James McEnteer : How Mass Media Enable the Zombie Apocalypse

Zombies from Shaun of the Dead. Image from TheModerateVoice.

What if the dead stop staying dead?
How mass media enable the Zombie Apocalypse

When Mitt Romney rose from the grave of his own hypocrisy and insular privilege to oppose Barack Obama, even Americans who dislike Obama’s policies voted for him anyway, simply because he was a live human being.

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2013

Zombies dominate our nation’s airwaves. They have already devoured much of our rational public discourse and now threaten our social sanity. Zombies are hot commodities. They sell. That’s why they cannot be stopped or killed. Some editors and producers understand that zombies carry dangerous mental and moral infections that may already have doomed civilization as we (used to) know it. But profits outweigh the risks of parading zombies in prominent places.

Two factions promote the prevalence of zombies in mass media: True Believers and Snarky Ironists. Believer media managers feature the living dead as hosts or guests to flaunt their twisted catechism. Media Ironists recognize zombies for the frightening freaks they are, but trumpet their grotesque views anyway to whip up outrage and energize their often demoralized “normal” base.

Unsurprisingly, many True Believers are zombies themselves, like Roger Ailes, who presides over the Fox zombie empire. Ailes spent decades promoting undead candidates such as Nixon and Reagan and Bush, all of whom were morally moribund before entering the White House. Like all zombies, Ailes has never had any actual ideas, only tactics, an obsession with ratings, and an urge to rule.

He employs other soulless creatures like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, who substitute truculence for wit and shrillness for substance. Such tactics mesmerize the gullible and unwary, who fall under the zombie spell as their minds disintegrate and they too are doomed to wander empty-headed over the earth.

So-called progressive media are as guilty as Fox for promoting the zombie agenda. Salon and Raw Story and Talking Points Memo cannot resist quoting the mindless, outrageous comments of zombies such as Pat Robertson or Rick Santorum or Donald Trump, just to stir the pot. For liberal media, zombies are the freak show that helps lure rubes and readers into the main tent.

Irrational assertions by Robertson or other undead “ministers” who pretend to speak from religious conviction make for hilarious and/or infuriating headlines in otherwise supposedly rational publications. Robertson’s pronouncements, that Ivy League schools are preventing God’s miracles in America or that feminism causes women to kill their children and practice witchcraft, are simply too wackola not to report.

But this mockery -- often in bold headlines -- still spreads the soul-destroying zombie creed. And even ironic renderings of zombie madness have actual consequences. Consider Newt Gingrich. Though politically dead since the last millennium, when he resigned from Congress in disgrace, Gingrich was kept artificially “alive” long years after his political demise by constant exposure on cryogenic “news” programs, enabling his 2012 zombie candidacy for president.

Fox sustains political zombies long after their sell-by dates in public life: Sarah Palin and Dick Morris and Herman Cain are some of Fox’s dead talking heads. Other mumbling, unkillable corpses haunt radio airwaves, like Oliver North and Mike Huckabee. Sunday morning TV talk shows feature zombie panels grilling zombie guests, though it’s likely only zombies watch these shows.

The Republican presidential primary season was a veritable zombie jamboree. When Mitt Romney rose from the grave of his own hypocrisy and insular privilege to oppose Barack Obama, even Americans who dislike Obama’s policies voted for him anyway, simply because he was a live human being. That could have been his campaign slogan: Obama. He’s not a zombie.

Americans are still hungover from the Bush-Cheney zombie era of death and detention. We watched horrified as humans degenerated into zombies in front of our eyes, like Colin Powell at the United Nations. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Woo -- their names still sends shudders down the spine. Or the echo of their strange incantation: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud...”

The legions of political zombies who haunt Congress -- McConnell, McCain, Hatch, Inhofe, Chambliss, Graham, et. al. -- are a media cliché. Who keeps voting these creatures into office? Apparently others of their kind. Many so-called “reality” shows are mere zombie voyeurism: Survivor Housewives of the Jersey Shore. Shoot them, they get back up and keep coming.

For the common weal, it’s time for a mass media ban on zombies. True Believers cannot be dissuaded from their soulless course. Fox will be Fox. But progressive and mainstream media must cease offering zombies platforms to spout their venomous anti-life invective, even for scornful laughs. Exposure prolongs the power of the undead. Let them perish in a well-earned oblivion.

There is no reason to hear from -- or about -- the Westboro Baptist Church ever again. The living dead should not be given space to proselytize for their anti-human views, even when presented as freaks or perverts. Or from preachers of anti-gay sermons who turn out to be gay themselves. Religious hypocrisy is old news. Let Pat Robertson rant and rave only in the catacombs under the 700 Club.

Nor should media cover the mad posturings of notoriety-sucking undead like Donald Trump. Yes, Trump has completely missed the point of what it means to be human. But how often do we need to see him demonstrate that? Trump is like a race car driver with no brakes or pit crew, careening in circles. We watch him, waiting for his wheels to fly off, hoping no bystanders are seriously injured.

When you start to notice them, zombies are everywhere. We tend to take them for granted. But giving them free rein is a fatal mistake. Zombies won’t be content until they convert every last one of us to their ghastly ghetto of ghouls.

We’re fast approaching an apocalyptic tipping point. If we lived there we’d be home now. And we almost are. Klaatu barada nikto.

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger). He lives in Quito, Ecuador. Read more of James McEnteer's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Bruce Melton : The Climate Change Awareness Drought is Over / 2

Photos by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
The Climate Change 
awareness drought is over
Part Two: Voices tell us 'the warmists are dead'

Which side is biased and how do we tell with all the noise in the media?

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2012

[This is the second of a three-part series exploring the recent change in public awareness of climate change issues, the causes behind the change, biases, the latest science showing how much our climate has already changed, and academic support for a vigorous change in messaging.]

AUSTIN, Texas -- Polls, surveys and academic evaluations of public opinion are showing a shift in the collective public understanding of climate change. Unprecedented extreme weather and political cues have allowed Americans to begin to disregard what the “voices” have been telling us.

The voices, and their “message,” lack credibility, yet their message is endlessly repeated in the media echo chamber. The brute force of Mother Nature can overcome many obstacles however. The increasing change in awareness is grounds for a shift in advocacy policy towards how we urge for climate change action. It is time to begin anew.

Climate pollutants are just pollutants. They will be no harder to limit and clean up than have been the challenges to find solutions to human toilet pollution over the last century. The voices have no credibility. Their money allows them to speak with millions of voices. The media is not qualified to tell the climate right from climate wrong.

The bias in climate change messaging is well documented in academia. This bias comes from conservative news reporting sources and those institutions like the Heartland Institute or George C. Marshall Institute.

One example of the bias in messaging comes from Stanford in 2010. It found that more exposure to Fox News quite significantly biased the respondents' view against the consensus position on climate change. These researchers found that 82 percent of survey respondents that watched no Fox News believed the Earth’s temperature has been rising while 19 percent fewer Fox News viewers (63 percent) believed this.

