The lawyers having the most fun
Charles Pierce on Murdochs and Foxes:
If I had to guess, I’d say that the lawyers having the most fun these days are the ones handling the defamation suit against the Fox News Channel and the extended Murdoch clan. Every now and then (most recently on Monday), they get to release another tranche of documents related to the case that make Fox look like the malevolent entity it always has been; that make the elite political journalists who have stood up for them over the years look like unusually useful idiots; and that make the Murdochs look like the invasive predatory species they are. This is a public service of immeasurable value. The lawyers must be convulsing with laughter over whiskey and appetizers when the workday is done…
…
In some ways, it’s comforting to realize that Fox’s malfeasance was based on pure greed, overwhelming venality, and a frantic desire to maintain its audience. Those at least are motivations we can all understand, rather than some unfathomable, twisted ideological dementia afflicting an entire television news network. However, in all other ways, the revelations have given us a window into how Fox prefers to be greedy, venal, and frantic rather than to cease pumping out the poison that even some of its own executives believed to be damaging American democracy.
The greed explanation is sort of comforting, for the simple reason that it save us the bother of trying to figure out a more…erm…reasonable explanation. Like – “Do they actually believe this shit? Stupid question; no, of course not, it’s just what they do to keep the cash rolling in.”
But the more serious, underlying question is why are 40% of the American population the intellectual equivalents of Fentanyl addicts…they are jonesing for what Fox is feeding them. Absent Fox, they will just go to another pusher.
Part of the problem, of course, is a continuous, shrill, puritanical diet of Victimhood Olympics style politics is not a good antidote. The Left is driving people away with unending group identity politics. The only thing that matters is which group you yes, identify with.
In a sane world, Fox would be shamed, and their audience would dry upd and go away.
In our world the response will be “But the other side is just as bad.”
And then back to the same old “like” and “Share.”
Mike: Forgive me if it seemed like I was doing both siderism. I still consider myself of the left. Just noting one reason, maybe a minor one, for alt right populism
Brian, I suspect it is a minor one; it’s the wedge that is driven between the factions on the left more than a real turn to the right, I think. I’ve lived with the alt right for some time, and saw it within my own family before it was a “thing”. It wasn’t a small “thing” where I grew up. I think it’s more the Internet allowing these guys to get together than it is the left’s politics. The right used the concept of “identity politics” long before the woke, to imply there was something wrong with people who were feminists and anti-racists,
Fox News grew up in the atmosphere of deregulation of the airwaves and the loss of the fairness doctrine under Ronald Reagan. They found an audience already available. They organized the alt right into what they are today.
All while insisting that white nationalism is not itself “identity politics” or that defacto bars against women and people of colour weren’t “affirmative action” programs for white dudes.
Ooops. I meant “defacto bars against…” There’s an extra “colour” in there that I left inside my sentence, like a careless surgeon short a sponge at the end of an operation.
For the political right, ‘woke’ is a term of abuse and denigration. That leads me to conlude that their preference would be for a nation of sleepwalkers, robots or zombies, obediently carrying out all instructions from their betters. With that in mind, I proudly proclaim my own ‘wokeness,’ and recommend it to all.
except, to some degree, wokeness has become the kind of purity policing that results in firing of prosecutors for using the wrong pronouns for a predator. As seen in so many of the discussions here. In some circles, for instance,it is a fixable offense toquestio whether, indeed, man and woman are western colonial inventions foisted on a queer world with 76 different genders. This may be an exaggeration, but it reflects the thinking of some groups.
The white supremacistthing is…ironic. Using group identity thinking for racist/fascist purposes. Which far predates leftist group identity politics, of course,but can be seen as amplified by/reacting to such politics. Even as the leftist group politics is necessitated by white nationalism, of course. Ach, my head hurts?
Omar: You don’t see similar demands for obedience/ pure thought on the left? Trans activists demand similar conformism. it is racist to question Islamist ideologist?
Brian,
I have little >0 time for trans activists, and none at all for Islamists. (Islam IMHO is entry-level fascism.) Politically, I am a centrist, finding neither Left nor Right in their modern forms 100% right or 100% wrong. The late Christopher Hitchens, with whom I have never so far found myself in disagreement, identified with what he called ‘the Anti-totalitarian Left.’ That was over the War in Iraq, in which he refused to support Saddam Hussein against GW Bush.
For much the same reason, I supported Bush in Iraq and Margaret Thatcher over the 1982 Falklands War. As numerous military dictators, juntas and oligarchs have found out the hard way down through history, their army is there for domestic repression only, not for their personal glorification or foreign wars. Forget that furphy ‘national defence;’ Latin American military dictatorships have as a rule, never gone to war against one another.
Oh, Hey, Brian,I didn’t think you were. I am quite with Iknklast on this, having seen too much of what the right say, I cannot join them for any reason. I merely meant to point out how such a scandal would in a just world get those personaliites and executives fired, but we have ideologically based media. So the forces that got Dan Rather fired, do not see the problem with Fox. The news doesn’t stop, and Tucker continues to grace us with this stupid “can you believe this?” presentation.
Omar: Makes sense. I might disagree with you about n Iraq and definitely on Libya and Afghanistan but otherwise.
I don’t know, Omar. That describes me, too, but I do not call myself a centrist, and I don’t know anyone else that would call me a centrist. I am firmly planted on the left, but reserve the right to disagree with them when I find it appropriate, and to agree with the right wing when I think they are…correct (almost said right, but since they are always ‘right’, I decided against it).
Not agreeing 100% with either side doesn’t necessarily put you halfway in between.
iknklast:
The centre is somewhere in between, however. It’s such a broad church, it’s more like a cathedral. (IMHO My pick would be the Duomo di Milano, Italy. Check it out at https://www.duomomilano.it/en/ .)
Brian, have a look at Nigel Cawthorne, Tyrants; History’s 100 most evil despots & dictators. Arcturus, London 2004. Hitler is in there at #70, and Saddam Hussein at #96. BUT though he himself was drenched in blood, Saddam had kept the lid on the Sunni-Shia war in Islam, which had been going since the death of The Prophet (pbuh.) It started up again with a vengeance when he was removed by Bush 2’s ‘Coalition of the Willing.’
Oh, I would never disagree with the argument Sadaam was a nasty character. Without being “racist”, I guess I have to ask how many Arab strongmen were not? But he had to rank pretty high up on the list. Funny how we gave him weapons and ammunition to launch an absolutely brutal invasion of Iran, then?
Just like nobody considered Kadaffi a Swedish Social Democrat. But the utter chaos the Peace Prize President created in North Africa by removing him and permitting his murder transcends what even happened in Iraq. Just like the little war started by the Holy Peanut Farmer (RIP) has subjected Afghanistan to 50 years of misery (the country was probably actually better off under Communist control?)
I know this is off topic. Sorry for the digression.
iknklst: I like your self definition. Can I also suggest “I have not left the left, the left has left me”? :).
I’d be more inclined to nominate Sagrada Familia: baroque, confusing, highly controversial, progress repeatedly interrupted by civil wars and pandemics… ;-)
I can’t believe I used to watch Fox News. I’m so glad I stopped. Thank you for writing this.