth from Beck or Palin. But that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to carry them. Murdoch has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into the New York Post and it has never been profitable for as long as he’s owned it. He purchased the Wall Street Journal for $5 billion and last year wrote off $2 billion of that. He has been deficit financing the Fox Business Network for over two years with still no sign of it going into the black. In short, he’s made of money and doesn’t care how much of it he loses in pursuit of his political agenda.
That ought to come as a great relief to Sarah Palin after this disastrous debut as an anchor.
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Fox News Caught In Massive Nielsen Ratings Fraud
Update 4/2/2010: A major development occurred overnight.
It is now April 2, 2010! (no foolin).
Update 5/10/2010: See this new analysis and addendum.This week saw the release of the quarterly ratings performance data for television programming. Much of the reporting on this story focused on the dominant position Fox News retains in the cable news sector. As has been the case for several years, Fox News smothered the competition and experienced rapid growth while other news programmers stagnated or declined.
While most industry insiders accept the routine pronouncements from the sole ratings provider, Nielsen Media Research, without question, some observers could not help but notice a certain incongruity in the results. How is it, they wonder, that Fox News can be so consistently in the lead despite their obvious niche programming focus on a narrow segment of the viewing audience. The decidedly right-of-center bias of Fox News corresponds to a rather small portion of the national electorate. Republican favorability has been hovering in the mid-twenties for years. So how does this negligible slice of the market translate into such a disproportionate ratings advantage?
The answer may be evident in new disclosures of business relationships that call into question the integrity of Nielsen’s data. With the rollout of its People Meter methodology in the early 2000’s, Nielsen entered the high-tech era of TV market research. It was heralded as a major advancement of data collection that would vastly improve the ability of producers, programmers and advertisers to evaluate the marketplace. But as with any upheaval in the status quo, there were skeptics and dissenters. Chief amongst them was Fox Broadcasting, who argued that the new system significantly under-counted African-Americans, a key component of their audience at the time. There was also a question as to the security of the new set-top boxes that would be recording viewer choices. With the introduction of technology comes the risk of miscalculations and tampering. But eventually the complaints receded or were resolved and the new service took its place as the signature survey product for television marketing.
It was during this time, subsequent to the implementation of People Meters, that Fox News began its rapid ascent to ratings dominance. A prudent observer might wonder how this new system came to report so much more favorably for a network that had fiercely opposed its adoption. What transpired that caused Fox News to withdraw their objections and become the biggest beneficiary of the change?
It has recently been discovered that the Wegener Corporation, the manufacturer of the set-top devices that Nielsen uses, has a long association with Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation, the parent of Fox News. Wegener was founded by the former management of Scientific-Atlanta, a producer of set-top boxes for cable access and other purposes. One of the other products in Scientific-Atlanta’s line was a device used by Gemstar to provide television program listings to cable operators and their subscribers. Gemstar was an affiliate of TV Guide, which in turn was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. So the executives who were responsible for developing and manufacturing Murdoch’s equipment for Gemstar became the principles of the company providing Nielsen with their ratings collection devices. And around that same time Fox News dropped their objections to the new People Meter service.
It would not be difficult to encode an electronic device so that it would purposefully miscalculate survey data. A simple algorithm to multiply a target by a fixed percentage could produce a result that would artificially inflate one set of figures while keeping it in proportion to a larger set, making it virtually impossible to detect. At present, their is no confirmation that such a deception has been contrived. It would require a thorough examination of Nielsen’s hardware and the ability to reverse engineer the chips inside of it. But for those who presume that it would be an outlandish notion, they would be well advised to study recent news events that uncovered similarly scandalous conduct on the part of News Corp.
One situation involves a digital recorder and satellite receiver made by NDS Group for Murdoch’s Sky network in Europe. Unlike TiVo, the Sky+ system records “personal viewing information,” which is information about your viewing practices that is tied to your contact information (i.e., it’s not kept anonymous, like TiVo’s).
In addition to that, NDS was also charged with using spies and hackers to steal Sky competitor Dish Network’s programming and make it available to viewers for free, thus undercutting Dish’s financial viability. As reported in Wired Magazine:
“The case involves a colorful cast of characters that includes former intelligence agents, Canadian TV pirates, Bulgarian and German hackers, stolen e-mails and the mysterious suicide of a Berlin hacker who had been courted by the Murdoch company not long before his death.