They found that 85 percent of respondents that watched no Fox News believed that the temperature increase is caused mostly by things people do or about equally by things people do and natural causes, whereas 25 percent fewer Fox News Viewers (60 percent) believed this.

In this study the authors tell us: “more exposure to Fox News was associated with more rejection of many mainstream scientists’ claims about global warming, with less trust in scientists, and with more belief that ameliorating global warming would hurt the U.S. economy.”

A more comprehensive study dealing with the reasons behind the different beliefs of viewers predominantly watching the Fox News Channel was presented by Feldman et al., in the International Journal of Press/Politics in 2011. Their findings backed up the Stanford study but went further. They found that Fox News viewers were consistently polarized in their beliefs vs. CNN and MSNBC viewers who showed no polarization.

The campaign to deceive is a monster. All one has to do is pick up a few books to define the magnitude of this concerted effort led by Conservative think tanks and institutions representing big money, fossil fuels, and big business.

The books are becoming endless and among their highly credentialed publishers are: Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science, Columbia University Press, 2011; Bradley, Global Warming and Political Intimidation, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011; Dr. Michael Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, Columbia University Press, 2012; Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 2009, and Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt, 2010, Bloomsbury.

And to wring this out, a paper in Political Science in December 2010 reviewed 141 books on portraying a skeptical view of the consensus and found 92 percent of them were funded by Conservative think tanks.

Television commercials from sources like Exxon, British Petroleum, and the American Petroleum Institute (there are many more) litter our evening viewing entertainment with proclamations that fossil fuels are good, are central to our society, and that we need more of them in the greatest whole-hearted American way.

This of course (except for the sarcasm) is very valid. Our society has evolved with fossil fuels and it is very obvious that significant changes in the cost of energy can cripple our world.

But the amount of propaganda produced by these sources, vs. the propaganda produced by sources whose message is to address our fossil fuel “addiction” is simply staggering. This kind of messaging influences us tremendously.

Two books that I left off the above list that show the great extent of organized propaganda created to persuade the American public about the dissenter’s viewpoint concerning climate change are Hogan and Littlemore, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, Greystone, 2009, and Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Bloomsbury, 2010.

These publishers are not the Academic powerhouses common to the above list, but the authors pursued this issue with a passion only similar to Rachel Carson and her Silent Spring which was published by a trade publisher, Houghton Mifflin, in 1962.

What about prominent scientists with dissenting positions like the Pielkes or Judith Curry? There are a few climate scientists whose views have been significantly reported in the media (and significantly promoted by interests capable of broadly advertising their message) that hold some viewpoints different from the consensus crowd. These scientists are mostly represented by the 2 to 3 percent of actively publishing climate scientists described in Anderegg et al. in their paper from 2010 (see the discussion of this work below as well as Oreskes 2004, Doran and Zimmerman 2007, Bray and Storch 2010 and Farnsworth and Lichter 2011).

There will always be dissenting views in science. Some are valid based on existing knowledge, others are rapidly disproven. Similar controversies in science have been repeated time after time. To name a few: planetary orbital theory, ice age theory, germ theory, continual drift theory, and atomic theory.

Is it weather? Are these public opinions reflecting changes in the weather, not changes in climate? Climate after all, is decades of weather. This change in trend is only a few years. Is it valid? If a doctor warns someone for 20 years that their smoking could give them cancer, and it occurs, was it caused by smoking?

The “weather is not climate” argument is a good argument and one that I use often, but it simply does not apply here. The “weather” has been getting weirder for decades. Now the extremes have become unprecedented and I will discuss this in Part Three of this series: “How Valid is the Trend?”

The findings in these polls and surveys are about respondent’s opinions about weather events, not about weather or climate itself. The validity of the trends in these cases is no different than the validity of public opinion poll trends looking at who is most likely to win a political race.

Statistical validity is based on sample size, sample diversity, and statistical measurements. The statistical validity of short-term opinion polls is little different from the statistical validity of long-term climate data. it just takes much, much longer to accumulate climate data than public opinion data and the data are much different in shape and form.

To lay the “bias” question aside, certainly there is bias. But, it is not coming from the vast majority of climate scientists. To illustrate the extent of the scientific acknowledgment of man's impact on our climate, Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego, in a paper in the journal Science, in 2004 (updated in 2005), revealed an astounding truth about academic thinking and current climate changes.

The study analyzes the contents of the ISI database. The ISI database (The Institute for Scientific Information) is an ongoing collection of over 18,000 scientific journals and is the foremost compendium of academic peer reviewed papers in the world. The ISI database provides a comprehensive coverage of the world’s most important and influential research. Oreskes searched the database period 1993 to 2003 for papers with the key words "global climate change" in their summaries.

This search found 928 papers. Seventy-five percent of the papers argued that climate change was caused by man, evaluated the impacts of climate change caused by man ,or discussed alternatives to lessen the impacts of climate change caused by man. Twenty-five percent dealt with scientific methods or the study of our ancient climate and took no position as to whether our current climate change is being caused by man.

 Zero percent of these papers argued that the climate changes we are seeing on our planet today are a natural occurrence. Of course, this research is only related to those papers with the key words “global climate change” in their summaries.

Doran and Zimmerman from the University of Chicago, Illinois, in the publication of the 50,000 member American Geophysical Union EOS, surveyed over 10,000 earth scientists about their professional opinions on climate change in 2007. Of over 3,000 responses, 90 percent (including prominent scientists who disagree with the consensus) say the earth is warming and 82 percent say it is caused by man.

Of those specialists whose work consists of more than 50 percent of their publishing related to climate science, 96 percent say the earth is warming and 97 percent of those say it is because of man. Interestingly, they found only 47% of petroleum geologists and 67% of meteorologists surveyed agreed there was human involvement in global warming.

A study by Bray and Storch (2010) from the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, looked at over 2,000 international climate scientists’ opinions in 2008. The respondents for their study came from the Oreskes study mentioned above, from the authors in ISI database journals showing the 10 highest impact ratings between 1998 and 2007, and from climate or weather related organizations such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the similar Max Planck Institute in Germany, the American Meteorological Society, etc.

They found that 94 percent of 375 respondents answering their survey agreed that climate change was occurring and 84 percent said it was caused by man. This work did not break out the responses per the respondents’ area of scientific expertise.

Farnsworth and Lichter at George Mason University have published a Research Note in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research (Oxford University Press) in October 2011 titled, "The Structure of Scientific Opinion on Climate Change." Their survey list came equally from the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, and was limited to individuals listed in the prestigious publication American Men & Women of Science, which is the most widely recognized biographical reference work on leading American scientists.

Their selection procedure did not include media weathercasters and they received responses from 489 of their 998 questionnaires (which is a really high response rate). Why no television weatherpersons? Weather and climate as we are concerned with here are distinctly different.

