Month: June 2019

I Watched Fox News So You Don’t Have To

This is a slight anecdote about my experience with Fox News.

I still wouldn’t describe myself as a leftist, but I was once a lot more right-wing than I am now. I ceased to be a Republican years before I ceased watching Fox News, and I never much cared for doctrinaire Republican positions, but if you look at the average Trumpnik voter today, most of them can’t stand the institutional Republican Party either, which is a huge part of why Trump won the nomination. Most of these guys don’t think of themselves as ideologues, but as “regular folks” who sometimes align with socially conservative or fiscally libertarian positions, and in any case prefer both to the liberal-left spectrum of politics. So if that also resembles the average Fox News fan, that might not be a coincidence.

But since I was hardly doctrinaire, I was capable of seeing outside the reality tunnel well enough to see that life wasn’t the way that certain media outlets presented it. So I was like most Fox fans in the respect that I was right-wing but not really Republican. But by the same token I’d also been listening to enough talk radio to notice the general decline of standards for that medium. Like, when Rush Limbaugh’s voice started getting high-pitched and awkward for reasons that weren’t made clear until he admitted that he’d lost his hearing, shortly before being obliged to announce that he’d been addicted to prescription drugs, which may or may not have led to his hearing issue. And then there was the day just after the 2006 midterms when Republicans lost the House and Rush admitted that he was sick of “carrying water” for the Republican Party.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rush-tells-his-audience-i_b_33690 (original link no longer on Rush’s site for some reason)

So at this point in my life, transitioning from the second Bush Administration to Obama, I was still sympathetic to the right-wing media but losing my illusions about it. And having heard so many liberals say how unfair and unbalanced Fox News was, I decided to do a little study. I just happened to have a weekday off, and decided to use it watching Fox News the entire day, to see just how biased it was.

It started with the morning-show team doing one of their little support-the-military bits by having their show on the deck of a Navy warship. It bored me, frankly. I don’t remember too much about that time of day, but I must have switched to another channel. I knew that Shepard Smith would be coming on with actual news around mid-day, so I switched back on to Fox News.

As it turned out, the day I decided to perform my little study – November 5, 2009 – just happened to be the same day that Army psychiatrist Malik Hasan decided to attack his base at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and injuring at least 30 others.

And at this point, it was early afternoon my time, later afternoon Pacific time, and the pundit shows that Fox makes its bread and butter on were not scheduled yet. So you had Shep Smith and the team of field reporters covering the events in real time.

And I discovered the dirty little secret of Fox News: when there is actual news to report, they actually report the news. They had a very good staff of professional reporters, and they stuck to the facts.

It’s just that as with CNN, which pioneered the concept of the 24-hour news channel, eventually you run out of actual news to report without reiterating everything that’s already known or been revealed. So your coverage moves from the Who, What, When, and Where to speculating about the How and Why. And once the shooter was identified as a Muslim of direct Palestinian descent, who had made it clear to his superiors that he did not want to deployed to the Middle East, news networks started asking if there was a connection to the War on Terror. And when you’re Fox News, and you’ve built much of your reputation (and audience base) capitalizing on the War on Terror, you play that up even more than the other networks. So as it approached 5 pm Pacific, you had more and more talking heads on Fox asking if Malik Hasan was in effect a terrorist. So of course by the time The O’Reilly Factor came on at 5 (8 Eastern), that was the main line of argument, and it basically carried over to the coverage in the following days.

I only realize in retrospect that I quit watching Fox News even as regularly as I had been after that. It wasn’t any one particular thing, it’s just that it felt like I’d seen the wires behind the magic trick. They would of course get far more partisan as Trump, the Platonic Ideal and result of their approach to the world, took over the Republican Party, which meant that they were financially obliged to be even less of a pure news outlet than they were.