On the hot spot is NDS Group, a UK-Israeli firm that makes smartcards for pay-TV systems like DirecTV. The company is a majority-owned subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corporation. The charges stem from 1997 when NDS is accused of cracking the encryption of rival NagraStar, which makes access cards and systems for EchoStar’s Dish Network and other pay-TV services. Further, it’s alleged NDS then hired hackers to manufacture and distribute counterfeit NagraStar cards to pirates to steal Dish Network’s programming for free.”
On yet another occasion Murdoch’s news group engaged in some sleazy and illegal behavior to get stories about celebrities and politicians. The Guardian reported that Murdoch paid substantial sums of money to keep this scandal under wraps:
“Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.
The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public Âfigures as well as gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.”
And if that’s not enough, check into the incestuous and disturbing web of connections Murdoch has to the communists in China. Glenn Beck tried to pull the veil off of this one but was censored by his own employer.
Given the history of sleazy conduct and nefarious associations, is it really that far-fetched to conclude that something similar has taken place with regard to Murdoch’s relationship to Nielsen and the firm that manufactures their ratings collection devices? It would explain how Fox News could wind up with such a dominate lead in the ratings despite catering to a relatively small potential audience. It would explain why Fox suddenly halted their objections to a new process that they previously considered inaccurate and biased against them.
It would also explain a deep discrepancy between the allegedly broad viewing of Fox News and their nearly invisible impact on the political landscape. If Fox were as ubiquitous as they (and the ratings) claim, then why, during the years of their strongest growth, did they fail to move the country to their positions. With a sustained 24/7 propaganda effort, Fox failed to stop the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress. They failed to stop the 2008 election of Barack Obama despite incessant and false allegations of him being a Muslim, a radical leftist, and a pal of terrorists. They failed to stop the 2010 passage of a health care bill despite charges of socialism, death panels, and national bankruptcy. Does this sound like a network that holds a commanding majority of America’s television viewers under its sway?
To be sure, I am not the first to question the legitimacy of Nielsen’s numbers. Many people in the industry quietly accept what they regard as a flawed methodology simply because there is no alternative – or because proposed alternatives are even less acceptable. When it suits their purpose, even Fox News complains about the ratings. And I’m not talking about simple complaints concerning minor numerical inconsistencies, but allegations of rampant fraud that warrant federal investigation. After basking in the glow of Nielsen’s data, Bill O’Reilly turns around and castigates them as having “major problems…that have benefited MSNBC,” and asserts that…
O’Reilly: “The bottom line on this is there may be some big-time cheating going on in the ratings system, and we hope the feds will investigate. Any fraud in the television rating system affects all Americans.”
Of course the “feds” don’t have any jurisdiction over private market research firms. And it’s rather hypocritical for O’Reilly to suddenly advocate for big government intruding on the free market. But conservatives like O’Reilly are not averse to hypocrisy when it furthers their agenda. And in this case the agenda is to work the refs at Nielsen and suppress any notion that Fox is not the king of the television hill.
In conclusion, if we are to have any certainty as to who the real king of the hill is, we will need to get to the bottom of this lingering controversy surrounding Nielsen’s systems and procedures. The connection to Murdoch’s covert operations and his history of unlawful corporate espionage cannot be dismissed. Nielsen must investigate their equipment providers and perform intensive examinations of the devices they place in viewers’ homes. Anything short of this would leave them open to charges of complicity and render their survey data useless.
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Tea And Sympathy For The Devil
Click here to see the full Malice In Wonderland seriesPsychology Today has published one mental health professional’s diagnosis of the pathology of the Tea Bagger. Dr. Michael Bader provides an astute examination of a serious emotional malformation, complete with clinical examples and prognosis. Bader’s conclusion is that the victims of this brewing epidemic of acute paranoia warrant our sympathy and understanding.
Bader begins by describing some of the causes of paranoia as the mind’s attempt to “make sense of and mitigate feelings of helplessness and worthlessness.” The goal is to manufacture redemption and absolution. In some cases that goal takes precedence over objective reality, which is frequently more frightening and less forgiving than the paranoid inventions.
