Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition of FAIR:
1 : marked by impartiality and honesty : free from self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism
2 : treating people in a way that does not favor some over others
3 : not too harsh or critical
Here is PROPAGANDA:
1 : ideas or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, a government, etc.
2 : the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
3 : ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause;
Which of these definitions do you think more accurately describe Fox News?
Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of Fox viewers believe that the word FAIR describes Fox News perfectly.
PROPAGANDA? That would be NPR.
These viewers don’t just believe that Fox is fair – and balanced – they believe it emphatically. This idea is so imbedded in their belief system that you’d think the Founding Fathers enshrined it in the Bill of Rights. During one family Thanksgiving Day get-together, I mentioned something I had heard on Fox News. I didn’t offer my opinion on the veracity of the information but its preposterousness must have been apparent because it provoked one of my conservative in-laws to assert vehemently that “Fox tells the truth!” The level of his vehemence was what one would expect of a devout Muslim from a suggestion that God might not be so great after all.
How masterful an application of Orwellian double-speak is it that Rupert Murdock and Roger Ailes could produce such devotion to the idea that Fox News is “Fair and Balanced” -- and the only network that can be trusted to report the news truthfully -- when it is so obviously a propaganda machine for far right-wing conservatism?
With practically no trouble at all, Fox News can get its audience to believe anything Fox wants it to believe, no matter whether it’s true or not.
How does Fox do it?
Well, the first prerequisite is a severe lack of scruples and integrity -- something Mr. Murdock and Mr. Ailes have famously demonstrated during their entire careers.
Fox’s target audience makes things easy, too.
When Fox was launched in 1996, there already was an audience available to them for exploitation. Thanks to right-wing talk radio, this audience had been groomed and conditioned to believe that liberals are the worst, most awful creatures on the planet. Throughout the years, I have heard Rush Limbag refer to “liberalism” as “the essence of evil.”
The anger generated from this image of liberals is kept burning with an endless drum beat of anti-left attack lines. This audience has been told for decades that these immoral reprobates have infiltrated every intellectual institution and control everything from our schools, colleges, scientific institutions, non-profits and, not least of all, the media.
We can get into bias in the media at another time, but isn’t it ironic that a bunch of extremely biased, ideologically driven right-wingers could saturate this so-called liberal media with their self proclaimed objective opinion that the very media they are using to convince people of its liberal bias is, indeed, liberally biased?
The widespread belief among conservatives that the mainstream media has a strong liberal bias and exists only to help the “Democrat” Party, is the foundation upon which Fox News was built.
Anyway, the “liberal bias” cliché works great for Fox and conservatives because anytime news is reported that contradicts right-wing propaganda, it can be easily brushed off as left-wing lies.
And then we have the right-wing think tanks. If you follow the conservative media as closely as I do you will notice how well coordinated the think tanks are with the right-wing talkers, Fox News and Republicon politicians. The job of these think tanks, as we all know, is to promote conservative principles. They do this by performing research and writing papers that advocate for the policies they want to inflict on the American people.
Despite the mainstream media’s “liberal bias” and its well known "agenda to suppress conservatives’ voices," right-wing think tanks somehow manage to get these results widely publicized in that very media. (As a matter of fact, right-wing think tanks are vastly overrepresented in the media [More on that in a later post])
And what these think tanks do with the right-wing propaganda-media-machine is a wonder to behold.
Whenever Republicon politicians need some “facts” to support their policies, they can be sure there’s a right-wing think tank ready with a study that gives them those “facts.”
We should always look at the results of studies done by think tanks (right, left or center) with a reasonable amount of skepticism. After all, a study is only as good as the job the researchers do on it. We need to apply even more skepticism, however, when the study is done by a think tank with a political ax to grind, either right or left. The further out on the end of the political spectrum, the more certain you can be that the researchers have cherry picked the “facts” that support the position they already hold and omitted the information that refutes it. When it comes to right-wing tanks in particular, that skepticism needs to be on high alert. I’m talking about code red.
I’m not saying that everything conservative think tanks put out is bullshit. I can see that they often times present good and important information. And I am willing to admit that some of their positions are well thought out and probably correct. And some of their other positions are valid enough to be at least arguable. The problem is what they do when the evidence goes against conservative ideology and propaganda. Hooh boy!
Like I said, left-wing tanks cherry pick data, too, and sometimes come up with badly done studies that exaggerate things in favor of the case they are trying to make. For instance, remember that study from a few years ago that claimed 48,000 premature deaths per year due to uninsured people? Conservatives claimed (like they always would whether true or not) that the methodology was flawed. Well, I looked into it and, I had to conclude, it was pretty bad.
Two other previous studies put the number at 18,000, so just that alone should have made people skeptical. But the left kept repeating that number (48,000) over and over again.
Two libertarian economists then did their own study and, surprise, surprise, came up with a much lower number. That number was “only” 3,300. Year after year. And of course, conservatives said, “see, ‘only 3,300.' We don’t have to reform healthcare. We have the best healthcare in the world. We’re the USA. We’re number one!”
Isn’t that something? After 9/11 when 2,996 Americans died, just that one time, the ‘cons were willing to have another 4,000 plus Americans (and still counting) die in order to turn the world upside down and have, who knows, 100 thousand(s) more people die (of the countries we were liberating for their own good) and put a trillion dollars onto our national debt, so they could get even with a small group of right-wing religious fanatics who were willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to brutally murder innocent Americans for the offenses committed by past right-wing American administrations.
But 3,300 Americans dying needlessly, year after year, because of Republiconservalibertarian's ideolgical obsession for "free market principals" and their mindless opposition to anything that can be construed as socialism??
Meh.
A universal single payer system would have covered all those 3,300, or those 18,000 or however many more thousands; plus every other person in the country, including the elderly, at 40 to 50 percent less than what we’ve been spending on “the greatest healthcare system in the world.” That would have helped to pay down the debt that the Reagan and GW Bush administrations purposely drove up with their “Starve the Beast” economic policies.
But for the Republiconservalibertarians it's better to just say we have “the greatest healthcare system in the world and there’s no need to change it.”
What I really found interesting about the libertarian study was the reason they gave for that number being “so low.” They said it was because of the robust safety net we have in this country!!
Imagine that. That’s the very safety net the Republiconservalibertarians have furiously been trying to dismantle since we first built it.
Now they’re going around saying that Medicaid actually kills more people than not having any insurance. Unfortunately, that claim undermines the libertarian study, which they used a few years ago to kill the public option, by arguing that there was no need to change the healthcare system.
So which is it? Does the libertarian study prove that the safety net saves lives and socialism works? Or are poor people better off with no health insurance at all, and we should take away Medicaid for their own good?
Which deceit do the Republiconservalibertarians cop to? Did they know that the safety net worked but refused to admit it because they hate socialism so much? Or did they know the current system was allowing people to die unnecessarily and lied just to stop the public option?
Well, apparently, they didn’t have to do either because the lame Democrats and the incompetent Obama administration never called them on it. Now they are letting the Republiconservalibetarians get away with their obscene and disgraceful “War on Food Stamps,” which is based on propaganda that is pure garbage. Which is exactly what Republiconservalibertarians would rather have the poor eat.
In my next post I will demonstrate how the right-wing think tanks work hand in glove with the conservalibertarian media to make us think that people on food stamps are living in luxury and feasting on lobster tails every night.