Weather looks at “climate” for the future in terms of days, maybe weeks, and sometimes months. Climate science is concerned with “weather” from the past and future based on the shortest time frames of years and generally 30 years to centuries and millennia. Weatherpersons are certainly knowledgeable about climate, but no more so than say, pharmacologists are knowledgeable about cancer.

What Farnsworth and Lichter found was that 97% of their respondents agreed that Earth was warming and 84% said it was because of man. Only 5 percent disagreed that it was because of man. They tell us that the greater proportion of atmospheric and metrological scientists in their sample could be the reason why their “belief in man-caused climate change results” was lower than Doran and Zimmerman.

“Surprisingly” (said that in the paper), industry-based scientists were not predisposed to show a preference one way or the other towards man-caused climate change. And tellingly, scientists based in academia were more likely to see climate change impacts more severely than their counterparts in industry and government positions.

Anderegg and colleagues (2010), from Stanford, the University of Toronto, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that between 97 and 98 percent of nearly 1,400 climate scientists’ publications reviewed, published by climate scientists who are most actively publishing findings in their field, support the human-caused climate change consensus. Out of the two to three percent that do not support the consensus, 80 percent have published fewer than 20 papers.

The consensus crowd includes only 10 percent of scientists who have published fewer than 20 papers. Not only do almost all climate scientists support the consensus position, those that do not support it do not have anywhere near the credentials as the consensus crowd.

In the authors’ words: “The relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC [anthropogenic climate change -- global warming] are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.”

As for the peer reviewed literature that contradicts the above I will just cite one extensive review of the literature against Oreskes (2004) and Anderegg et al. (2010), of about 7,000 words and 58 references (Goot, 2011): “None of the criticisms leveled at Oreskes or Anderegg et al. undermine their findings in any substantial way.”

Scientific discipline does make a difference. Any old scientist can be knowledgeable, but their knowledge may be inaccurate relative to that of the specialists. We need to pay the most attention to the most actively publishing climate scientists. The bias is not in the circles of specialists, it is in the voices of interests capable of widespread advertisement of their message and it is repeated far and wide by the media that knows not what it is about.

The media do their reporting innocently. Or maybe ignorantly is more an appropriate term. They no more know who is correct than the general public, or the vast majority of the signers of the Oregon Petition. They are reporters, not climate scientists. Their principles are based on the Journalists’ Creed. They are vested in the public trust and understand that both sides of the story need to be presented in an unbiased manner. To a journalist, “fair” is not just a motto for a television news program, but a presentation of both sides of an issue.

Our society has taught journalists and their kin to be fair. The Federal Communications Commission created the Fairness Doctrine in 1949 just to be sure. This rule required that media coverage of public issues be covered on the news and contrasting viewpoints were required to be presented. It said that broadcasters were to provide coverage of controversial news and public affairs when appropriate.

This was the way it should be done. It was just and fair. It basically created investigative journalism as we know it today, or as we knew it 20 years ago. The Fairness Doctrine was abolished by President Reagan in 1987.

Then there was the Equal Time Rule, established in 1927 and recodified in 1934. It was a rule addressing political issues only, intended to provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political candidates who request it.

These two rules help define ethics, and the morally appropriate way to behave while reporting on television and radio. It is only fair that both sides of the story be heard, that those with different beliefs be given appropriate time to demonstrate their position accordingly. We as a society understand these ethical and moral rights and generally we uphold them to the utmost degree.

But there is a big challenge associated with climate change, or science of any kind really. Most public issues in the past and today deal with beliefs and issues. Climate change is not about beliefs and issues. Beliefs change over time as the public’s perception of an issue changes over time. These are things like: racial issues, alcohol consumption, workers’ rights, child labor laws, women’s suffrage, slavery, right to life, appropriate religious beliefs, separation of church and state, the right to bear arms, nuclear power, national healthcare, birth control, etc.

Climate change is about science. Science has no morals. There are ethics involved in science, but they are the ethics of the industry of science, not the perceived appropriateness of an issue like “the right to life.” Issues can be debated based upon beliefs. There are no “beliefs” in science, only facts or evidence.

So right away, you see that there is a fundamental problem with the way our society is treating climate change as just another political issue. We are treating it like it is another belief; something that can be judged through morally appropriate behavior. We actively seek contrasting viewpoints and consume them with the same weight as the consensus position. Kruger and Dunning, in the Journal of Psychology, put this problem very simply:

When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.

Incompetent is a harsh word, but how does one know that climate change is real if they do not have the knowledge to understand the science is valid when their authority figures are telling them the science is not valid? Ignorance in many cases is not bliss. The media just reports, but should place more confidence in the vast majority of specialists? Should they be more aware of the sources of the information they are reporting? Or the funding sources of the information sources that they report?

Who gets more credibility, the George C. Marshall Institute or Penn State? The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine or the Woods Institute? If one does not have the knowledge necessary to make decisions on such topics, how does one tell?

A little more knowledge however, may spoil the pudding. From the Yale Cultural Cognition Project we find that a little more knowledge often serves to reinforce the position of social issues of one’s peers. Higher education does not always mean that appropriate climate science is recognized for what it is. More education can enhance what is often described as the Kruger Dunning Effect.

Understanding a few more facts about climate serves to reinforce the well-designed propaganda of the vested interest groups that is so widely distributed to the media. This design specifically enhances commonly understood, intuitive evidence to the contrary of more detailed information understood by specialists.

The media only understand that the public trusts them to be fair, and that the rules their industry evolved under require them to provide equal time to the opposition. But the rules that trained this industry were written for issues-based discussions, not science based discussions. The bias is on the side of the voices. The media faithfully uphold their ethics and report what the voices have to say in ignorant bliss.


A Revelation

But all is not even as the voices themselves believe. In their quest to quell, they have denied the key to the whole conundrum. Authoritative voices tell us climate change is not real, that it is a scientific conspiracy, that it is a natural cycle soon to end, and that it will be good for society. These same voices, that are telling us all of these things at the same time; these are the voices that tell us that the solutions to climate change will ruin our economies.

Climate scientists say nothing of the sort. Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, one of the lead authors of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Reports, member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and one of the pivotal international researchers in climate science, tells us in his book Earth: The Operators Manual, that about 100 reports have been published concerning the economic impacts of the solutions to climate change and they are focusing in on one thing.

The solutions to fixing our climate will cost about one percent of global gross domestic product every year for 100 years. This may seem like a lot of money ($540 billion a year), but it needs to be taken in context. Professor Alley tells us that the cost and effort required to fix our climate will be no more than what has been spent across this planet in the last 100 years installing our human waste collection and treatment infrastructure.

That’s right. The cost and effort required to clean up greenhouse gas pollution is really not so much different than the cost and effort required to clean up human toilet pollution.

It’s time to begin anew. Climate pollution is just that -- pollution. It’s no big deal, and a lot of people are going to make lots of money creating climate toilets to get rid of the climate pollution.

