Sep 25, 2004 11:05 PM
5790 Views
(Updated Sep 25, 2004 11:11 PM)
''Making Joe Goebbels proud'' was the title of my friend's paper for his journalism class. No, it does not deal with the extremely efficient propaganda machine which the Nazi spin supremo put in place but with the mass hypnosis that a certain 24x7 cable news channel intends to achieve hidden under the very marketable catch phrase of ''Fair and Balanced''. Last time I checked it was winning, hands down.
The Fox News channel is owned by NewsCorp another Murdoch conglomerate and is headed by Roger Ailes, a former aide to various Republican presidents. It sells itself to people by saying that it is fighting against a liberal elite media while condoning a fair and balanced view of world events, politics and any other vaguely interesting news piece which can help further its agenda.
The prima donnas of this right-wing cheerleading team are Bill O'Reilly of ''The O'Reilly Factor'', Sean Hannity of ''Hannity & Colmes'', Brit Hume and several other syphilictics (no disrespect intended to the actually diseased who seem to have held onto their last shreds of sanity)whose main belief is that you can make your opinion factual, by stressing it over and over again and asking your opponent in your tantrum voice to shut up.
Coming to Bill O'Reilly who was profiled in The Rolling Stone magazine ( http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6417561 ) and who confesses that he enjoys flagellating the spineless(read who are these people) liberals who come to his show to ''counter'' his view by repeating one word ''shut up''. Thereby reminding me of a debate opponent who terminated a debate with the same words. I forgive him,he was only a tender sixteen at that time and susceptible to hormonal influences.
Hormonal influences reminds me of the cross-section of Fox viewers who range from PMS afflicted soccer moms to prep school provosts to the audience which Fox news claims to pander to, the angry average citizen who's riled at the unfairness of society. In an exploitation of that instinctual emotion in a human who's got a vague sense of entitlement, Fox news finds an audience willing to overlook facts and blindly follow the pied piper's tune that it plays on the air waves, night and day.
Since the year when the right claimed its right which was bestowed upon it by the almighty (a god with a little aide called Katherine Harris) Fox news has mellowed down and covered every insignificant little event of its poster boy with the temerity of a lap dog. This led my friend to remark ''Boy, if they could show me more of their luscious bimbos they call political analysts and newscasters, rather than that ugly(unprintable) , they would have more of my TV time''. All I could reply to that was, ''Man, that was sexist and a disrespect to the primates on the lower rungs of evolution''.
The most significant reason for the meteoric rise of CNN as a news agency was its coverage of Iraq War Sr. Fox rose above CNN by its coverage of Iraq War Jr. (call it Jr.'s war or anything else) and CNN followed by its pristine coverage of healthy-looking Iraqis welcoming the thundering tanks into Baghdad, reminiscent of Parisians welcoming the Allied Forces in WWII, with the hot French women being digitally replaced by hot Arab women. A well hidden microphone (thanks to provisions of the Patriot Act) captured a Fox producer saying to a CNN producer '' you can borrow my video as long as you don't make any reference to that baby-faced insurgent''.
Two documentaries came out , one ''Outfoxed'' ( http://www.outfoxed.org) and another ''Control Room'' ( http://www.noujaimfilms.com), the former documenting Murdoch's war on journalism and the latter documenting the control room atmosphere of Al Jazeera (popularly called Lucifer's Lies by Fox). As a male I would recommend leaning towards ''Control Room'' because picturesque young women like Jehane Noujaim need our support for their journalistic efforts. Talk about hormones influencing political leanings.
There's Fox News in a nutshell for its audiences who want ''fair and balanced'' reporting and who feel that every country which disagrees with the redneck oops Republican agenda should be nuked into oblivion. Which comes back to the question of who is terrorizing whom?
Remember NPR, CBS, Air America are all evil and paraphrasing( and misquoting) the words of the beloved Eric Cartman of South Park, Colorado '' Those channels will warp your fragile little mind, preventing you from getting down on your knees to please the God of freedom and feel his salvation all over your face. Goddammit, liberals can't be in America because they'll choke on the sweet air of freedom''
