Angelo Carusone of the media watchdog group Media Matters made news this week when he asserted that if there is another violent action by extremist Fascisti as there was on January 6, it won’t be Trump who will be responsible for it, but far-right media like Fox News: “You don’t need to wade into the online fever-swamps to see the cauldron of extremism simmering. Fox News is ratcheting up heat and legitimizing it nightly.” The Murdochs are allowing this because “they don’t care” and because it is “good” for ratings, and advertisers still willingly pay high rates to have their products represented by promoters of violence and death in the name of “freedom.”
The January 6 insurrection happened because a previously leaderless rabble was able to coalesce around a rabble-rouser who held the highest office in the land: they believed the fantasy that they had the “power” to overturn an election based on nothing but lies and the megalomania of one man. Trump today still remains as a figurehead leader of a fascist, white nationalist “movement,” but because at present he is without his bully pulpit, Fox News has stepped in to keep the “faith” alive.
Carusone specifically targeted Tucker Carlson—who had previously defended Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse’s “right” to cross state lines and engage in a deadly vigilante action—who had the nerve to demand the “resignations” by those who “refuse to hold themselves accountable over time,” after which “people revolt.” Of course he should be talking about Trump and his outlaw gang, but he wasn’t. Carlson asserted that “We need to change course immediately and start acknowledging our mistakes” which is about four years (or 20 years) too little and too late for either himself, Fox News or the country.
Carlson then intoned that unless Biden “changes course”—meaning, we assume, wherever it is that the extremist white nationalists want him to go—“or else the consequences will be awful.” It is clear that Carlson is “suggesting” that what will be “awful” is another violent insurrection by those who are whipped into action by this insanity from Fox News. Day after day now, some new “story” is “leaked” to whip people into a frenzy believing that the Biden administration is worse than simply Carter 2.0.
Take the “leaked” telephone conversation between Biden and former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, which has been blown sky high out of proportion by Fox News and The New York Post, with at least one Republican congressman claiming that this should “finish” Biden’s presidency. A closer reading of the transcript only reveals that Biden was under the illusion provided by faulty intelligence reporting that 300,000 Afghan troops could with continuing U.S. assistance hold its own against the Taliban. Biden apparently believed that Ghani needed to infuse confidence in the Afghan military by asserting publicly that it was sufficient for the task, because failure to build such confidence would put in the minds of security forces that they could not “win”—so why should they even try to fight? Of course that is exactly what happened.
There is plenty of media hypocrisy to go around, however, especially over at CNN which claims to be a ‘moderate” voice, but its difficulty in telling the truth about Afghanistan—that there was never a “good” way or time to leave that country, and it was going to be “messy” and get messier the longer we stayed there—only contributed to a false sense of who was responsible. This country is no good at “nation building” when dealing with non-Western cultures, and it had no business trying to. Not a single Muslim country is a true democracy, not even Turkey anymore.
The U.S. should have gotten out of Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden was killed, since that was the “goal” in the first place. Now you have “Rambo” types claiming that “defeat” was snatched from the jaws of “victory,” but that is lie. They can blame their commanders on the ground for not utilizing them effectively—or for not being the “warfighters” they pretended to be, or being the kind that Trump “pardoned” for killing prisoners.
This and other complaints about Biden only suggests to fence-sitters that there really must be something wrong with Biden if this is coming from a “liberal” media outlet. The vast majority may prefer to sit home and “watch,” but what we saw in Nazi Germany was that “silence” betokens “consent.” CNN’s hypocrisy about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Texas’ anti-abortion law is another example of how the media creates monsters it can’t control, in this case by the fact that it can put part of the blame on itself for “inadvertently” promoting Trump in 2016 and the FBI’s on again/off again investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server.
Fox News commentators and fanatics ignore polls that show that getting out of Afghanistan was a “popular” move, and despite CNN’s best effort to claim otherwise, this will be a “stain” on Biden’s “legacy” only if they want it to be one. The history books on the Afghanistan “adventure” will need to be told before the media’s culpability in its failure is completely understood. All of this had been put in unstoppable motion by Trump’s “peace plan” with the Taliban that had been ongoing for 18 months, and the only way out was a massive influx of troops and heavy fighting, and probably hundreds of dead Americans. Far down the list of fact points is that we had the “cooperation” of the Taliban, who allowed safe passage to a secret entrance to the airport for any American who wanted to leave, without which this could have been an even greater “mess.”
