Originally published at: Fox News CEO said fact-checking "has to stop now" because it is "bad for business" | Boing Boing
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What’s that old saying, “ Never let the facts get in the way of an insurrection or impede a genocide?”
It’s something like that, I’m sure of it.
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In a better world there would be a class-action lawsuit filed against Murdoch for using the word “News” in the cable network’s name.
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It’s important for their business model to present both sides of an argument, as long as neither of them is true.
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We can’t afford to provoke this angry monster that we raised and enraged!
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“Half of the settlement will be cut if the defendant officially changes the name of the media channel from ‘Fox News’ to 'Fox Fairy Tales for Xenophobic Idiots’” [gavel strike] -sigh-
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Cue the argument that this is all entertainment, they’re giving their audience what they want, and no reasonable person could mistake it for real journalism.
Corporations are people! Lying, racist, assholes in this case.
Now I’m mentally re-casting Friends using only Fox and assorted MAGAts. Tucker is so Chandler.
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Yeh, I mean the thing that’s sort of lost in that particular piece of evidence is that the fury is the point: it’s much more profitable to manufacture anger in your audience than to make them informed in actual facts.
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For sure. Fox News exists to feed the beast its fury-pudding. It no longer has a monopoly on right-wing misinformation and viewers will just go online if Fox doesn’t give them that right kind of anger-inducing conspiracy theory that they crave.
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Sigh - That old reality, with it’s left wing bias…
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That’s too long. How about Fox Propaganda?
Big Brother, Fox “News” edition: once all the houseguests have entered the building, all the doors are nailed shut and/or blocked with heavy weights.
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To any BBers who live in the US: how is this being reported and/or perceived over there?
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It depends on what media you consume. I tend to get my news from NPR (and aggregators like google news, etc), which is pretty centrist and prides itself on traditional journalistic objectivity, so they’ve done a decent job of informing the public about what’s happening. Plus I include in various other shows for more opinion-based analysis (late night shows, some youtubers who deal with current events, some newsletters like the one by historian Heather Cox Richardson, etc) for thinking through what I’ve heard or seen there…
But people who depend primarily on right wing media for their “news” have probably not gotten a clear picture of what’s happening and probably have no idea about the various text messages that have come out from the various hosts of Fox news about Trump and this lawsuit in general (they’ve probably been fed the line that it’s a “witch hunt” if it’s mentioned at all).
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It seems like lots of people think creating a monster or catching a tiger by its tail is a viable strategy. They never seem to realize that the situation is always short-lived, and changes in about half a second. That’s about all the longer it takes for the tiger to turn his fang-filled head around around and make you regret your life choices.
The guy passing torches out to the mob always forgets he’s also flammable.
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Had a interesting discussion on this just last night. I’m not sure what the “fix” is for them currently. Would resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine be viable and even if done, enforced?
Should Fox be forced to remove “News” from their name and just put “Opinion” there? Do they have a giant disclaimer on? I really don’t know what I would hope for to be a viable end game. Simply taking them off only means the bubble pops up elsewhere. Lesser, most likely, but still there. They are, sad to say, the #1 watched channel.
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On cable…
Far more people watch network news programs…
And the fairness doctrine would never apply to Fox, MSNBC, etc, as they are on cable, not over the airwaves, which are publicly owned, and that’s always what the fairness doctrine applied to anyway…
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I remember a bit Jon Stewart did on the Daily Show where he pointed out Bill O’Reilly bragging about his ratings was silly, since there was a fishing show during O’Reilly’s time slot that got better ratings.
I’ve gathered from conversations that a lot of Americans don’t even really pay attention to the news, stuff just seeps into popular consciousness, and Fox News seems to have an outsized impact on that. Style over substance.
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I don’t think the problem is paying attention, it’s what they are being “fed.” There have been concerns raised for years about the increasing number of people who get their news from social media. Just as with active searches and manipulation of results, passive feeds can be controlled, too. Who or what controls the content that is displayed, how easily that can be manipulated, and how misinformation can be spread using those channels are huge issues. More attention has been paid to it since the accusations of intervention in US elections, but there are also major problems with misinformation provided to people who speak languages other than English, because that’s the language getting most of the attention when it comes to monitoring, moderation, and countering lies or conspiracy theories.
ETA:
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