ash had a jolly good time shredding the author of this unfortunate defense of the FOX News Network. Unfortunately Mike, the editor not only declined to publish it, he neglected to acknowledge receiving it. Which in turn reinforced ash's decision to cancel the paper.
Did someone say “Faux News”? Myself, I’m rather partial to “FOX Noise,” a spinoff of The Republican Noise Machine. It was coined by ex-conservative and perpetually atoning author and Media Matters website proprietor David Brock. In fact, he liked it so much he made it the title of a confessional book. Or maybe he appropriated the term from the title. Either way…
I suppose, to really stick it to Fox aficionados, liberals and other honest brokers could double whammy it. Voila: Faux Noise. But since “faux” means “false,” “faux noise” could be construed as a double negative, inadvertently flipping its intended message and thereby neutering the insult. It’s not really so much blabber; it just sounds like it. So it’s back to Faux News or FOX Noise. As I said, either way.
Well, I do get cable, which means I could watch FOX, but don’t. I’ve seen more than my share of that con game, and if I care to keep track, there’s always the monitoring website FOX News Hounds providing transcripts, served with the proverbial spoonful of sugar, in this case of ridicule. I rarely read that either. In my experience, with age come less tolerance and patience proportional to the waning lifespan. But I still ram into reports of skewed panels, J’acuse captions (“Al Qaeda: Glad Dems Won Midterms?”) framed as questions for plausible deniability, and inane interviews provoking the dilemma in every erstwhile watchdog brain: Lord, forgive me for turning it off, but I can’t continue without lobbing a grenade at the TV screen.
Attention, FOX fans: behold anchor Bill O’Reilly commiserating with fellow Caucasian Christian males over the erosion of exclusive power, transforming himself into the victim. With laments like that deliberate satire becomes futile and ceases to exist. As for “fair and balanced,” come on. Surely Fox apologists don’t point to the stable of (token) progressive commentators. Talk about faux; could that self-sabotaging, milquetoast bunch of sellouts be any more unconvincing if it tried? Lucrative prostitution indeed.
Whole books have been devoted to FOX’s numerous atrocities against truth, as well as at least one documentary interviewing, among others, ex-FOX employees. Disgruntled, undeniably. The undisgruntled ones remain loyal to the myth. But did I say they’ve got documentation: footage and memos dictating not only content but packaging and delivery? Unrefuted evidence and everything? And that since the expository movie it only gets better, such as the directive to speculate that Democrats regaining Congressional control serves Al Qaeda’s purposes? To actually wonder aloud on the air?
Now I hear, orchestrated by Fox and conservative bloggers and journalists, the “Stabbed in the Back” theme is being revived. Extracted from the aftermath of World War I (a la Germany) and most famously dug out by Vietnam rationalizers, the convoluted comeback is as deafening as it was predictable. Roughly translated, it means when you can’t be the loser, make an enemy rivaling the official enemy force you to lose. In other words, some of us defeated the rest of us. Imagine that: “Stabbed in the Back” by our own country. What, liberals and other realists aren’t supposed to be reminded of the equally vacuous “America: Love It or Leave It”? While the residents of Alice’s Looking Glass insist that whenever the United States ultimately abandons the ravaged Iraq, uncannily it will have been just short of victory, administration critics harrumph another well-worn phrase: when, already, do we cut our losses? We left so we lost versus we lost so we left. Trade cause with effect for opposite interpretations.
Right about now all good FOX defenders are bristling at my diatribe. Well, fine. In spite of limiting my exposure to purportedly undistorted news, I’m constantly antagonized by the misrepresentations of FOX speakers leaking into establishment media (which is why I’m addressing how issues are discussed as opposed to the issues per se). When I am, I turn to my homemade words of, if not wisdom, of aggravation reduction:
Don’t be so hard on the other side. They just don’t see things the way we do.
The trick is to believe your own maxim, and if you can manage that, regardless of political perspective it should absorb some of the venom. As much as anyone can hope for in our feuding society.