NPR, i.e. 'No Point in Reporting'

In a snotty and condescending tone, the NPR journalists said that journalists should not address their audience in a snotty and condescending tone, and should report what their audience wants to hear.

So far, sounds just like Fox News.

In an era when journalists are being arrested by a totalitarian GOP government merely for reporting the facts, I don’t think the problem is that the reporters are insufficiently “folksy.”

“The customer is always right” is a rule of thumb that may work for grocers, but it decidedly does not work for professionals like physicians, lawyers and journalists. The journalist’s mission to provide accurate, important and relevant information to the public, particularly information that the public does not know it needs to know.

Guard the Unendurable Laughter

A sense of humor is sanity’s steam valve.

Shaftesbury, in his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor, said humor is the only real test of gravity because “a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious.”

Put another way, it’s just that cartoonists realize that sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

In fact, speech that offends someone is the only speech worth defending. Inoffensive speech is necessarily meaningless, and is never censored.

And why keep the stiletto of ridicule always handy up your sleeve? Because, as Euripides observed, “The laughter of one’s enemies is unendurable.”

Lured by Fox News

I always knew if Fox News was permitted to get away with it, without being exposed, our society would have had it.

Fox News, the Voice that Destroyed America

Fox News has been softening us up for fascist totalitarianism for a quarter of a century now. They’ve left the American electorate punch-drunk.

The Fox News “journalistic principle” is a simple one: everything the Democrats do is wrong, and nothing the Republicans do is wrong (even when it's the same thing).

Listen for when Fox News spokesmodels utter the phrase, "Some say." It will be followed by whatever propaganda lie they have been instructed to push today.

It is news media misinformation, spearheaded by Fox News, that has done the country in.

That's 'Kill' as in 'Kilmeade'

Fox News has been softening us up for fascist totalitarianism for a quarter of a century now. They’ve left the American electorate punch-drunk.

Fox News vs. Superman

The scripted Republican attacks on Superman 2025 don’t seem to be working. It’s cleaning up at the box office.

“He’s creating a moat of woke, enlightened opinion around him. He’s got a woke shield,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld whined as an on-screen graphic proclaimed that the “Superwoke” movie embraced “pro-immigrant themes.”

Fox News has always peddled such ugly fascist trash propaganda aimed at destroying empathy and decency. Previously, Fox News called Captain America, Wonder Woman and Superman “un-American,” while describing the children’s gentle champion Fred Rogers as “evil.”

In its constant quest to gaslight its willing victims, Fox News uses panic mongering, character assassination and ad hominem arguments, psychological projection and flipping, the rewriting of history, scapegoating, conflation of violence with power, bullying, confusion, populism, invocation of the Christian God, saturation, the disparagement of education, guilt by association and diversion. 

Fox News’s most basic propaganda technique is simply to lie about facts, and it does so constantly.

Fox News is where Phineas Taylor Barnum meets Paul Joseph Goebbels.

The Fox News Reality-Reversal Machine

How can Republicans possibly offer such uniformly low-grade, corrupt and often ignorant candidates for the highest office in the nation? 

Because they have developed a corporate media propaganda echo chamber/fog machine so high-grade that it’s capable of conning any number of citizens into believing that black is white, government is evil, invasion is liberation, poverty is freedom, health care is luxury, stupid is smart and contemptible is heroic.

If you have sufficient propaganda power over the news media, you can launch and sustain just about any horror. You can, for example, demonize an unarmed boy who had committed no crime, and make a champion of the man who stalked and killed him.

Back with a Vengeance

“(Trump) bears responsibility for what comes next, as do his allies and supporters,” wrote Timothy Snyder in The New Yorker. “Yet some, and probably more, of the blame rests with our actions and analysis. Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.”

Donald Trump is not a president at all. He’s the first American dictator, one the corporate news media helped usher into office by drowning us in sanewashing.

The Misinformation Menace

For a propagandist, news isn’t relevant and/or interesting factual information to which the public is entitled. It’s a weapon to be deployed for the purpose of deception. 