Part Three of this series will look at the validity of the trend: the validity of the public awareness trend and the trend of increased and unprecedented weather extremes caused by climate change. Completing this article, we explore public opinions on how the U.S. government should be treating climate change and some amazing numbers about how an active and vigorous position on “green” issues has been shown to win more political battles and races.

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found at this link. More climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.]


References

Fox News: Krosnick and MacInnis, Frequent Viewers of Fox News are Less Likely to Accept Scisntists Views on Global Warming, NSF grant, Stanford, 2010. http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Fox-News.pdf
Feldman et al., Climate on Cable, Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, International Journal of Press Politics, XX, 2011. http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf
Scientific American Sidebar on Oregon Petition: http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~kotliar/honors/honsem/somalwar/honsem/2002/articles/sciam_uncertainty.html
National Academy of Sciences Statement on the Oregon Petition: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s04201998
Of 141 skeptical books on climate sicence, 92 percent were funded by conservative Think Tanks: Jaques, Dunlap and Freeman, The organization of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental skepticism, Environmental Politics, June 2008. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09644010802055576
The Bias: Oreskes, “The scientific consensus on climate change,” Science, December 2004. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full
Doran and Zimmerman, Examining the Scientific Consensus, American Geophysical Union EOS, January 2009. http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/ssi/DoranEOS09.pdf
Bray and Storch, A Survey of the Perspectives of Climate Scientists Concerning Climate Science and Climate Change in 2008, Institute for Coastal Research, Geesthacht, Germany, 2010. http://ncse.com/files/pub/polls/2010--Perspectives_of_Climate_Scientists_Concerning_Climate_Science_&_Climate_Change_.pdf
Farnsworth and Lichter, The Structure of Scientific Opinion on Climate Change, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, October 2011. http://ijpor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/27/ijpor.edr033.short?rss=1
Anderegg et al., Expert credibility in climate change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, April 2010. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/22/1003187107.full.pdf+html
Goot, Anthropogenic climate change : expert credibility and the scientific consensus, Garnaut Review Secretariat, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/159903
Kruger Dunning Effect: Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, Psychology, December 2009. http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~suh/metacognition.pdf
Education can increase bias: Kahan et al., The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons, Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change, Yale Cultural Cognition Project, 2011.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503
Toilet Pollution: Alley, Earth: The Operators’s Manual, W. W. Norton and Company, 2011, pp. 209-219.

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BOOKS / Lamar W. Hankins : 'The Fox Effect' Poisons Public Discourse

The Fox Effect:
Disinformation that poisons public discourse

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / March 26, 2012

[The Fox Effect, by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt, and Media Matters for America (2012: Anchor); Paperback; 336 pp; $15.]

Sometimes education is not the answer, at least if the question is one that involves politics. A 2008 Pew report supports this proposition. What one believes about political issues is determined more by one’s view of the world than by facts.

There is more emotion involved with political beliefs than reasoning says the Pew study and another study by Dan Kahan at Yale University. Researcher and author George Lakoff suggests that people with authoritarian and individualistic orientations are less likely than others are to accept facts that are contrary to their emotional state.

More education does not fix this disconnect. Other researchers from Dartmouth and George Washington University have found that better-educated Republicans are more resistant to facts that aren’t emotionally satisfying than are their less well-educated compatriots.

Examples of this include the widespread (and false) belief among conservatives that the 2010 healthcare bill included “death panels,” the ridiculous proposition that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and the widespread right-wing fabrication that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. We’ll get to global warming in a minute.

Now, we have a new book that argues that the deliberate misrepresentation of facts by Fox News strengthens the conservative views of Republicans and poisons our political discourse.

The title of the new book by Ari Rabin-Hayt, David Brock, and their colleagues at Media Matters for America explains clearly its premise: “The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine.” In case you were wondering whether these authors are nothing but a bunch of lefties and Democrats, the personal journey of David Brock might convince you otherwise.

Brock has worked for The Washington Times and The American Spectator, and he was one of the key people financed by Richard Mellon Scaife to look for heinous crimes committed by Bill and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas in an attempt to destroy Clinton’s presidency. He termed Clarence Thomas’s accuser during Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination hearings, Anita Hill, “a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty” in a book he wrote touching on Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment of her by Thomas.

Before Clinton’s presidency was over, Brock had his own Damascus Road experience and denounced his right-wing colleagues and himself for their sewer antics and dishonesty. Since that time, he has devoted himself to exposing conservative disinformation and misinformation, and was a founder of Media Matters for America.

Brock and Rabin-Hayt’s new book draws from memos leaked by disaffected Fox News employees to show that Fox is not just another news organization, but a propaganda mill whose purpose is to change the Republican Party into a political institution that satisfies the basest instincts of the neoconservatives who embody Fox News.

The Fox News Channel is in a real sense the alter ego of its president, Roger Ailes, who began his political career working for Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush, for whom he produced the misleading, but politically brilliant, Willie Horton ad that shut down any chance Michael Dukakis may have had to become President.

To understand how close Fox News and Roger Ailes are to Republican Party politics, consider that in the week leading up to the first Tea Party events, Fox ran 100 promotional spots, all free. This largess fits in with Ailes’s desire to turn the party over to anti-government, libertarian, neoconservative forces. What Fox supports and promotes influences Republicans’ political beliefs more than the facts do. A clear example of this is the debate about global warming.

A University of Maryland poll shows that Fox News viewers believe overwhelmingly that there is no scientific consensus that we are experiencing man-made climate change. Notice that this proposition is not focused on what the viewers believe about man-made climate change, but on what they believe about the scientific consensus on that matter.

Their views have been so shaped by disinformation and propaganda broadcast by Fox News that they think there is no scientific consensus about climate change, a demonstrably untrue assertion. Now, the scientific consensus could be wrong, but there can be no doubt that such a consensus exists. Only dishonest reporters claim otherwise.

Fox viewers also believe that their taxes have increased under Barack Obama’s presidency, another position easily refuted, but one repeated so often on Fox that its viewers accept it as true. As Ari Rabin-Hayt says, all they need do is look at their own tax returns and they will see this proposition is false.

In a very real sense, Fox News is like the older brother of a friend of mine. When they argued as they were growing up, the older brother would make up facts so that he could win the argument. It didn’t matter to him that what he said was pure make-believe. He insisted that it was true, that he had read it somewhere, or that someone in authority provided the information -- so he could win the argument.

The authors of The Fox Effect acknowledge that Roger Ailes is brilliant as a producer of Fox News. But he has devoted his brilliance to harming the world by poisoning the arena where much public discourse occurs today -- the air waves of cable television.

Fox’s productions are excellent largely because Ailes insists on having high production values, utilizing great graphics and sets. Rabin-Hayt says that Fox News is more visually and auditorily appealing than other cable outlets.