It was the responsibility of the media to report the truth about the reality on the ground for the past 20 years, and that even 100,000 troops on the ground at one point failed to achieve the aim of subduing the Taliban. It is bad enough that a media that shows the “picture” but leaves out the “thousand words” to explain what it all means has failed in its responsibilities in illuminating the truth, but misinforming the public with invented “context” is even worse; Politico and others who are currently accusing Biden of “shifting blame” should turn right around and point the finger at the person looking at them in the mirror.
But if 20 years of hard truth is ignored over on CNN, it is of course much worse at Fox News, not the least because its viewership has tended to be at least as much as CNN and MSNBC combined. While intelligent, informed viewers know how to sift out the self-serving bullshit that CNN occasionally dishes out, Fox News viewers tend to be paranoid whites consumed with spite and self-pity. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that they seem addle-brained (watch any Jordan Klepper visit to Trumpworld) when they are being fed completely contradictory messaging—the only “consistency” of which is that it is whatever puts Biden and the Democrats in a negative light.
Take for example a Fox News report that an Afghan interpreter and his family are hiding out from the Taliban and missed their chance to get out of the country. The reason this story deserves more airplay than other similar stories, according to Fox News, is that this interpreter supposedly happened to “save” Biden and two other U.S. Senators in 2008, when on a fact-finding mission in Afghanistan their helicopter had to make an emergency landing in snowbound hills. If there wasn’t a “connection” with Biden that put him in a bad light, this simply would not be a story, and this is just more indication that there is no limit on how much blame can be piled on one man who has only been president for seven months, yet he has to take all the blame for 20 years of failure.
The hypocrisy of Fox News comes into greater focus when you wonder why it is so “concerned” about refugees Biden “personally” left behind in Afghanistan, when its most popular evening commentators are providing an entirely different message. Carlson has been wailing about an “invasion” of “millions” of Afghan migrants “into your neighborhood.” Of course Carlson did accidentally throw in some truth during this particularly harangue, declaring that the rapid fall of the Afghan regime to the Taliban demonstrated that Afghans “firmly rejected what are leaders were selling for 20 years.” But then again what he means is that “all” Afghans believed this, so they have no reason to leave the country at all. Meanwhile, the BBC reported Tuesday that 123,000 civilians—most of them presumably Afghan nationals—were flown out of the country. This is hardly “millions,” and 97 other countries have pledged to take some in for resettlement.
Carlson claims this has less to do with humanitarianism than with some mythical Democrat “Great Replacement” plot, even though the Afghan people are technically Caucasian, although it would be perfectly understandable why some wouldn’t trust white evangelical “Christians” and their white nationalist agenda. Of course, Laura Ingraham is of the same opinion, and she brought on Stephen Miller to tell Fox viewers that he opposed any Afghan refugee resettlement in this country, because for all he knows (and that is all he “knows”) is that they are “all” terrorists biding their time to bomb your neighborhood, or undermine Christian “values” and impose sharia law. Of course this is what white nationalists like Carlson, Ingraham and Miller do to conceal the fact that this is less about “safety” than about ideology and politics.
But why stray so far from home when we have a pandemic to deal with—or not. Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro (she still has a job?) may claim that they do not oppose Covid-19 vaccines “in principle” and do not think it is a “bad” thing to get a shot, but they turn right around and warn frightened anti-vaxxers that government Gestapo agents are coming to break down your door if you are not vaccinated. Bartiromo wondered how many booster shots will people need to get, and enlisted crazed former Trump deputy national security advisor K.T. McFarland, an “expert” who has no experience in the medical field whatever, and whose principle “qualification” is that she is a former Fox News commentator and another fanatical Trump supporter. McFarland claimed that vaccinations and mask mandates were all part of the “plan” by the “loony left” to set a “precedent” for controlling people’s lives—or, as Carlson claims, their “bodies.”
