I think Fox may be the most destructive force in American society nowadays, basically pouring poison into the stream of our political discourse.- Tom Ricks, "Fox News Scoop!"
As this blog has been discussing for years, the function of the media is not to inform, but to deform reality for the benefit of the ruling class. In this context, the nature of the news is by definition propaganda and its value, just as Pravda was during the years of the Soviet Union, is to leave the audience with a specific perspective that benefits the powerful. In the USSR it was the communist party; in the USA it is the broad swath of business interests, including the military-industrial-surveillance complex, big-pharma, big-agri, the financial industry, the energy/chemicals sector, and Health care/insurance industry. Fox News serves the interests of these people and is, as Ricks points out, a source of outright fraud that contaminates civil discourse with purposefully designed falsehoods and innuendo that plays into the biases and bigotry of their audience.
I found it interesting when Dick Cheney was vice-president, that he wanted the television in his hotel suites preset to Fox news. Did that mean that he wanted to know what the minions were watching and thus assess the adequacy of his disinformation machine personally? Or did it mean that Cheney was uninterested in hearing other perspectives of news, other than the one he and his cohorts had created? Fox News represents the convoluted intersection of corporatism and government sponsored deceit. This disinformation channel, because it wasn't interested in news but in pushing perspective, became a juggernaut in the decade of the zeroes. The conventional framework of left and right politics has broken down. As a result, no longer is the prevalent conflict between liberals and conservatives. Instead, the struggle for America has become a battle between an inverted form of totalitarianism, defined by corporatism, and the free flow of information espoused by those interested in democracy.
There are those who feel that if a person is given sufficient and credible information, they will invariably choose the most rational argument. The fact that religion, debunked political ideologies, and failed economic models persist amongst the majority of Americans, suggests that this line of thinking is false. Many people don't want to know the truth. They want to be lied to and given ridiculous and fictitious narratives that make their lives tolerable. The majority of the world want to exist under what Nietzsche described as a slave ethic. A world where they are the constant victims, where forces external to themselves are always punishing them and depriving them of their just deserves. In the minds of American conservatives, Fox News is their secular conduit to the outside world. They can justify their ignorance and prejudices through presented falsehoods and manufactured realities, while all the time marching to the beat of their corporate masters.
No comments:
Post a Comment