Fox was the originator of the now-ubiquitous crawl -- the news ticker that appears at the bottom of television screens during shows. Ailes created the crawl in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy when the news was coming in too fast to cover in only one way.

According to the authors of The Fox Effect, Fox News presenters and commentators don’t present false information by accident. They do so intentionally. The head of Fox’s news division in Washington, Bill Sammon, has acknowledged that five days before the 2008 election, he went on air and called Obama a socialist even though he knew it wasn’t true.

This false allegation was repeated on 30 Fox segments just before the election. If the essence of good journalism is presenting the truth, what can you say about someone who has acknowledged in writing that he lied for political purposes on a news show?

The authors of The Fox Effect believe that the fundamental problem with Fox News is that it destroys our national debate because its commentators and producers refuse to stipulate what the known facts are.

For instance, we can’t debate about whether the cost of fixing climate change will be worth the expense of transforming our economy in fundamental ways, if that would be necessary to correct the problem of global warming, because Fox (and its adherents) will not stipulate the scientific consensus about the fact that we have man-made climate change.

Whether we should move our economy, for instance, away from carbon-based energy can’t be discussed because Fox will not acknowledge the core facts that would lead to that discussion.

According to the authors, Fox doesn’t necessarily create lies -- like the one about death panels during the health care debate -- but it amplifies and gives a forum to such lies. In Rabin-Hayt’s view, Fox "launders" the lies.

Because Fox’s lies have been exposed, Fox now has as much credibility as a political party has; that is, it is suspect. Fox has been the key propaganda arm of the Republican Party for many years and gave the Tea Party element of the Republicans more cachet than the Tea Party would ever have mustered on its own.

As a letter-writer to The New York Times put it:

"By passing off conservative jihadism as 'fair and balanced' reporting, Ailes and Fox have diminished the journalistic enterprise itself, contributing mightily to a communications universe in which research, facts and dialogue are seen as soft, boring and ineffectual compared with fear-mongering, Bible-thumping and race-baiting. Honest debate becomes impossible, and the entire marketplace of ideas on which a functioning democratic society depends is put at risk."

Just the point made by The Fox Effect.

This is why I have jokingly said that “friends don’t let friends watch Fox News,” at least not without adult supervision.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Mary Tuma : When One Man Owns Too Much

Hacking Rupert. Political cartoon by Pat Bagley / The Cagle Post.
The News Corp. scandal:
A case against media consolidation

What happens when one man owns too much?

By Mary Tuma / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2011

Before a UK parliamentary hearing (and in between being attacked by a cream pie) earlier this week, media mogul Rupert Murdoch -- under investigation for allegations that his recently shuttered British tabloid News of the World hacked into the phones of some 4,000 individuals and bribed police for information -- stunningly absolved himself of any responsibility in the alleged illegal actions of his company.

When MP (Member of Parliament) Jim Sheridan asked Murdoch if he was ultimately responsible for the “whole fiasco,” Murdoch replied, “No,” shifting blame to those he employed and trusted. “The News of the World is less than one percent of our company. I employ 53,000 people around the world,” Murdoch retorted in defense.

Whether or not Mr. Murdoch is telling the truth, his argument -- that as a head of a media conglomerate it is unreasonable to assume -- due to the sheer size of the operation -- that he was aware of actions, however illegal or abhorrent, within the company he owns -- should trouble the public almost as much as the scandal itself.

His multi-billion dollar global media empire, stretching from TV and film to publishing and online holdings, has garnered considerable attention for its growth and scope, not to mention the political and ideological leanings of some outlets, including Fox News.

Aside from what we might think politically of the News Corporation, we can legitimately ask whether one man, or one company, should have such dominant control over our media system, the very institution we as citizens rely on to function effectively in a democracy.

Murdoch controls a wide-range of media properties like The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, a number of cable channels including Fox News, National Geographic (part ownership), 20th Century Fox production company, film distributors Fox Searchlight Pictures, Harper Collins publishing, and some 120 international channels, according to media reform group Free Press.

The conglomerate’s expansion did not come solely by virtue of free market competition, but instead was greatly the result of a series of regulatory decisions fought hard for by Murdoch himself. The Australian born media mogul, infamous for his ruthless and ideological drive, has spent sizable energy lobbying federal regulators to relax media ownership rules in order to enable him to swallow up more media properties in more markets.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine, writes in a recent Washington Post editorial that, while media reform groups have battled hard to prevent the FCC and Congress from expanding media consolidation, Murdoch and his lobbyists, “have been a constant, well-funded presence -- pushing to rewrite media ownership rules so that one corporation, and one man, accumulated extraordinary power.”

Dubbed the “Man Who Owns the News” by author Michael Wolff, Murdoch lives up to the moniker, having monopolized sectors of the media market with skilled leverage, even at one time securing an extremely rare waiver, not previously given to any other foreign firm at that point, which granted him license to start up U.S. broadcasting efforts. The waiver allowed Murdoch to begin Fox News while reaping the tax benefits of keeping his company in Australia.

And through all the “well-funded” wrangling, Murdoch has secured a legion of defenders in the media, an unmatched asset in a time of crisis. From leading cable network Fox News to the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch is doubly recused from guilt within the media empire he created.

The continually unfolding phone-hacking scandal shaking the UK and, to some degree, the U.S., has placed News Corp. CEO Murdoch (previously seen as "untouchable" but who has now been "mortalized") in the hot seat -- along with his son James, head of News Corp. Europe and Asia, and former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, among others.

With multiple arrests, mass resignations, and a company whistleblower found inexplicably dead, the News Corp. saga has effectively exposed the incestuous relationship among politicians, police, and the press -- and is chipping away at the already questionable media conglomerate’s ethical credibility.

While allegations surfaced nearly six years ago, it was The Guardian’s investigation earlier this month, detailing the especially egregious instance of NOTW reporters intercepting and deleting cell phone voice messages of a 13-year old female murder victim, lending her parent’s hope that the deceased girl might still be alive, that spiked renewed and fervent interest in the claims.

Rupert Murdoch on Fox News' Bill O'Reilly show. Image from Business Insider.
Since then the scandal has not been contained to the UK, but has crossed the Atlantic, with a bipartisan coalition of U.S. lawmakers and activist groups calling on the DOJ, SEC, and FBI to investigate the media conglomerate for unethical practices including hacking into the phones of 9/11 victims and bribing foreign law enforcement.

Congressional leaders charge that the media company may have violated U.S. law under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which holds that U.S. corporations can’t bribe or attempt to bribe foreign officials; as News Corp. is now headquartered in New York City, the law may be applicable in this case.

Yet while the dominoes continue to fall in the scandal, Brooks and Murdoch remain steadfast in their claims of ignorance to the wrongdoing, and their apologies fall short of assuming responsibility. Even Murdoch’s “We are Sorry” weekend newspaper advertisements -- an attempt to save his company’s tarnished reputation -- didn’t assume full liability for the actions, stating, “We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred” (and not the “wrongdoing we allowed to occur").

