Reality for a lot of people has become whatever they can find on television, radio and the internet that supports their own personal belief system. If you want to believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in California, it’s as easy as finding a story online about how there are millions of illegal immigrants in California, and then hearing a radio show talking about a case in Los Angeles where an illegal immigrant used his dead cousin’s ID to cast a vote, and then seeing FOX News confirm your assertion that common sense says putting those two things together means millions of illegals voted for Killary.
It’s not a coincidence that Conservatives are more prone to this than anyone else, as the vast majority of them have been doing the same thing with religion their entire lives. Politics has become religion for these people, and Fox News is their church program. Trying to make them see the error of their ways or how badly Fox is deceiving them would be akin to trying to convert them to atheism. Good luck.
“I’m watching now and screaming,” one Fox News personality said in a text message to CNN as the person watched their network’s coverage. “I want to quit.”
“It is another blow to journalists at Fox who come in every day wanting to cover the news in a fair and objective way,” one senior Fox News employee told CNN of their outlet’s coverage, adding that there were “many eye rolls” in the newsroom over how the news was covered.
The person said, “Fox feels like an extension of the Trump White House.”
Ya, it’d be soul crushing to be someone like Chris Wallace at Fox News.
The guy is a serious, respected journalist. It’d be like an award winning chef working at Jack in the Box.
I’m willing to bet that an award winning journalist like Chris Wallace has basically limitless opportunities for work elsewhere. I respect his reporting (and effort to remain objective), but staying at a Murdoch owned network is his choice, and the consequences of that are his own.
EDIT: Him staying gives Fox some credibility which they use to deflect criticism of their obvious bias.
A point on the Fairness Doctrine, which some have mentioned. In our current climate of partisan bad faith and shattering of all norms of civilized behavior, restoring the Fairness Doctrine aka the “Equal Time Rule” will accomplish sweet F-all.
The concept of Equal Time relies upon a certain level of good faith, counterbalancing one opinion with a roughly equivalent inverse opinion on the other side. However, it’s very easy to give lip service to this rule and yet functionally render it worthless. There are two basic ways: the “Hannity & Colmes” method of balancing a strong partisan demagogue versus a moderate milquetoast; or what I think of as the “Wally George” method, of “balancing” a strong view on one side versus a completely non-credible ridiculous view on the other.
Wally George was a TV conservative talk jock in the 80s, starting when the Fairness Doctrine was in effect. In high school, one of our teachers showed us an episode to demonstrate demogoguery and it was pretty enlightening. Wally George brought on a Moral Majority type to discuss the conservative view of Christianity. A truly Fair response would have been bringing on a mainstream moderate/liberal Christian as balance. Or, to go a little further liberal, a Quaker or a Unitarian. Or, if you really push it, an atheist. But Wally George did none of those things. To balance the Moral Majority, Wally brought out a Satanist. A full-blown, black-clack, goatee-sporting, tatted up Satanist (and in the 80s tats were not mainstream like they are now.) There’s your Equal Time right there.
It’s a micro-cosm of our bigger issue: no rule, no law, no institution is going to save us as long as two things remain true. The two things killing our politics right now are 1) the right wing is operating in severe partisan bad faith, exploiting every possible cheat and breaking every norm and 2)the voters are not punishing the right for that (yet.)
If the voters finally turn against the right, then we have some hope. I don’t expect the right wing to restrain itself (although I suppose the horse may talk) but there is at least some chance their extreme disregard for reality and law is beginning to get some traction in turning off the weakly aligned voters in the middle. We’ll see.
And, in general with a lot of these issues, the broader public’s perception of “the two sides” isn’t based on reality. The two sides of the climate change debate are not “Climate change might have a tiny amount of human cause but we can’t afford to do anything about it” and “CHINESE HOAX KILLARY.” Rather, they are “Climate change is real, deadly serious, and requires immediate global effort to stave off the worst possible effects” and “We need to start researching interstellar-capable drives and the materials needed to build generation ships.”
The actual, meaningful, debate that we should be having about climate change, is “What policies will best address the issue, while not crippling our entire economy, because economic progress helps drive technological progress which can help solve this issue.”