“…the tea party folks find in their paranoid views about politics a narrative that ‘explains it all,’ that reduces their sense of helpless confusion, and that channels their feelings of victimization into ones of self-righteous militancy. They go from passive victim to active agent, from guilty to innocent, but all at the price of distorting reality into one full of malevolent conspiracies.”
Many Americans have been burdened with hardships that are testing their capacity to cope. The loss of jobs, homes, and security, threaten their sense of self-worth and provoke feelings of guilt and failure. For some, the discomfort of these conditions compels them to find alternative explanations that render them innocent victims of some other more powerful, irresistible force. And, as Bader notes, the vulnerable are getting help in constructing their emotional defenses:
“For new tea-party members, however, the drift toward paranoia is facilitated by the right-wing media machine that offers several ready-made narratives perfectly designed to help its consumers clear up their confusion, understand their helplessness, absolve them of any blame, and offer a way out. The conspiratorial alliance of business and government, a growing tyranny intended to disenfranchise, disarm, and exploit ordinary citizens, secret pacts to overthrow the constitution, etc. all currently led by an un-American, godless, colored, elitist, contemptuous, foreigner – Barack Hussein Obama. A grim and frightening picture of the world to be sure.
Fox News, of course, is the foundation of this electronic therapy. They happily feed the conspiracy-primed psyches of people whose barriers to irrationality are already severely weakened. The loss of tangible assets like property and work leads to a fear that more significant intangibles like liberty and faith are also at risk. They are convinced that the human values that have been present in society for centuries are under assault and are losing the war. So they invent explanations that soothe their conscience, even while creating new dangers and anxieties. Why would they do this, Dr. Bader?
“Psychologically speaking…it offers relief from helplessness and a sense that things are falling apart. It offers a sense of cohesion and identity based on certainty, a commonality of interests, innocence, and even martyrdom. While the world of the tea-party’ers is filled with danger, it is a danger mitigated by moral certainty, clarity of purpose, and a definable external enemy.” […]
“The ‘problem’ is that tea-party activists move from legitimate feelings and normal longings to paranoid political positions that are dangerous and cruel. But because these positions serve an important psychological function, because they resolve an emotional dilemma, they can’t be changed by rational argument.”
That level of certainty, combined with delusional foes lurking behind every acorn, is a formula for fiasco. And recent events in the news bear this out in the most horrific way. The gunman at the Pentagon. The suicide pilot in Austin. The murder at the DC Holocaust museum. The shooting at the Arkansas recruiting station. The assassination of Dr. Tiller. All of these tragedies were the result of diseased minds convinced that their actions were required to right some perceived wrong on the part of entities too large to confront any other way.
Just try arguing rationally with them – or with Tea Baggers who want the government to keep it’s hands off of their Medicare. They are a perplexing group of activists who actually advocate against their own interests. They reside in a world that can’t be reached from the real one the rest of us inhabit.
The same warped reasoning is the inspiration for birthers, patriot militias, and gold hoarders. It produces contrived plots like FEMA building concentration camps, and health care being a secret plan for reparations or total control of every citizen’s body. Liz Cheney’s McCarthay-esque campaign against the imaginary Al Qaeda 7 in the Justice Department is exactly the sort of media red meat that fuels these delusions (both liberals and conservatives are now rebuking Cheney). And Fox News’ repeated misrepresentation of “reconciliation,” a conventional parliamentary procedure, as a “Nuclear Option” is purposefully designed to invoke anxiety.
Glenn Beck is the acknowledged master of delusion. He is still peddling economic Armageddon, treasonous government moles, and the fear of Obama’s clandestine army of progressives (or fascists, or communists, or Raelians) perverting our principles and our children. Just this week he aired a special he titled: “The Indoctrination of Our Kids: An American Epidemic.” He ascribed all manner of evil (his actual word) to the most mundane social interactions and studies. One book he spoke of was so abhorrent that he wouldn’t even utter it’s name, or that of the author. He called it “Eric’s Book,” and sought to portray it as another link in the chain of villainy that the government (or progressives, or teachers, or the overlords) are tightening around our throats.
