Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/10/fox-news-anchor-reacts-without-realizing-shes-live-on-the-air.html
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There have been signs this week that FOX has become aware of just what a shit show they’ve helped create over the past twenty five years, and are trying to be JOURNALISTS for the first time. This was one of them, cutting off the press secretary another, pressing people on the fraud claims and pointing out they have no evidence. It’s almost as if they can tell the decades of lying to a large swath of the public MIGHT have unintended consequences for our Democracy (consequences many of us have pointed out time and again).
Unfortunately, it’s too late. The crazy sailed long ago. If they won’t feed the masses the lies they’re accustomed to, the masses will turn to OANN and Newsmax and other sources to get that gratification of knowing that the reality outside their window isn’t the “reality” they have to believe in. FOX is in danger of killing its core audience with truthfulness, and no one is going to replace them because the rest of us are too disgusted with how they’ve acted.
I’m calling this their Seth Rich moment. He and his family deserve to watch FOX kill itself now after all the shit they put them through with their lies.
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I posted this in the other Fox news thread, but it applies here:
When not complete idiots at Fox realize all of their water carrying for Turmp and owning the libs opinion pieces to get more viewers might actually fuck up our Democracy and they are like “Oh shit…”
Meanwhile, since Fox News seems to have reached its limit to how far they want to radicalize people, many of them are screaming, “Harder, Daddy!” and going to Newsmax and OAN.
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The wealthy and corporate interests want no regulation and no taxes on the rich. They cannot get the majority of people in the USA to vote for that, so they go after the religious right vote, the gun-lovers vote, the racists and the intolerant vote.
They lie to them and promise them things they can’t deliver. They get them riled up.
However, the wealthy cannot keep their money safe and corporations cannot do business if there is civil war and the government becomes unstable. They may be starting to think they pushed things too far and may try to backpedal.
Meanwhile, Trump is going to stick with contesting the election as long as the donations from poor people keep coming in to the legal defense fund, half of which are going to pay off his campaign debts (and half of that is actually going directly into his, his family and his cronies pockets instead of the campaign) He has to pay off the $400 million to Deutsch Bank somehow.
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There has to be a way to make them (+Twitter) legally accountable for the damage. If not for the environmental damage, at least corona deaths.
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That’s giving them too much credit. It’s more that they understand that right now the markets are responding positively to a solid Biden win (they would have to his opponent’s solid win, too – it eliminates uncertainty). That’s all they really care about in the short term, and they’re a bit surprised that their fellow conservative greedpigs aren’t getting on board.
They’re planning on getting back to their usual lib-bashing soon enough, but as you say the Know-Nothing 27% (which doesn’t care about da stonks) is already moving on because they see any questioning of Dear Leader’s claims of victory as treason.
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These all just may be signs that the Murdochs and Kochs have decided they can work with Biden and/or the Democrats for a few years. Throw a few bones towards the rabble so they can avoid the guillotines.
It is a fine balance, preserving and growing immense personal power without ending up under a guillotine. I have no doubt that there is a lot of attention paid to threading the needle, and they are a lot better at it than in previous centuries.
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Their thought was that Biden would just be the usual neoliberal-lite president they can portray as a soshalist while not having to worry about actual socialist policies that impact them. And normally that would work for them, as it did with Obama and Clinton. The problem is that this time they spent the previous four years helping build a personality cult for a right-wing populist demagogue. That approach doesn’t tend to work out well for moneyCons who want their net worth to grow and don’t want to worry about it being taken away at the regime’s whim.
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Unless and until one of the Fox news anchors directly repudiates the messages being sent by the far more prominent Fox opinion commentators, I’m not sure what they think these token gestures of journalism accomplish. When their own network runs Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, Levin, et al for hours a day telling viewers that the election is being stolen, what do they think 30 seconds of mild skepticism is worth?
(to be clear, this is not a criticism of your point, but at the target of your point)
I’m not sure what in the last four years would lead to the conclusion that it would be a good thing for the government to have the power to punish news networks it does not like.
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Really, looters, don’t wreck a mom&pop store on mainstreet. Go raid your local Amazon warehouse.
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I don’t think that is exactly it. It isn’t so much self awareness as that they are becoming fractured and naturally more mainstream. The ouster of Ailes and O’Reilly had a big part in that I think, as they were big enough fish to dominate the network. No one person has the kind of sway those two did any more, and there isn’t really room for that. Some of their people are just as fucked up as those two, but they don’t have the influence to control the entire network.
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I’m tending to lean more towards the Paul Ryan faction on the board is cracking down on “making sure the news desk gets it right for now” because he knows what a quagmire they’ve walked into. They have less latitude with the talking head shows, but even Tucker seems to have slowed his roll and is now saying “well, there’s probably some fraud, but I think we all need to admit there’s not enough for it to change the outcome at all.”
Note: weren’t we all waiting for some amazing new info to come from that Hunter Biden hard drive? I seem to recall Rudy teasing us for weeks about it… and now it’s all gone poof. Weird… (not weird of course). Maybe he forgot it on the way to Four Seasons Total Landscaping?
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Even at Fox, there’s still some separation between the news department and the pundits, who suck up most of the air time. I’d make a guess that Hannity and Carlson will be the last to admit defeat.
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And this election they got their best case scenario. A Republican senate has a lot easier time saying “no” to a Democratic president than it does to a Republican ones. And since saying “yes” usually costs money, corporatists love the Democratic President / Republican Senate match up.
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These are the consequences of the FCC’s abandoning their fairness doctrine in 1987.
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No, there is most certainly not. Until they are forced to have the big black letters in the white boxes at the bottom of the screen shouting “This information is unverified and could likely be misleading lies” then they’re just doing what the cigg companies did for years (cash in while possible; ignore the side-effects).
Fox in its entirety made a very fine gold-flake encrusted bed for themselves. Now the bed is on fire and being thrown out of the window into a pit of rabid dingos. Everyone who works for and/or enabled that company is now required to lie in that bed.
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That, and the fact that network news shows were money pits and they had to become money generators or be cut. That led away from news as “headline” information and into news as “entertainment,” which led to a decline in the overall product. And explains why I get most of my news through reading WaPo, NYTimes and other papers.
edit: removed
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I’m not sure I follow–the Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast license holders, on the theory that the public airwaves were limited in scope and the public had an interest in avoiding a monopoly of views using those public resources. Whatever the merits of the FD originally, its reasoning doesn’t apply to things like cable news or modern digital media, does it?
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Very much like the dreaded caravans of “bad hombres” 4 years ago. Election over, moving on. Although it won’t shock me if the Rethugs in congress try to drag something like this back up for hearings and investigations if we don’t win in GA.
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I would argue that without the Fairness Doctrine, right-wing talk radio was able to build an audience that could support a couple of cable “news” channels.
Though we probably would have gotten in the same place eventually with or without Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.
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