The original Fake News

by | Sep 18, 2017 | Editor's Blog, Media | 17 comments

A few years after the invasion of Iraq, I was talking to an acquaintance outside a bar in Chapel Hill. We had engaged in brief conversations over the years, but never discussed politics. When the subject turned to how poorly the war was going, I said we should never have invaded. He looked at me incredulously and said, “But Saddam was responsible for 9/11.” When I argued that wasn’t true, he laughed and called me naive. After listening to him rant about how the mainstream media was covering up links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qeada just to hurt the Bush administration, I realized this guy got his news from talk radio and Fox. No amount of reality was going to change what Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh had convinced him was true.

In the debate about Fake News, we all need to realize that fake news started with media outlets on the right. Fox News started as a lie. Its original slogan was “Fair and Balanced,” but Roger Ailes never meant for it to be either. Ailes was a professional political operative who began his career in the Nixon administration and envisioned Fox News as a GOP propaganda tool from the beginning.

Fox told disgruntled white Americans what they wanted to hear: They are under attack by a system run by liberals who want to take their liberty and their money. They pushed a populist brand of conservatism that demonized immigrants and Muslims. And they created a following of people who believed their lies with relish.

In addition to insinuating Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, they kept alive the lies that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that he was Muslim. They pushed the ridiculous War on Christmas theme to keep evangelicals even more outraged at the mainstream media and society. They created the rumor of “death panels” in their attacks on the Affordable Care Act. They’re the voice of the climate change deniers. And their audience believes all of it.

Now, Fox is the voice of the Trump administration. Personalities like Sean Hannity have abandoned all their conservative principles in defense of Donald Trump. They applaud his decision to grant amnesty for DREAMers (I’m for it, by the way) despite years of criticizing Democrats for doing the same thing. They parrot Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric despite his appointment of Wall Street cronies throughout his administration.

And Fox has been successful beyond Ailes’ wildest dreams. Trump’s base believes everything he says and everything Fox reports. One PoliticsNC reader said, “So he’s a long way from losing his base…and you may quote me. In fact the only way Trump will lose us is if he STOPS FIGHTING for the big three: Tax reform, the wall, Obamacare repeal. He doesn’t have to succeed, we know who to blame, but he MUST go all in with maximum effort.

Well, Trump has already given up on Obamacare repeal without ever fighting for it. He uses it as a talking point, but he’s ready to move on. He’ll keep talking about the wall because his base loves it but he knows it’s not a reality and he’s not spending any political capital on it. After only nine months in office, tax reform is the only one he hasn’t abandoned but that’s because the debate hasn’t started. There’s no clear evidence that he understands the difference between tax reform and a tax cut for the wealthy.

But don’t worry. Facts won’t get in the way of his base believing he’s still with them. They’ve been believing the propaganda of Fox News for twenty years now. After a generation, they’ve created their own reality where white people are under attack by minorities and immigrants, the government is coming for their guns and their money and a reality show huckster has arrived in Washington with an army of Wall Street bankers and corporate lawyers to protect their way of life.

17 Comments

  1. Jessie

    You must not be happy that things in the Trump administration are going so well, otherwise you would have had plenty of current Debbie downers to write about. Since you don’t, you reverted to this comical, so-called journalistic post.

    • Bill nasso

      Yea. A free press, unconstrained by corporate interest or cronie capitalism. What were our paranoid Founding Fathers thinking?

  2. -Bill Nasso

    To my old friend Chris, save your energy for an audience that’s still persuadable. In these days since the death of The Fourth Estate, there’s no cheese down the hole of confronting ignorance with fact.

  3. JAY lIGON

    The First Amendment protects American society from the overreach of government officials who would prefer to hear only the good news about their accomplishments in office. We often hear officials of the government say: “Why don’t you ever talk about all the great things we are doing? Why is your new coverage so negative?” Government officials do not like to be asked tough questions or called to account for corruption.

    The Fourth Estate has provided the country with a measure of protection from the abuses and excesses of government, and for that, we should be grateful to live in a country where freedom of speech, including written or recorded words and images, is a right, not a privilege.

    Speech has become freer in the United States throughout the centuries. For example, under the second U.S. President John Adams, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition acts which restricted speech that was critical of the federal government. The Sedition Act resulted in the prosecution and conviction of many Jeffersonian newspaper owners who disagreed with the Federalist government.

    At various times in our history, the U. S. Post Office acted as the office of censorship for speech deemed inappropriate for Americans to see.

    The American Civil Liberties Union began to campaign against government censorship after World War I. The ACLU has been a stalwart in the fight for freedom of expression.

    For most of our American history, the fight for free speech has been fought against the intrusion of government by those associated with left-wing politics.

    A shift occurred in recent decades with the right wing taking control of the airwaves like talk radio and cable television. While conservatives always had publications offering their point of view, today there are vast amounts of conservatives media expressing the views of the right from all angles.

    The right is dictating public discourse in ways that have never happened in the past. Think tanks, funded by billionaires, provide news outlets with opinions laundered and folded for public consumption by the 1%. The moneyed-classes have abandoned the idea of using public relations alone to obtain ink or airtime. They have, instead, bought the newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television channels. They are working on taking over the internet now.

    The question becomes whether our First Amendment is protecting Americans by preserving robust public debate of important issues or are Americans becoming programmed by a few people who can afford to own the media.

