Faux News

I suppose it makes sense that in a county where rap is accepted as music and in which comic-book movies are accepted as cinematic masterpieces,  the Fox News Channel would be accepted as a news channel.  In fact, the Republican-propaganda channel, despite having some excellent reporters like Jacqui Heinrich (more about whom soon), has so stained the word "news" that it's no wonder that MSNBC goes by now-meaningless initials and CNN, which used to stand for Cable News Network, doesn't stand for anything anymore.   

The extent to which Fox News is a propaganda machine centered on profit came to the fore in recent days when text messages between Fox executives and on-air hosts revealed that, despite telling viewers that the 2020 election was in fact stolen from Donald Trump and that Joe Biden's election to the Presidency was illegitimate, they never believed a word of it.  This revelations were made thanks to court filings from Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox News for defamation of the voting-machine company's reputation for falsely implicating that it allowed the software in its voting machines to flip pro-Trump votes to Biden.  Text messages between Fox News bigwigs revealed that they thought that Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, Trump's two top point people on the election fraud charges, were blooming idiots and incredibly insane.

Rupert Murdoch and the unholy trinity of Fox News's prime-time op-ed lineup - Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson - at first resisted the urge to go along with Trump, but when it became apparent that Trump was encouraging his supporters to change the channel to Newsmax, which is more conservative than Fox in the same matter that the Omicron COVID strain is more dangerous than the original Wuhan strain, Murdoch & Co. went along with the lies in public.

Except for Fox News' actual reporters, who subscribed to the idea that, in journalism, facts matter.  Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich (below) fact-checked a Trump tweet asserting electoral fraud and tweeted herself that the Trump tweet itself was a fraud.  According to the briefs filed in the Dominion lawsuit, Tucker Carlson, already committed to the scam, blew a gasket.    

"Please get her fired. Seriously . . ..  What the fuck?" Carlson wrote in a text to Hannity and others, according to the filing. "I'm actually shocked. . ..  It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke."

The fact that Carlson - at Fox News only because he'd already bombed out at CNN and MSNBC - was concerned about the company's stock price makes it clear once and for all that the channel is more interested in making money than in practicing honorable journalism.  Texts released due to the lawsuit show Fox News employees referring to their viewers as "good people," but they went ahead and spread the lies about the 2020 election to draw more eyeballs and, thus, more advertisers.And more money.   And the good people who trusted Fox News to tell them the truth believed the lies so much it led to an insurrection.  (For the record, Heinrich deleted her tweet before security could show her the door.)

The story of Fox News knowing that Trump's election-fraud claims were lies is getting reported throughout the media.  But one news outlet isn't reporting anything about it - no prizes for guessing which one.

Of course, even if Fox News viewers did learn about how much their favorite and most trusted news personalities lied to them, they would insist that the texts were taken out of context (meaning that viewers would have a pretext) and say that the private comments of Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson were exaggerated and slanted in a way to make them look bad.  I don't see how you could take such evidence of journalistic malfeasance and not make Fox News commentators look bad, but that's just the point.  Fox News viewers are so sure that their version of events is the truth that no amount of evidence to the contrary can persuade them otherwise.

Thus, while it may be so that Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch are the emperors who have no clothes, nudity has become quite acceptable among a large number of Americans.