For the record, it was Eric Greenberg’s “Generation We.” Beck played clips from this companion video in which he saw an assembly of depraved young Americans. What do you see?
Ghastly isn’t it? These kids, who are concerned about the future of the nation and the world that they will inherit, are obviously puppets of Obama’s robot dictatorship.
But you can’t slip this past Glenn Beck. No, he knows what’s going on:
“What’s going on? Well, there’s a battle for the hearts and minds of your children. While you’re busy trying to make a living and navigate through the daily madness piling up all around you, progressives are working on indoctrinating America’s youth, your kids.”
Beck’s paranoia is operating at full steam. There doesn’t seem to be much hope for restoring whatever sanity he may have started out with. But Dr. Bader appears to be more optimistic about the prognosis for the Tea Baggers. Perhaps it is his experience with patient care and analysis that gives him this perspective:
“It would help if we found ways to get into relationship with them, to demonstrate a genuine curiosity not about their paranoid theories but about the underlying pain and fear that is the source of them. In this way, perhaps we can figure out how to speak to that pain and fear in ways that are both authentic and comforting. Perhaps we can figure out what experiences they might need to have in order to feel safe enough to at least listen to another narrative – ours.”
That’s a worthwhile strategy, but I can’t say that I’m as hopeful as the good doctor. After all, Fox News and talk radio are still around to fire up the crazy. How will the Tea Baggers heal when they are still being fed contaminated slices of unreality? How do you replace the paranoid narrative when Beck and O’Reilly and Hannity and Cavuto and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s messengers of malignancy are churning out fractured fables that reinforce the Baggers’ dementia?
The Murdoch cartel is explicitly designed to keep weak souls strung out and gasping for another fix. Murdoch is the pusher and the Baggers are addicted to the phony melodramas that bring them the comfort of having an enemy onto which they can project their gnawing guilt and shame. It doesn’t matter that it’s all a litany of lies. The more outlandish the falsehood, the stronger the rush and, in the end, the more tragic the consequences. To these poor suckers anything is better than facing the harshness of reality and taking responsibility. Particularly if it involves sacrifice and charity and other scary socialistic notions of fellowship. It’s much better to be distracted and confused by nefarious forces from the outside.
That’s where Rupert Murdoch comes in with his international media empire, devoid of national allegiances or personal conscience. This paranoia factory could only be run by such an entity. It requires massive resources and ambition. It works because Murdoch is a man of wealth and (dubious) taste. And what’s puzzling you is just the nature of his game.
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Roger Ailes Seeks To Improve On Hitler And Stalin
In an interview with his pals at the National Review, Fox News CEO Roger Ailes made clear that he won’t be satisfied with the slipshod propaganda techniques pioneered by the Nazis 75 years ago. Responding to a question about whether Fox News was inappropriately engaging in persistent attacks on the President, Ailes attempted to redirect the charge of bias back to the media at large:
“This little cable channel called Fox is somehow ruining your life. Keep in mind, the last two guys to get all of them [the media] lined up together were Hitler and Stalin. That did not work out well.”
So Ailes regards Hitler’s efforts to dominate the press as insufficient. Should we, therefore, assume that he aspires to do a better job of it? He’s off to a pretty good start. His network has already homogenized its coverage to fall in lock-step with a conservative agenda and is expertly regurgitating rightist rhetoric from a well-disciplined army of anchors and guests. But even that’s not enough. He also finds it necessary to lie about his record of blatant bias and disregard for facts:
Q: You have the President of the United States and others, including the extremely intelligent James Carville, saying Fox News shapes the nation’s politics. Are you pleased? Are you appalled?
A: No. That’s their fault. What we do is we go on the air every day with two points of view in the news. Glenn Beck has a phone on his set that says if I make any factual errors please call me so I can correct them immediately and apologize. And the phone never rings. Because what he’s saying is apparently true. We have been thirteen years on the air – in our fourteenth year – and we’ve never taken a story down because of factual problems.Where to start? First of all, we already know that Fox News deliberately tried to shape politics because Rupert Murdoch admitted it in public. Secondly, the two points of view Fox presents are from the Republican Party and the Tea Party. Third, Ailes’ reference to Glenn Beck (whom he said is “actually not a conservative”) beautifully depicts his absence of reason. If Ailes concludes that Glenn Beck’s acute paranoia represents the truth because the White House hasn’t dialed up his prop phone, then it must also be true that Beck worships Hitler because he hasn’t phoned me to deny it.