    John Mayer said it this way:
    “And when you trust your television
    What you get is what you got
    Cause when they own the information, oh
    They can bend it all they want”

    It is clear that a constant barrage of misinformation
    has an effect. People believe propaganda. Chinese believe what they are told in Communist China, and Koreans believe North Korean lies. Soviets believed the state-owned media in the Soviet Union.

    Our neighbors who follow Fox, Limbaugh, Breitbart and other right-wing propaganda outlets are getting a bad education, but you cannot convince them of plain facts no matter what source you provide. But Americans are not being inundated by state propaganda, though. We have corporate propaganda delivered by the select group of right-wing zealots. These are the words the 1% want people to hear, and the ideas they want the people to adopt.

    Americans cannot really look to the courts or the government to suppress speech from the malignant right. That is the dilemma of our free society.

    Civic ignorance is a dangerous thing in a self-governing nation. We rely on our fellow citizens to try harder to become informed. Unfortunately, harder than many are willing to try.

    That is our American dilemma. The special interests have the bullhorns and our Founding Fathers gave it to them.

    • Ebrun

      Well of course, Fox News is responsible for the spate of recent conservative electoral victories. Those millions of American voters who vote Republican are just too stupid to realize how they are being duped. LOL

      What a spurious excuse to explain why so many Americans are rejecting leftist ideology. One network on the right versus five major national television networks plus the bulk of major metropolitan newspapers that parrot left wing orthodoxy. You guys are in denial. Your politics and you PR lack credibility with mainstream America. Fox News just confirmed their suspicions of liberal bias in the mainstream media.

      And your claim that Fox attributed the 9/11 attacks on Saddam Hussein is totally without merit. In short, just more fake news from the left that much of the public has wised-up to.

      • Jay Ligon

        Exhibit A.

        • Norma Munn

          Perfect!!!! (I needed the laugh. Thanks.)

        • Ebrun

          D,g, The more you respond with personal attacks on those with whom you disagree, the more that suggests a lack of intellectual capability to engage in a substantive discussion. But personal invective, as opposed to rational discourse, is what I am striving to elicit here from left wing ideologues. It confirms suspicions as to your intellectual competence. So keep it coming, “Comrade’.

      • Christopher Lizak

        Here you go Ebrun – Fox News reporting that there is in fact a connection between Hussein and 9/11 that is not being adequately reported in other news sources:

        http://www.foxnews.com/story/2003/09/11/connection-between-11-and-iraq.html

        TOTALLY without merit? Were you alive during the Fox Propaganda assault following 9-11, when the anchors of the three “liberal” broadcast outlets, and the most popular CNN news show, were removed?

        • Ebrun

          OMG, you’re right, Chris. I stand corrected. A 2003 Fox interview with some fellow named Monsoor Ijaz
          persuaded millions of uninformed Americans that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. This scam, if course, led to the reelection of George W. Bush. Wow, who’d have guessed?

          BTW, has anyone has ever heard again from Ijaz in the past 10 or 12 years. Boy, he sure made a lasting impression on the American public. Maybe he was a Russian plant who helped Fox News get Donald Trump elected. LOL

          • Christopher Lizak

            So you deny that Fox News offered a forum to what they knew was an unreliable source?

            The reason they did that was to forward their agenda in the guise of “expert opinion”.

            But that guy is not an expert, and was only given a forum because he supported the Fox narrative.

            This kind of behavior is called “plausible deniability”.

            And remember – you said TOTALLY without merit.

            Admit your error.

      • GSR

        For about 2 to 3 years after 9/11, I became a Fox News junky and started voting Republican because I thought Democrats were to soft to deal with terrorism and that a more muscular approach was needed. During those years, I vividly recall how blindingly deferential Fox News was to the Bush Administration. I remember O’Reilly telling his viewers that Americans needed to trust their government…trust that it would never start a war in Iraq without good reason. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the government knew things about the Saddam-Bin Laden connection and WMD that it couldn’t share with the public with for fear of hurting our intelligence capabilities…and that it would all make sense one day. My eventual realization that we started the Iraq War on false premises led me to finally realize what too many American still haven’t: That Fox News is a propaganda machine that has done great harm to this country.

        • Jay Ligon

          Thanks for sharing that., GSR.

      • Mooser

        They may not have come out and said that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, but they were constantly insinuating it on the air. They mentioned Saddam and 9/11 in the same breath constantly. They never mentioned one without mentioning the other. That’s what they do – they plant the seed of the story into a bunch of receptive brains that will never question what they are being told.

  4. Christopher Lizak

    The “Original” fake news?

    Fake news got us into the Vietnam War.

    Churchill said in his memoir that the whole Pearl Harbor “sneak attack” was fake news – he told Roosevelt where the Japanese Navy was on December 6th.

    Rothschild made his fortune on fake news following the Battle of Waterloo.

    Fox News may have taken it to a whole new level, but Fake News pre-dates Fox News.

    • Christopher Lizak

      The military at Pearl Harbor never put it together, but FDR and the guys that broke the Japanese Purple code did. That’s why the carriers were not at Pearl when the attack occurred.

      I encourage you to study the actual scholarship on the subject, and not the mythology they spoon-fed us in school. Those were tough times, and that was a tough call for FDR. It’s called Realpolitik these days. Or “Going to the Dark Side” in Cheney’s words.

      But at least we are in agreement that it was Fake News that started the Vietnam War, and that pre-dates Fox News. Right?

      • Christopher Lizak

        Hmm. OK.

        There was little doubt that an attack was coming, but the narrative in the news was “Surprise”.

        Fake news from 1941?

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