More’s the pity, because they still could be. Shep Smith is an example of the Fox News approach done right: folksy, somewhat right-of-center, but geniunely fair and balanced. Chris Wallace is also a professional news man. Pundit Andrew Napolitano is a former judge who, like the late Antonin Scalia, is a hardcore conservative Catholic on many issues (namely abortion) but is also a principled libertarian on legal issues who has not been afraid to criticize conservatives, including the Trump Administration. It is clear that you could have an obvious political slant (like MSNBC, or as I call it, MSDNC) and still do real journalism at the end of the day. And I think that Fox News had managed to build a certain level of success in the days before Trump because it attracted people like Wallace and (ABC veteran) Brit Hume who may have been politically incorrect but also had standards.

But, as with everything else on basic cable, that’s no longer the point. Every channel from MTV to SyFy is relying less on the innovation it started with and more and more on reality TV, because that’s a cheap way to monetize their outlet. So you have all these shows with pretty people bitching at each other like they’re still in high school. Why would Fox News be any different? CNN is certainly not becoming any more newsworthy, and they never claimed to be conservative. So it stands to reason that as all 24-hour news channels shift to entertainment value, the one which started with a conservative slant would, like every other conservative medium, become that much more involved with sensationalism and reality-TV style tribalism than serious news or even a serious conservative viewpoint, which at one time might have existed.

Fox News has the resources to be a valid news network if they wanted to be. But that’s not really their job.

So, About That Rape

How’s that for clickbait?

On June 21, writer E. Jean Carroll publicized her new book on the website of New York magazine, saying that of all the “hideous” men who have mistreated her in life, Donald Trump was the worst, because “in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996″ they had a playful encounter in the Bergdorf’s department store that led to a fitting room where Trump forced himself on her, ” (thrusting) his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.” So a career writer in a major metropolitan magazine has just accused the President of the United States of rape. Or as we call it these days, “Friday.”

You notice I did not use the term “alleged rape.” Frankly, the fact behind the rumor is irrelevant.

I am frankly not sure that Carroll is credible. Her prose is flippant even now and very much so in describing the event. There are always certain questions that, rightly or wrongly, come up when a rape accusation is made many years after the fact, namely: Why now? Why did you wait so long? Carroll answers for herself: “Because I am a coward.” But also: ” I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.”

Over the course of the last week, a whole bunch of media types have been taking their own profession to task about how little attention they are allegedly giving this alleged event. The thread of discussion underlies that the subject is not really being neglected at all. The fact of the matter is that an accusation is simply an accusation without proof, and there is none. And if this were any other President with the likely exception of Bill Clinton, the accusation would provoke horror, or at the other extreme, laughter. The fact that this accusation is treated by many as no big deal is the real verdict: it IS no big deal. The fact of whether Donald Trump raped somebody is irrelevant to the point that most of us consider it likely that he could.

In common-law countries, an accused is always legally innocent until proven guilty. In the social arena, this is normally also the case. But that depends on the individual’s reputation, or social capital, which is earned or squandered by one’s deeds. And when the accused lies literally every day, has been under investigation or lawsuit for most of his life for his crooked business deals, is currently being investigated by Congress, has been married three times, was proven to have paid off two women in the 2016 campaign to not tell stories about their affairs with him, and actively cultivates the image of being a disgusting pig, we cannot be surprised that any charge against him, no matter how horrible, is believable. Especially since, as with the Daniels and McDougal affairs, the rumors usually turn out to be true.

It also doesn’t help that the accused reacted the way he did. Speaking to reporters, Trump prefaced his remarks with “I’ll say it with great respect” – like how he said “some” Mexicans are good people – ” Number one, she’s not my type.” The implication of course, being, “Now, if she was my type? Sure, I’d rape her.” This attitude does not exactly reinforce credibility.

Both legally and socially, the burden is on the party making an accusation against a target. If the target’s reputation was previously clean, the social burden may be too much to surmount. But if facts become clear, and they do not favor the accused, then the burden is on the accused, whether he is legally guilty of anything or not.