The mixed messaging to confuse and inflame Fox News viewers is most clearly embodied by Sean Hannity, who recently opined that “Just like we’ve been saying, please take COVID seriously.” Well, some people might ask “Since when?” He went on to claim that “I can’t say it enough, enough people have died, we don’t need any more deaths…It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated…I believe in the science of vaccinations.” OK, but the majority of his colleagues do not believe any of that, and he left a worm hole to escape through by saying “many” instead of “all.”
And Hannity sure used it when he learned than some on the “left”—including Biden—praised his stance. He switched gears and lied about what he had said previously, now claiming that he “never told anyone to get a vaccine,” and that he wasn’t “qualified” to judge a person’s “current medical condition” as if that has anything to do with anything. So we can speculate that Hannity in the first instance was speaking for Trump, as he claimed to do during Trump’s presidency; he was doing so to show Trump he still had his back by supporting Trump after a recent rally in Alabama in which Trump was actually booed by some in the crowd when he expressed support for vaccinations. Hannity was really only thinking of himself and promoting his own ego.
And there is Carlson applying his own misleading numbers in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which on the system’s website it is plainly said that it is made up of mostly self-reported cases which are not necessarily reliable or have anything to do with vaccines or the virus. Carlson’s nuttiness continued on by suggesting that besides “forcing” people to get vaccinated being a short step from the government “ownership” of his body, also feared that the government could also order him sterilized or lobotomized (not a bad idea, actually).
Media Matters discovered that most of Fox News’ coverage of vaccines “undermined or downplayed vaccinations,” even during the current Delta surge. MM found that 47 percent of the shows in the 7 to 11 PM time slot between June 28 and August 8 included claims of government “coercion,” “overreach” and violation of “personal choice.” 33 percent of them included charges that the “vaccination was unnecessary or dangerous.” During the Tucker/Ingraham/Hannity hours, an average of 92 percent of each show included anti-vax propaganda, every day. Ingraham has been especially despicable in this regard; 98 percent of her shows had segments featuring such fantasies as “Liars in Labcoats,” in which it was claimed that new variants don’t matter, and protective protocols should be completely abandoned because it “slows down” herd immunity—meaning that more deaths is the “price” others pay for people who refuse to follow recommended safety measures.
In July, resident U.S. Senate nutjob Rand Paul was allowed major airtime on Fox News to claim that there was “zero evidence” to suggest that “some new variant, some new strain of COVID is now hospitalizing and killing hundreds or even thousands of people in the United States.” It is now reported that over 26,000 people have died in August from the virus, making it one of the deadliest on record. A parade of Fox New guests continued to claim right up to two months ago that there was no evidence that there was a new variant capable of causing a major surge. Once it was clear that the Delta was making waste in many states in the South, Fox News hosts and their guests continued to attack Anthony Fauci’s supposedly “contradictory” statements, and still claim that the Delta variant is vastly overblown and is simply being used to “control” people and take away their “freedoms.”
Of course you won’t hear anyone on Fox News mention the story of a Texas man named Caleb Wallace, the fanatical virus-denier and anti-vaxxer. Wallace organized a group called the “San Angelo Freedom Fighters,” who threatened a school district for requiring masks. He demanded to know where the “science” was that showed that masks and vaccines were effective in keeping the virus under control. Shortly after he staged a “freedom rally” in July, he came down with a serious case of COVID, which he refused all treatment save Vitamin C and the anti-parasite medication for horses, Ivermectin. A relative forced him to go to a hospital, and he died four weeks later. He was just 30 years old, but stupidity knows no age limit. His wife admitted that she hoped that he would have had a new “perspective” had he come out of it alive, but his fanaticism was such that she admitted this was only a guess, since she couldn’t speak for him. But you can bet that Fox News was “speaking” through him.
One thing that comes to mind is that the media is acting irresponsibly because of its own sense of “power.” CNN’s hypocritical attacks on Biden is certainly fueling his plummeting poll numbers; one wonders if this part of a “plan” to avoid responsibility for creating the atmosphere for violence by simply insuring (deliberately or not) that Democrats won’t “win” and allow the far-right the illusion they “won” without “help.” But between then and now is the reality that there is no “fine line” between “predicting” violence and stoking violence. It all comes out of the same cesspool of media lies and hypocrisy.
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