The American media scene in the 21st century cannot be understood at all without constant reference to that fact.

The problem is that at least half the country is being fed a largely fictional narrative, every day, and accepts it to be true. That’s the Fox News Effect.

I realized more than 20 years ago that if lying propaganda could be substituted for news, this country’s ruin would follow in short order.

News Media 'Sanewashing' Trump

The word of the day is “sanewashing.”

Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop observes that major mainstream news outlets are routinely quoting Trump's incoherent, highly abnormal rants selectively in order to make them sound sane.

Allsop explains that the news media emphasizes “… lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing…. If journalists are sometimes sanewashing Trump, why are they doing it? … (I)t has something to do with that old desire to project a false equivalence, or ‘balance,’ between the two leading candidates.”

“When I wrote earlier this year,” Allsop notes, “it was in the context of Trump saying, at a rally, that his failure to win reelection would lead to a ‘bloodbath’ in the country — remarks, many critics suggested, that were subsequently sanewashed by allies and pundits who suggested that he was talking metaphorically about the auto industry. I argued at the time that the furor over the phrase missed the point: Trump said many unambiguously dangerous things at the same rally that got far less attention.”

So America 2024 is a place and time where a gibbering reality-TV loony can actually be propped for a second run at dictatorship, thanks to the collusion of corrupt national institutions.

Failing Journalism 101 to Coddle Trump

Chris Quinn, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post today, on Journalism 101—

“Chris Quinn, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote to his readers to explain why he will not treat Trump like other politicians:

“The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

“The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

“This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a years-long campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

“The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.

“Quinn warned, “Our nation does seem to be slipping down the same slide that Germany did in the 1930s. Maybe the collapse of government in the hands of a madman is inevitable, given how the media landscape has been corrupted by partisans, as it was in 1930s Germany.” He hopes that will not be the case but vows that his paper will “do our part.”

“This should be so blindly obvious that every respectable outlet should subscribe to it. That they don’t — and instead reject it — tells us how badly major outlets have forgotten their essential mission.”

When the GOP Dial Got Stuck

I wrote this: “The problem is that at least half the country is being fed a largely fictional narrative, every day, and accepts it to be true. That’s the Fox News Effect.

“I realized 20 years ago that if lying propaganda could be substituted for news, this country’s ruin would follow in short order.”

And I got this thoughtful reply from Mouse Detective on the Washington Post website: 

“Same here professor. Believe it or not, I grew up in a Republican family, and used to listen to Rush Limbaugh every day. I remember during the first Gulf War, he was always enraged at CNN, and wanted them muzzled for reporting what happened, and whined about the “liberal media,’ 

“I remembered what Ben Franklin had written about an informed electorate, and felt uncomfortable. It took me awhile to leave but I have never looked back. 

“That was before Fox ‘News,’ but it was universally accepted by Republicans that the media was biased in favor of liberals. I thought that was BS, and that you had a rich buffet of choices from both extremes to the middle. But I think that was a time when many Republicans began to choose only far right sources. AM radio was loaded with Rush wannabes and I think that’s when my generation got stuck. There, but for the Grace of God go I! I don’t think I’ve voted for a single Republican since about 1995...”

Don't Pretend You Don't Know Where This Goes

As Umair Haque observed, “Think back in recent history. Those of us who warned? That this was an implosive social movement led by a demagogue? Who came right out and used the word ‘fascism?’ What were we met with? Laughter, mockery, disdain.”

I remember thinking on Jan. 6, 2021, that now, finally, here was something the corporate news media couldn’t “normalize” — the Republican attempt to overthrow American democracy in plain sight. 

Boy was I wrong.

The overridingly significant political issue in this country is the very one that the cowardly corporate news media refuses to address: the fact that the GOP is now a fascist party. 

And Trump is merely a symptom. The Republican Party itself is the raging epidemic.

The 21st century GOP is entirely fascist, from Dumb Donald and Moscow Mitch at the top right on down to the snickerdoodle-baking, church-going granny who’s sure all problems can be traced to those awful “Chicago people” (hint, hint) that Fox News keeps warning the old bats about.