Aiding in the absolution of guilt are none other than Murdoch’s vast media properties. The highly profitable Fox News Channel, owned by News Corp., stayed silent on the most prominent media story in the world when it first erupted. Unfortunately, any claims of ignorance won't hold water: this web video caught panelists on Fox’s ostensible media criticism program, “Fox News Watch,” in a verbal game of hot potato, as all present strove to avoid responsibility for bringing up the major media scandal on the show.

When contributor Cal Thomas asked, “Anybody want to bring up the subject we're not talking about today for the -- for the [Internet] streamers?", a second contributor encouraged Thomas to “go ahead” and raise the issue. Thomas threw the idea back at him, concluding, “I’m not going to touch it.”

Eventually Fox did cover the scandal, albeit devoting considerably less time to the issue than did its cable competitors. Even so, some of Fox's news segments sought to dilute the criminality of the situation through the use of dubious comparisons -- or simply sloughed it off as an over-reported story.

In one particularly disheartening instance a Fox host and his guest attempted to frame the controversy as a mere “hacking story” (rather than what it is, a story about journalistic ethics), by unfairly paralleling it to when Citigroup and Bank of America were hacked. They missed the mark by a long shot, only providing further evidence the network actively sought to downplay the scandal.

The Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch media outlet acquired in 2007 from the Bancroft family, ardently championed their owner’s veracity, calling the criticisms surrounding News Corp. a plot by competitors to smear the newspaper and “perhaps injure press freedom in general.” The editorial piece argued that governmental regulators, by drawing critical attention to the scandal, were essentially attacking the First Amendment, and that commercial and ideological motives are fueling the media spotlight on News Corp.

Almost mimicking their top executives' blame-shift game, the Journal's piece placed British police (given they failed to enforce law) as more culpable in the illegal tampering than those who hacked the phone lines. A second WSJ article responded to accusations of the paper's perceived ideological or commercial bias under Murdoch by citing The Simpsons' satirical punches at Fox News. While the cartoon sitcom, produced and distributed by Fox, does occasionally poke fun at the news network, this embarrassingly weak example does little to counter the claims of bias.

It is also worthy to note that, just days earlier, WSJ publisher and CEO Les Hinton resigned his post in the midst of the phone-hacking scandal; Hinton had overseen News Corp.’s British newspaper unit during the time of the allegations. He too has pleaded ignorance to the nefarious activity, and clearly has the backing of his former colleagues. “We have no reason to doubt him, especially based on our own experience working for him,” the opinion piece read.

Similarly, News Corp.-owned The Australian, a major daily newspaper from Murdoch’s home country, claimed that a small group of elite liberal “hacks” were responsible for igniting what they called the “anti-Murdoch” campaign and bemoaned the heightened scrutiny on journalistic practices as an affront to press freedom.

Such instances of parent-company cheerleading by media are not novel and most definitely not exclusive to Fox. When it was discovered that media conglomerate General Electric did not pay federal taxes after earning some $5.1 billion dollars last year, all major media outlets but one swarmed around the story. NBC Nightly News -- a GE holding -- blatantly ignored the topic in its broadcast for four nights straight. NBC, of course, denies the decision had anything to do with its corporate boss.

Examples such as these are rife in corporate media culture and well documented by media watchdog organizations such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Much of the censorship -- or censorship by omission -- is born from an increasingly consolidated media market. With just six major firms dominating everything we read, hear, and see (down from 50 companies in the '80s), it is no wonder editorial pages, media criticism shows, and nightly news programs skirt around or entirely avoid critical mention of their parent companies.

The Murdoch saga affords us all an opportunity to seriously reevaluate -- or at least to start paying attention to -- the country’s media ownership rules. While a win for media reform activists came this month as an appeals court ruled to disallow relaxed ownership rules -- and while Murdoch’s long awaited bid to acquire British Satellite company BSkyB fell through due to the scandal -- the fight is far from over. Media consolidation, as activists know, hurts localism and diversity and also creates a landscape for multiple conflict of interest problems.

The UK is in the process of investigating media ownership in response to impropriety but the FCC has remained largely hands off during the scandal. The allegations may inevitably carry weight during a review of media ownership regulations by the federal agency later this year.

Just as the press held banking industry heads and BP CEO Tony Hayward accountable for dogging blame amid scandal, we too should press Murdoch -- who has been granted unique and expansive rights to consolidate American media for his own financial gain -- to assume responsibility.

If Murdoch refuses to take ownership of his media company’s wrongdoing, perhaps its time we take back ownership of our media.

[Rag Blog contributor Mary Tuma is also a reporter for The Texas Independent. A graduate of the University of Texas School of Journalism, Tuma has worked for The Houston Chronicle, The Texas Observer, and Community Impact Newspaper. She is in the process of obtaining her master’s degree in media studies from UT-Austin. Born and raised in Houston, she now calls Austin home. Read more articles by Mary Tuma on The Rag Blog.]

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Mary Tuma : Rick Perry (Selectively) Touts Texas Economy With Glenn Beck

It's all good. Rick Perry's broad brush. Image from The Last Refuge.
Schmoozing with Glenn Beck:
Rick Perry paints the Texas
economy with a broad brush

Texas leads the nation in the number and proportion of people making minimum wage or less.

By Mary Tuma / The Texas Independent / June 29, 2011

AUSTIN -- On Monday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry appeared via satellite on Fox News’ Glenn Beck Show -- this time sticking around longer than his 35-second in-person cameo on the program two weeks ago -- to tout the Texas economy and job creation numbers, his prime talking points as of late.

Beck, whose television program is set to end Thursday, prefaced the interview by lauding Texas for generating 37 percent of all new post-recession U.S. jobs since June 2009. Both he and Perry avoided mentioning the state’s structural budget deficit, sweeping cuts to health services and public education, and its surge of low-wage jobs, as noted by the Texas Independent.

From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers in Texas rose from 221,000 to 550,000, an increase of nearly 150 percent. Texas leads the nation in the number and proportion of people making minimum wage or less.

Aside from the lack of a state income tax and Perry’s push for tort reform, neither the host nor guest paid much attention to other variables that could have influenced the job creation numbers, such as Texas’ natural resources, energy and high-tech industries, successful Gulf port business, and trade with Mexico and China, all factors pointed to by Pia Orrenius, a senior economist at the Dallas Federal Reserve -- the source of the 37 percent figure (via PolitiFact Texas).

Referencing a critical story in TIME Magazine’s Swampland, Beck asked Perry to assess the idea that he is a “master at the theater of job poaching” from other states like California and New York, to which Perry replied, that is what the “Founding Fathers had in mind with the Tenth Amendment.”

(That particular amendment explicitly asserts that powers not granted by the U.S. Constitution to the federal government are reserved to the individual states; unless those powers are prohibited by the U.S. Constitution to the states -- then they are reserved to the people.)