This is probably what Republicans realize when they defend Trump. He has no credibility, so they have to lend him theirs. The joke of course being that if the respectable cloth-coat Republicans still had credibility with their own base, they wouldn’t have nominated Trump. Such credibility they still have is with the mainstream media who see them as something other than the jeering redcaps at Trump rallies, who actually love him all the more the more transgressive he gets, like G.G. Allin with nuclear weapons. And yet, people are acting like there’s such a thing as shame. Republicans, who have traded in shaming their enemies for so long, refuse to acknowledge it now. All they have to do is deny. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said, “I know the president has said this is not true … yes I believe the president.” Mitt Romney said, “The president indicated that this did not occur and that’s I think his strongest point to make.” Yes. It WOULD be. Normally. Trump is not a rapist. In exactly the same way that O. J. Simpson is not a murderer.

And it is testimony to how broken and scared the Republicans are that they continue on this path, when they ought to know better. Of course, when your leader is accused of something horrible, and there’s no REAL proof of it, you deny it. But as so many people say, this is not normal. Or rather, abnormal is the new normal. And we should quit acting as though normal is normal. Why do Republicans keep going further and further out, putting their own credibility on the line? Of course there’s no evidence that Donald Trump could do such a thing. EXCEPT for everything we’ve found out about him since he ran for president, and everything that New York reporters had found out about him years before, but did not stress until he became a threat to their profession, and incidentally, the nation. But these guys continue to insist there’s no proof of what E. Jean Carroll is saying. Just like there was no proof of what Stormy Daniels was saying. Until there was. Just like there was no proof of the Karen McDougal story. Until there was.

There’s no proof that Trump was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, either.

Just saying.

A friend of mine posted this liberal article on Facebook: The Trouble With Normal Is It Always Gets Worse. I agree with much of it, but argue with this part of the text, quoting another Lawyers, Guns & Money post:

“Regardless of his supporters we have to keep talking about these rapes over and over and over because otherwise we accept the implicit framing that it’s somehow okay or that there’s some kind of non-legal statute of limitations on holding someone accountable for rape.

In other words we normalize it. We normalize rape. Rape.

That’s not okay. I understand that we live in a rape culture and that rape and sexual assault are to some degree already distressingly normal and normalized, but this is different. This is not hidden or glossed over or anything. It’s an open accusation, both credible and substantiated by what she said at the time, and consistent with over a dozen other accounts.

We need to keep talking about it. A lot. Because if we don’t we give the message that you can get a free pass on rape if you just…do it enough times that people get tired of hearing about it, or stonewall and lie about it no matter how obviously.

If I had a media platform I would consider calling him “Credibly accused rapist and president Donald Trump” on a regular basis.

Like it or not many people, including children, take their cues from ‘leaders.’ What message are we sending if we say “if you’re important enough it doesn’t matter if you rape someone, because holding you accountable is too inconvenient” on such a public scale. I understand that’s a message we send frequently in other situations but it’s one we must resist.

Trump cannot be allowed to get away with the moral equivalent of the Gish gallop. Not on this.”

But he IS getting away with it, because we will not normalize this. We are so desperate to say that things are okay, that we will not admit what’s in front of our eyes. Everyone wants to have it both ways, especially the Good Christians ™ of the Party of Trump, who want the benefits of political dominance without the social consequences that they were all screaming and yelling about when Bill Clinton was in charge.

The only way out is through.

All the professional Christians are going to have to embrace the consequences of their actions and admit that THEY FORCED THIS ON THE COUNTRY, Because Hillary and Because Abortion, and they want to do it again Because Trannies and Because Drag Queen Story Hour.

Everyone is going to have to normalize this. They are going to have to look themselves in the mirror and admit that Donald Trump is a squealing, shit-covered little piglet. That is not a value judgment. It is a fact. The value judgment is what the country is going to DO about it. The value judgment is where you look yourself in the mirror and decide that such a creature should or should not be President of the United States.

And if you’re okay with it, then the problem is not with Donald Trump.

Where is the problem? With the person in the mirror.