There are multitudes of meaningful changes we can make, which can actually result in economic growth opportunities. Climate change can be dealt with in a sensible way.
But we’re not having that debate. Instead, we’re arguing about whether it’s even a thing.
It’s silly to repeat me like that, and you are right, the research needed to crack FTL travel will provide innumerable STEM jobs for the next couple of decades.
Exactly. It’s like disputing the national debt. No one disputes that we have a debt. We just argue about what we need to do about it, and how best to fix it.
The climate change debate is ridiculous. We don’t discuss what to do about it. We have arguments about it’s very existence as a fact, like we can just debate away the overwhelming scientific evidence. Crazy.
It’s too late for Fox News. Even if every single employee with a scrap of decency and self-respect left in them quit Fox News tomorrow at 8:00AM, by 8:15 they’d have replaced them all with every Tomi Lahren and Sean Hannity clone they could scrape together, and sadly there are thousands of them. The viewers would barely notice the change, and go right on lapping up the moron slop just like they do every single day, because it’s not about who delivers the message, or even how the message is delivered, it’s about the message being a confirmation of their own narrow-minded, racist and idiotic hot take on their tiny little worldview.
I mean you laugh, but there is a lot of possibility in that statement. Heard it more than a few times from people across the spectrum. Sadly we can’t really count on Rupert dying any time soon.
Yeah, I mean apparently his sons were behind some of the departures of recent Fox personalities.
The Fox demographics are not appealing to most advertisers. That’s a problem too. Geritol is only going to buy so many ads. I could see his sons looking at it more like a business and less like a platform.
The interesting thing about the last year is that it turns out that Murdoch is now just fine with Trump (which he wasn’t at the start of the Trump campaign) even though the orange one is objectively a disaster for Republicans.
It could just be that Trump is good for ratings. Fox is still #1 in cable news despite losing a bunch of on-air personalities.
Or it could be that Murdoch isn’t a mere bystander in the Putin-Mercer-Bannon regime but is now an active participant. I mean, he shares girlfriends with Putin, why not agendas?
Rupert is good with anything that makes him money. Right now that’s Trump. All this political division is great for the ratings if you’re Fox News and have a virtual monopoly on Conservative TV viewership. CNN and all the major networks have to split an audience that is only slightly larger than the Conservative audience you have all to yourself, so yeah…it’s good to be the king of shitty partisan slanted news. Even if/when his sons take over, they may try to shift a little more to the center, and will certainly continue cleaning house, but they’re not going to mess with the money machine too much because they’re not stupid.
We will never go back to how things were with the media pre-Obama. Social media has forever altered the way much of the world both receives their “news” and digests it. Much of America no longer takes the time to approach news with critical thinking skills, it’s all about the 30 second hot take. Upvote or Downvote and move on. It’s impossible to create an informed electorate from such a population. Conservative Media was tuned into this fact long before anyone else, and they’ve spent years refining the process until now they have an overwhelming advantage. For proof, all you need to do is look at how when the moniker “Fake News” started, it was liberals decrying the spread of “news” articles on social media that were completely fabricated, things like the Pizzagate stories. Now, Conservatives have turned the “Fake News” label back on itself and use it to attack the mainstream media. You can’t fight the stupid, because the stupid doesn’t know or care when it’s wrong/losing/defeated.
Yeah, bear in mind that Murdoch pere isn’t all that right wing by American standards, and his sons at least not noticeably less so, they’re just not as bound up with the old way of doing things and loyalty to specific executives like Ailes or Brooks. Murdoch’s UK newspapers, broadsheet and tabloid, are far from the most right wing in the country. The only reason Murdoch dying or properly retiring would change things is Fox might become more sensitive to commercial pressure for a while. James has taken decisions to protect brands and reduce liability that Rupert never would on his own. But if rabid Trumpism is good for ratings and advertising, they’ll keep doing it until it ceases to be.
Why isn’t there a more balanced conservative media source at this point? Did Murdoch buy up all the competition or is there just not a market for anything outside of Fox? I mean, isn’t that part of the issue just as much as social media? That the majority of news for a large portion of the voting segment comes from one source?