The TIME article recounted a trip Perry made to California last November in which he “crowed that he had stolen 153 businesses from the Golden State in 2010; some 92 companies moved the other way, leaving Perry with a net gain of 61 businesses.”

A CNN opinion piece, written by a former Dallas Morning News columnist, calls the “Texas miracle” a mere “mirage.” In it, state Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-San Antonio) says many of those highly touted jobs went to people moving to Texas in order to take those jobs, and therefore, fail to raise the employment rate of native Texans:

“That jobs thing is a sleight of hand,” Castro said. “More than half of those new jobs have been filled by non-Texans. So it’s people moving here to take those jobs. It underscores this bipolar state that we live in. You have a population in Texas that is generally lower educated, poor, isn’t covered by health insurance... all of these things... so you can recruit these companies to come here from out of state but your own people, often times, aren’t qualified to fill these jobs.”

The way that Castro sees it, this is all about long-term investment and conflicting priorities.

“We’re not creating a system that educates them well and prepares them,” he said. “We underinvest in these things, which is what Perry is doing in public education and higher education. We can create the jobs, and that’s great. But our own people who have gone through Texas schools and Texas universities aren’t the ones filling them.”

When Beck brought up the TSA “anti-groping” bill, added to the special session call by Perry, the governor took to the opportunity to voice his disapproval of federal employee-led unions:

Beck: Are you concerned at all about the organizing of the airport workers by the AFL-CIO? The security, homeland security?

Perry: Sure. I think anytime you have federal employees being unionized, I have a real problem with that. You don’t have to look much further than what we have already that those federal agencies, or the federal employees that are unionized at the end of the day, it’s not in the best interest of the citizens, certainly the citizens who aren’t part of the union.

As a “right-to-work” state, employees in Texas cannot be required to join unions upon employment. The classification is seen by opponents as a means to deter from collective bargaining, a way to dilute unionization and prevent employees from securing higher paying jobs.

According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, the “right-to-work” law -- because it decreases wages and benefits, weakens workplace protections, and minimizes the likelihood that employers will be required to negotiate with their employees -- “is advanced as a strategy for attracting new businesses to locate in a state.”

The report’s analysis of Oklahoma, the most recent state to enact a “right-to-work” law, also found evidence that the laws could actually hurt the economic prospects of states looking to branch out from traditional or low-wage manufacturing jobs into areas such as high-tech manufacturing or “knowledge” sector jobs.

Referring to reporting by the Associated Press, Media Matters for America also notes:

Although Beck cited Texas’ AA+ rating from S&P, he neglected to mention that Texas is “unlikely to receive the top AAA rating because lawmakers have not addressed a structural deficit created by an underperforming business tax.”

Beck joked that he is considering moving to Texas and toyed with the idea of running for Perry’s spot, if he decides to make a presidential bid, saying,

You know, Rick, I mean this sincerely. And I know that you’re considering possibly running for president of the United States. And I’m considered possibly moving to Texas. I don’t know who your lieutenant governor is, but I am thinking that we’re not going to let you leave Texas. I mean, I could run for governor of Texas, I’m just saying.

Political observers expect current Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to announce soon that he will campaign for the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

[Mary Tuma is a reporter for The Texas Independent and will be contributing regularly to The Rag Blog. A graduate of the University of Texas School of Journalism, Tuma has worked for The Houston Chronicle, The Texas Observer, and Community Impact Newspaper. She is in the process of obtaining her master’s degree in media studies from UT-Austin. Born and raised in Houston, she now calls Austin home. This article first appeared at The Texas Independent.]



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Eric Boehlert : Fox Insider Says 'Stuff Is Just Made Up'

Fox's Roger Ailes. Image from Scene Magazine
Fox News Insider:
'Stuff Is Just Made Up'

By Eric Boehlert / Media Matters / February 15, 2011

Asked what most viewers and observers of Fox News would be surprised to learn about the controversial cable channel, a former insider from the world of Rupert Murdoch was quick with a response: “I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up.”

Indeed, a former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”

And that’s the word from inside Fox News.

Note that the story here isn’t that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known that since the channel’s inception more than a decade ago.

The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods.

“They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they’re balanced or that they’re not right-wing extreme propagandist,” says the source. But it’s all a well-orchestrated lie, according to this former insider. It’s a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

“You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks,” says the source. “And God help you if you don’t because sooner or later you’re going to get burned.”

The source explains:

Like any news channel there’s lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn’t "news," they didn’t care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything -- anything -- that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it.

If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn’t explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There’s a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is.

What if Fox News staffers aren’t instinctively conservative or don’t have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? “My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead,” the source explains. “You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough.”

The source recalls how Fox News changed over time:

When I first got there back in the day, and I don’t know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were “training” you, as it were, they would say, "Here’s how we’re different." They’d say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live trucks outside the prison and all the live shots. CNN would go, "Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls." MSNBC would say the same thing.

We would come out and say, "Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two-year-old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the school yard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get." And they say that’s the way we do it here. And you’re going, alright, it’s a bit of an extreme example but it’s something to think about. It’s not unreasonable.

When you first get in they tell you we’re a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left-wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don’t even start arguing that or you won’t even last your first day.

For the first few years it was, let’s take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it’s not just the conservative take on things, we’re going to take the Republican take on things which is not necessarily in lock step with the conservative point of view.

And then two, three, five years into that it was, we’re taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalinesque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president.

It’s worth noting that Fox News employees, either current or former, rarely speak to the press, even anonymously. And it’s even rarer for Fox News sources to bad-mouth Murdoch’s channel. That’s partly because of strict non-disclosure agreements that most exiting employees sign and which forbid them from discussing their former employer. But it also stems from a pervasive us-vs-them attitude that permeates Fox News. It’s a siege mentality that network boss Roger Ailes encourages, and one that colors the coverage his team produces.

“It was a kick-ass mentality too,” says the former Fox News insider. “It was relentless and it never went away. If one controversy faded, goddamn it they would find another one. They were in search of these points of friction real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack. The brain trust just knew instinctively which stories to do, like the War on Christmas.”

According to the insider, Ailes is obsessed with presenting a unified Fox News front to the outside world; an obsession that may explain Ailes’ refusal to publicly criticize or even critique his own team regardless of how outlandish their on-air behavior.

“There may be internal squabbles. But what [Ailes] continually preaches is never piss outside the tent,” says the source. “When he gets really crazy is when stuff leaks out the door. He goes mental on that. He can’t stand that. He says in a dynamic enterprise like a network newsroom there’s going to be in-fighting and ego, but he says keep it in the house.”

It’s clear that Fox News has become a misleading, partisan outlet. But here’s what the source stresses: Fox News is designed to mislead its viewers and designed to engage in a purely political enterprise.

In 2010, all sorts of evidence tumbled out to confirm that fact, like the recently leaked emails from inside Fox News, in which a top editor instructed his newsroom staffers (not just the opinion show hosts) to slant the news when reporting on key stories such as climate change and health care reform.