And finally, Ailes must not be watching his own network if he thinks that there haven’t been any retractions or corrections. In fact, they are so sloppy with facts that executives had to issue a memo declaring a “zero tolerance” policy after numerous “mistakes” were broadcast. And that doesn’t even include the intentional lies that are the keystone of Fox’s anti-journalistic brand.
Perhaps the funniest quote from the interview is when Ailes pretended to merely be a contrarian whose only interest was to balance whatever the predominant themes were in the press:
“To be honest with you, if all the media was tipped to the right, I’d be the biggest liberal in New York.”
Not exactly. He’d still be the biggest liar. To which side does he think the media was tipped after 9/11, when an idiot president whose legitimacy was still in doubt, was elevated to hero status and given a free pass to legislate away decades of civil liberties? To which side does he think the media was tipped in 2003 when every prominent network, newspaper, and reporter were uncritically supporting the Bush administration’s march into an unjustified and illegal war with Iraq? Why wasn’t Ailes directing his staff to take a contrary position then? Where was the “biggest liberal in New York” when conservative issues were being championed by the international megaliths that own and operate most of the media (as they have for decades)?
Ailes was just where he’s always been – staked out on the far right, disseminating disinformation in pursuit of his arch-conservative mission. He is marshaling his troops and enforcing strict discipline to insure their adherence to the official doctrine. And now he has even insinuated that his competition are aligned with the principles of Hitler and Stalin. So I hope people will stop complaining when I post this:
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Malice In Wonderland: Fox News Through The Looking Glass
Over the past year the Tea Party phenomenon has attracted a lot of attention from the rightist media. From the beginning Fox News took the lead sponsoring and promoting Tea Party events, dispatching their anchors to literally host Tea Party rallies, and donating hundreds of hours of airtime to Tea Party spokespeople and supporters. Fox News is the de facto Tea Party Channel.
Despite that massive PR push, the Tea Party remains quagmired as a niche clan of exclusionary cultists and corporate dupes. But that hasn’t deterred Fox News from their campaign to Tea Bag America. This morning Fox Nation declared that Tea Parties are going on high alert, and posted recruiting calls for Joe the Plumber’s Tea Party Tax Revolt.
All of this got me to wondering where it will all end. With a major so-called “news” network advocating on behalf of the delusional flank of the conservative crusade, it seems to me that the right stumbled into an abyss and has consumed some mighty potent mushrooms. So, with apologies to Tim Burton, I present…
Malice In Wonderland, Fox News Through the Looking Glass:
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Later this month a new Tea Crusade will commence in the form of another AstroTurf sponsored bus tour. The thrid Tea Bagger Express will conclude in Washington on April 15. On August 28, Glenn Beck will headline his “Restoring Honor” affair at the Lincoln Memorial. That’s an ironic event considering the obvious lack of honor of the host. He just starting claiming that it’s a fundraiser for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, but he originally promoted it as the launch date for his next book “The Plan.” Also, the date is the anniversary of Martin Luther’s King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the same location. A couple of days ago, Beck called King a “radical socialist” and questioned whether we should be celebrating a holiday in his name. Now Beck seeks to muddy King’s memory by usurping this historic anniversary to hawk his book. In September Beck’s second annual 9/12 rally will take place on 9/11. This gives Beck another opportunity to tarnish a sensitive anniversary.
Expect all of these events to be aggressively promoted on the Tea Party Channel (i.e. Fox News). And expect there to be more coverage of, and interviews with, Tea Baggers and there proxies in Congress. And above all, expect more confusion, mischief, and deceit on the part of Fox and the right-wing politico-media complex.
I must say that I have to agree with Alice when she said:
“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”
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Number Of Advertisers For Glenn Beck In The UK: Zero!
The movement to persuade advertisers from supporting Glenn Beck’s Acute Paranoia Revue has been surprisingly successful. Thanks to the efforts of Color of Change and StopBeck.com, over 100 advertisers have now affirmed that they will no longer permit their ads to be aired during Beck’s program. That’s here in the U.S. In the UK the situation is a little different.
