Once again while working out, I was subjected to Fox News. No worries though, I had headphones and I'm intelligent enough to tune out idiocy. Glenn Beck was prancing around his chalkboard playground, trying to look scholarly in his practiced and scripted manner.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people can be sucked in to one conspiracy after another by a bleating charlatan who connects symbol A to picture B to soundbite C. His theories not only defy academic analysis but even the most glancing review by anyone with a modicum of reason and education. But what would one expect from someone who relies on disgraced historian David Barton and Cleon Skousen.
His latest 'Islamic caliphate' conspiracy, designed to persuade anyone from supporting a democratic insurgence in Egypt [much contrary to his oft-cited idolatry of our own founding principles], finds it's genesis in the statement that Bush ordered the ancient site of Babylon [in Iraq] to be spared from bombing....as it is prophesied to be the seat of an Islamic new world order.
Newsflash to Beck........THERE WAS NO MILITARY SIGNIFICANCE TO BABYLON WHICH WOULD WARRANT AN ATTACK TO BEGIN WITH.
Glenn Beck's faux-intellectual tirades rank alongside Islamic fatwah's in being damaging to this nation and the principles this nation was founded on.
The question is, should we be surprised at this?
ReplyDeleteBeck, Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Coulter et al have a target audience that has been "schooled" rather than "educated". They respond to authority, symbols, slogans, and they do not evaluate and act when certain buttons are pushed, they emote and react.
The audience of Fox is insecure and angry, but probably not for the reasons they should be. Yellow Journalism has always worked, always will.
But a brief look-around is somewhat telling. The above-mentioned "pundits" are about the only people who actually DO talk to that audience at all. No one else really does, the "left" ran people like this audience off years ago, went all abstract and intellectual. When they actually do take notice of this "audience", it is to scold them, or demand from them.
The "mainstream" is corporate, colleagial with power, and mostly speaks in a preistly tongue and round tones. No identification, no relevence to the Faux audience.
So, where I live, and what the people around me think is, here's my place, Fox.
I certainly find no argument with your first paragraph, and the general tenor of your post...but I wonder....was the 'Fox audience' left behind/aside by other sources of mainstream news media, or did that audience merely look for an outlet that told them what they wanted to hear? I think I can speak with some certainty on my observation of liberal thought that a majority of liberals do not consider the MSM at-large as leftist, nor does it cater to their belief system.
ReplyDeleteI would also add that Fox is very mainstream, by definition....so comments by those listed pundits and various GOP politicians are erroneous.
I don't say that the "mainstream media" 'left them behind', but life as a lot of these folks have lived it in the past forty years makes them (I can tell you that many of them, pretty much Babbitts would punch my head if they found out I said such a thing) pretty much anti-establishment whether it makes sense or not.
ReplyDeleteAs I said, they react, they don't say, "Hmmmm, what's going on here"?
They see a very real collegiality and concordat between "The Mainstream Media" and the elites left and right, and they remember just enough and are hard-headed enough to metaphoriclly stick their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, and go, "lalala, lalala" when something crops up that may be of personal/national/international importance.
Why shouldn't they? They've been caught napping time after time in the past few decades: alar, WMD, "impersonal market forces" when it was in fact (as is pointed out sometimes years later by the same "media" that then sounds astonished) that it was actually a bunch of men in suits who got together to make a (sometimes) real killing.
They won't seperate wheat from chaff, that's all, if it sounds like they want.
OK....that makes sense...I just didn't read your submission correctly.
ReplyDeleteI still don't find much in your thoughts to disagree with. Don't get me started on my take on the US media as a whole and their infotainment focus over real news.
Sad as it is to say, I've begun trusting Al Jazeera English over US sources for accurate reporting of events in the middle east. Ironic, as many Americans will merely repeat the script they've been given about the efficacy of their reporting.
As my initial post was focused on Beck, do you see a left wing version of him in other or obviously left media sources? I see some who start down that road, but can't quite generate the following or have the ideological commitment that Beck does.
I'd say that Chris Hedges probably comes the closest, maybe Jim Hightower, but I really don't see anyone doing what Beck, Palin, Coulter, O'Reilly, or Limbaugh do.
ReplyDeleteThey all lie through their teeth, are exploiting the anger and confusion that a certain segment of the populace is feeling, but they are saying things that have "truthiness" in them. They name enemies and hint at action to be taken. They validate fear, but in the wrong direction, and cause even more suspicion and upst by naming names, scapegoating. Lots of folks in history made out quite well with it, so they do, too.
We both seem to have had carreers in the military, and I'd bet you have read Kipling. If you read hia "A Pict's Song" you get a pretty good idea of what makes up listeners to Fox and the Coulters, and why they do, at least in my experience. The American "left" no longer has anything to say to people like that. They should, they could, but they don't, so they turn to people who feed them mental "comfort food".