Meanwhile, Media Matters revealed that during the 2009-2010 election cycle, dozens of Fox News personalities endorsed, raised money, or campaigned for Republican candidates or organizations in more than 600 instances. And in terms of free TV airtime, Media Matters calculated the channel essentially donated $55 million worth of airtime last year to Republican presidential hopefuls who also collect Fox News paychecks.

And of course, that’s when Murdoch wasn’t writing $1 million checks in the hopes of electing more Republican politicians.

So, Fox News as a legitimate news outlet? The source laughs at the suggestion, and thinks much of the public, along with the Beltway press corps, has been duped by Murdoch’s marketing campaign over the years. “People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don’t. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things,” says the source.

The source continues:

I don’t think people understand that it’s an organization that’s built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend to think that stuff that’s on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You’d think that people would wise up, but they don’t.

As for the press, the former Fox News employee gives reporters and pundits low grades for refusing, over the years, to call out Fox News for being the propaganda outlet that it so clearly is. The source suggests there are a variety of reasons for the newsroom timidity.

“They don’t have enough staff or enough balls or don’t have enough money or don’t have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it’s not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they’ll kick you in the ass,” says the source.

“I’m sure most [journalists] know that. It’s not worth being Swift Boated for your effort,” a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch’s operation as not being a legitimate news source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

“That blew me away,” says the source, who stresses the White House’s critique of Fox News “happens to be true.”

[Eric Boehlert is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (Free Press, 2006) and Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press (Free Press, 2009). He was a senior writer for Salon.com and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Boehlert is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, where this article was first published.]

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Bill Freeland : More Evolution at Ten

Rag Blog graphic by Bill Freeland. See Bill's video version here.
Verified by a second source:

Image courtesy of Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog.
The Rag Blog / Posted September 15, 2010

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David McReynolds : Glenn Beck's Faux Dream

The great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963. Photo by Warren K. Leffler / U.S. News & World Report / Wikimedia Commons.
Remembering August 28th:
Martin Luther King had a real dream

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / August 29, 2010

What a difference money makes. On Saturday, the 28th of August, 2010, Glenn Beck rallied on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with all the majesty of Fox News behind him.

Day after day Fox News had trumpeted the event, organizing for it, and if Beck hadn't gotten a crowd it would have been no fault of those who own Fox News and fund Glenn Beck. (Fox News is one very good reason for an estate tax that would guarantee that no one could buy and own networks, newspapers, and control the media, the way Rupert Murdoch has done.)

I’ve never met Glenn Beck, I don’t expect to. He is -- pretty much in common with all the commentators, whether their views are left or right -- paid to air his views. I suspect that for the right price Beck would happily change those views.

(I do agree with Beck’s attacks on Woodrow Wilson, who brought segregation back to the White House, got us involved in the bloody First World War, and who jailed the Socialist Party’s leader, Eugene V. Debs, for the crime of speaking out against that war. Irony of ironies, Wilson refused to even consider a pardon for Debs -- that remained for the Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who met with Debs in the White House and pardoned him.)

Let me, as someone who has had the good luck to be a guest at history’s table, turn back more than half a century to Wednesday, August 28th, 1963, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I was then, at 33, a young radical working for the War Resisters League, which had given Bayard Rustin leave so that he could work in the Civil Rights movement as a special aide to Martin Luther King Jr., and as the primary organizer of the August 28th events.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
The media gave the event good coverage after it happened -- Life Magazine (who can remember the days when Life Magazine, a weekly, was a major cultural force?) put Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph on its cover. But there was no advance coverage, no daily drumbeat on the networks. No commentator who could act as the organizer for it.

Nor did it take place on Saturday -- Bayard knew it had to take place in the middle of the week, when people would need to take time off from their jobs. The event was far more than a weekend outing in the nation’s capitol -- it was the largest demonstration of its kind in our history.

Much of the background feeling can be seen in the film about Bayard, Brother Outsider, which gives one a sense of how the demonstration was organized with the support of trade unions, church groups, and the civil rights movement in the South.

There was profound fear in Washington DC. John F. Kennedy had tried to get the march called off. The police were put on special alert. The shops of the city were largely closed, the streets empty, as “White Washington” braced for the flood of Blacks and the inevitable rioting.

Bayard had enlisted the support of the Guardians, the Black police officers in New York City, who came down in force to provide security.

I don’t remember how I got there -- I assume I was one of the many thousands of New Yorkers who took buses down. But I shall never forget our march toward the Lincoln Memorial, as thousands and thousands of citizens, most of them black, but many of us white, chanted “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom” with a cadence all its own. Blacks from the South who had never been in a mass demonstration with whites before. All pouring into the area around the Lincoln Memorial.

I had been to Washington many times before (and have been many times since). I had been to the “Prayer Pilgrimages" Bayard had organized, which were a kind of prelude to the great march. I was used to the endless list of speakers at these events, a speaker from each of the sponsoring groups.

Usually, after getting to a march, and making sure I’d be one of those counted by the counters, I’d take a break for a hamburger or a drink. This time I was grateful that I stayed and heard King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, breaking out over the vast assemblage. To compare the majesty of that rolling speech, with the cadence of the Black church and the infinite suffering of Black America, with the commercial hysteria of Glenn Beck is, almost, to make one ashamed of being white.

There was a scene that unfolded before King spoke, as the crowd moved into place. George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi leader (who was later assassinated by one of his followers) had set up a small stand from which to speak, and began to spew hatred of “niggers, kikes, queers, and commies."

I admired Rockwell for his courage, but he was clearly intending to spark a riot. I watched with fascination as young Black men moved in, formed a ring around Rockwell and his supporters, and locking arms, faced outward, toward any of the marchers who might be tempted to make a physical assault on Rockwell. Rockwell and his cohorts found themselves isolated -- and protected -- by a ring of young Black men.

Organizer Bayard Rustin at news briefing, August 27, 1963, before March on Washington. Photo by Warren K. Leffler / U.S. News & World Report / Wikimedia Commons.
There was no violence in Washington that day. It was a proud moment for the Civil Rights movement, though terrible things were to come -- on September 16th, racists bombed a black church in Birmingham, murdering four children. And in November of that year JFK was murdered.

August 28th was a moment of affirmation for the best in America, black and white, young and old. It did not end the struggle for civil rights for Black America -- but it was a crucial point in that struggle.

I wonder if those who follow Glenn Beck so avidly will, 10 years from now, look back to this day, this media-organized event on a Saturday when no one had to take off from work, an event funded by the multimillioniares who stand in the shadows behind Beck, and feel they were part of history, in the way those of us who were there in Washington D.C. in 1963 knew we were on the side of the best America had to offer.

[David McReynolds is retired, the former chair of War Resisters International, and the Socialist Party presidential candidate in 1980 and 2000. He lives on the Lower East Side of New York with two cats. He can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com.]

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