Glenn Beck’s program on Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News in the UK has run for the past six days without any advertisements at all.
That’s right. Glenn Beck has become a non-profit, commercial-free, charitable donation of airtime courtesy of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. Perhaps that is why Beck displayed a painting yesterday, that he says he did himself, showing George Washington in the style of Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster. Beck is probably “hoping” that his show will stay on the air even though it is scaring off advertisers faster than Osama Bin Laden’s dating video at eHarmony.
It is one thing to note that viewers have rejected Beck. His program is seen by less than 1% of the American population and polls show that 42% don’t even know who he is or have an opinion. However, it is another thing entirely when conservative corporations, including Wal-Mart and Home Depot, are embarrassed to be associated with his brand of hate and fear mongering. So here in the U.S. Beck has taken a considerable hit financially and is being kept afloat by dubious gold dealers and direct marketers.
But in the UK Beck is now completely ad-free. The significance of this, beyond the monetary, is that Rupert Murdoch must now be recognized as a brazen propagandist. He can no longer pretend to be a businessman making choices based on the best interests on his company. By granting Beck hours of free airtime despite the financial losses, Murdoch is neglecting his fiduciary duty to his shareholders. And he is doing it in order to continue the wingnut proselytizing of Glenn Beck. Perhaps the show should carry a disclaimer along the lines of PBS: “The Glenn Beck program is brought to you by a grant from Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation.”
It will be interesting to see how long Fox can ignore this situation. The Advertiser Exodus began last summer, and critics at the time said it would be over by fall. Instead it has held fast and expanded. Someone needs to ask Murdoch how long he intends to carry this albatross at the next News Corp. shareholders meeting.
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The Right’s Top 25 Journalists?
Tunku Varadarajan, national affairs correspondent for The Daily Beast, has compiled a list of what he and 50 academics, politicians, and journalists, consider to be the top 25 right-wing journalists in America. The most enlightening thing we learn from this list has nothing to do with the ranking of wingnuts in the media. What is truly fascinating is how it reveals their definition of a journalist. Here are the top 10:
- Paul Gigot, Editorial Page Editor, The Wall Street Journal
- Glenn Beck, Fox News
- Rush Limbaugh, Radio Talk Show Host
- Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal
- Bill O’Reilly, Fox News
- Michelle Malkin, Fox News/Blogger
- David Brooks, The New York Times
- Sean Hannity, Fox News
- James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal
- Matt Drudge, The Drudge Report
To be fair, placing Paul Gigot at the top of the list recognizes a veteran newsman who spent decades with ink-stained fingers pursuing his vocation as a reporter and editor. While devotedly right-wing in his current role as an editorialist and commentator, he also has the resume of a bona fide journalist. And that makes him the ONLY journalist on the list.
It is nearly hysterical that the 50 unnamed participants in this project elevated Glenn Beck to second place; and Rush Limbaugh to third; and Bill O’Reilly to fifth; and … well you get the idea. What’s more, Varadarajan obviously has a soft spot in his heart for his former employer, Rupert Murdoch. Seven of the top 10 are also Murdoch minions employed by either Fox News or the Wall Street Journal. I wonder if some of the few real journalists at those shops are upset that they were ignored in favor of Sean Hannity and Peggy Noonan?
It is rather telling that an assembly of conservative academics, politicians, and journalists, couldn’t actually come up with names of other conservatives who are actually journalists. One of their selections, Limbaugh, has already responded to the list by declaring that he shouldn’t be on it. At least he is honest enough in this circumstance to admit that what he does is not journalism.
Some of the notable non-journalists on the remainder of the list include raging propagandist Andrew Breitbart (11), serial interrupter Neil Cavuto (14), Coulter clone Laura Ingraham (21), and Marc Morano, a virulent Climate Crisis denier and science skeptic.
Overall, judging from this coterie of cranks, I’m surprised that James O’Keefe and Jeff Gannon weren’t given honorable mentions. Perhaps the panel should be consulted again and made aware of some of these glaring omissions. Remember, Joe the Plumber served as a war correspondent for Pajamas Media. How dare they insult these fine conservatives by failing to honor their contributions to the rightist media.
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