Fox News
I will crank out another clickbait nemo dat post sometime, but this post will focus on Fox News.
Yesterday it was revealed that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates had been indicted, and it was also revealed that earlier this month George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI. Papadopoulos's "Statement of the Offense" (link to PDF), in particular, indicates that Russians purporting to act on behalf of the Kremlin made repeated contact with the Trump campaign and probably tipped the campaign off about the hack of John Podesta's email. How the Trump campaign responded to those overtures is not yet fully known to the public, and that is the focus of intense speculation at this point, but it's clear that at the very least there was low-level collaboration.
So in short, it was a bad day for Trump. Several of the people I follow on Twitter provided running commentary on Sean Hannity's Fox News program, and so I ended up watching it on YouTube. And in fact it was remarkable. To put it in context, Hannity has long been one of Trump's biggest fans, and there was even speculation that he would leave his position at Fox News to work for the administration. But Hannity is probably more effective helping Trump from outside than he would be as a formal administration employee.
Anyway the program can probably best be described as mindless propaganda. It did not rise to the level of well-crafted propaganda—Hannity did not bother to maintain a coherent narrative, and he did not confine himself to the literal truth—but it was delivered with a straight face and with no hint of reservation. Any viewer with no grasp of the underlying facts and with lower-than-average skepticism could come away convinced that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are guilty of treason while Trump and his associates are being falsely maligned. (I won't get into the details right now, but the basic game is to pretend that the sale of Uranium One amounted to treason, driven by large contributions to the Clinton Foundation. In fact the deal did not permit any export of uranium from the United States, and perhaps more importantly then-Secretary Clinton had little to do with it.)
People on Twitter have started referring to Fox News as "state television," and that's basically right. Conservatives would claim that Fox merely counterbalances the liberal-dominated media, but there's an important distinction between the alleged liberal bias of mainstream news and the blatant sycophancy of Fox News. Mainstream media is less partisan and less predictable. It plays by rules that may be annoying and may be (are) easily manipulated at times, and it has a permanent, ineradicable ideological slant.
But it also has some redeeming features, most notably a reasonably strong impulse to get the literal facts right. The mainstream media also won't shamelessly carry water for any particular person or party. (Again I should probably qualify that with "reliably"—at times the media really does bend over backwards for someone, but in doing so it respects limits, and it is generally fickle.) The media won't stay on sides or cover things up.
So Fox News is not just a conservative mirror image of the mainstream media. It is a propaganda outfit with minimal regard for any kind of truth. And it has been this way for a long time, although its devotion to Trump is arguably new in its intensity and lack of ideological grounding, as Matt Yglesias pointed out:
I don't have anything original to say here, I suppose. I will try to write a few further posts about what I think the implications are, but the short version is... they're bad.
Yesterday it was revealed that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates had been indicted, and it was also revealed that earlier this month George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI. Papadopoulos's "Statement of the Offense" (link to PDF), in particular, indicates that Russians purporting to act on behalf of the Kremlin made repeated contact with the Trump campaign and probably tipped the campaign off about the hack of John Podesta's email. How the Trump campaign responded to those overtures is not yet fully known to the public, and that is the focus of intense speculation at this point, but it's clear that at the very least there was low-level collaboration.
So in short, it was a bad day for Trump. Several of the people I follow on Twitter provided running commentary on Sean Hannity's Fox News program, and so I ended up watching it on YouTube. And in fact it was remarkable. To put it in context, Hannity has long been one of Trump's biggest fans, and there was even speculation that he would leave his position at Fox News to work for the administration. But Hannity is probably more effective helping Trump from outside than he would be as a formal administration employee.
Anyway the program can probably best be described as mindless propaganda. It did not rise to the level of well-crafted propaganda—Hannity did not bother to maintain a coherent narrative, and he did not confine himself to the literal truth—but it was delivered with a straight face and with no hint of reservation. Any viewer with no grasp of the underlying facts and with lower-than-average skepticism could come away convinced that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are guilty of treason while Trump and his associates are being falsely maligned. (I won't get into the details right now, but the basic game is to pretend that the sale of Uranium One amounted to treason, driven by large contributions to the Clinton Foundation. In fact the deal did not permit any export of uranium from the United States, and perhaps more importantly then-Secretary Clinton had little to do with it.)
People on Twitter have started referring to Fox News as "state television," and that's basically right. Conservatives would claim that Fox merely counterbalances the liberal-dominated media, but there's an important distinction between the alleged liberal bias of mainstream news and the blatant sycophancy of Fox News. Mainstream media is less partisan and less predictable. It plays by rules that may be annoying and may be (are) easily manipulated at times, and it has a permanent, ineradicable ideological slant.
But it also has some redeeming features, most notably a reasonably strong impulse to get the literal facts right. The mainstream media also won't shamelessly carry water for any particular person or party. (Again I should probably qualify that with "reliably"—at times the media really does bend over backwards for someone, but in doing so it respects limits, and it is generally fickle.) The media won't stay on sides or cover things up.
So Fox News is not just a conservative mirror image of the mainstream media. It is a propaganda outfit with minimal regard for any kind of truth. And it has been this way for a long time, although its devotion to Trump is arguably new in its intensity and lack of ideological grounding, as Matt Yglesias pointed out:
I have no idea whether or not Trump will scuttle NAFTA, but I’m sure whatever decision he makes Hannity will praise it to the stars.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 27, 2017
I don't have anything original to say here, I suppose. I will try to write a few further posts about what I think the implications are, but the short version is... they're bad.
posted by James | 2:50 PM
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