The GOP is now nothing but a wrecking ball that swings randomly, smashing this democratic institution here, that rule of law there. And the only job the Democratic Party has now is holding out against totalitarian Republican fascism.

The GOP is on a tortuous political path, but I know where it ends: with them putting us in front of a firing squad. 

Fascism is, after all, so tediously predictable.

Why the Press Won't Report National Collapse

What Paul Loop said: 

"I think, generally, the Beltway scribblers, our national political press,  frame all their coverage to keep conservatives off their backs. Their bosses don’t want to piss off advertisers and the ruling class they lunch with. 

"The Beltway political press reflexively treats any news coming out of the Capitol as political grist. They mill it and then put it into the Good for Dems or Good for Repubs sacks and that’s that. We see it over and over again, political reporters on air and in print who lack the imagination or incentive to view what’s happening not as the business-as-usual electoral fight they’re comfortable reporting, but as the profound institutional collapse we're actually going through. 

"Stories like the January 6th coup attempt shouldn’t even be covered by the political desks, in my opinion. They should be treated as crime stories. 

"All the best reporting about Trump et al has come from the straight-news desks, the investigative reporters, the financial investigative reporters, the legal and court reporters. At best, the Beltway scribblers’ work has been hit or miss."

CNN Parades Primal Resentment

Robert Freeman on the CNN Town Hall: "When you marry Trump’s force-of-nature demonic character with the money-seeking imperative of commercial media and stew it all in the primal resentment held by vast swaths of the public who believe that the country has shafted them, you get exactly, formulaically, what we saw last week: an almost satanic (certainly, sadistic) celebration of our worst side, our basest nature, our latent id, the devils of our lesser being. It couldn’t be anything but.

"The essence of Trump’s message and of Trumpism itself is this: “Tear it down. It’s shafted you, it’s rigged, and it cannot be redeemed.” This is exactly what Trump means when he says with deadly seriousness, “I am your retribution.” That is, “I am your retribution against a society that has shafted you.” The fact of Trump’s resilience is the proof of the depth — and the breadth —of this sentiment. It is fanatically shared by tens of millions of people. We ignore it at our peril.

"But “tear it down” is not a viable governing policy principle, which is why Republican policy proposals are nothing so much as nothing. There’s no “there” there. There are no actionable actions that can be acted on. It’s just vituperation, rage, conspiracy, histrionics and bile."

CNN Bellyflops into a Moral Sewer

On Wednesday night, ratings whore CNN actually PROMOTED a man who tried to violently overthrow American democracy. 

Their lack of even a pretense of journalistic ethics disgusts me. Nd I’m not alone. Journalists inside and outside CNN called the event a “disaster” and “CNN’s lowest moment.” Meanwhile, on Twitter, the hashtags and phrases BoycottCNN, DoneWithCNN and ByeCNN were trending.

With its latest “Trump Town Hall,” CNN did nothing but provide millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity to a nakedly fascist politician, the Republican rapist president. 

And that was the channel's intention all along. 

CNN is so desperately eager to dive into the Fox News sewer.

I’ve been expecting this kind of thing under CNN CEO Chris Licht. CNN’s new “non-ideological” policy is this: fire any reporters who might confront Republicans with verified facts, and sponsor lavish mob events to promote Republicans.

Donald Trump spewed a firehose of factual lies while CNN’s hand-picked audience of Trump sycophants laughed and cheered. CNN selected a hapless moderator as its “journalistic” fig leaf, knowing she’d be sacrificed to the pro-Trump mob they’d so carefully selected.

As a friend said: “My ‘Do Not Watch Ever Again’ List just grew. CNN is in good company on that list with 60 Minutes for interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene. I refuse to be manipulated into viewership on ‘provocative’ alone. That never works. Don't they know that by now?”

And as SirCharlie said, “Why give Hitler a second shot at a Nuremberg rally? What could go wrong? Does a zebra change its stripes? Shame on CNN. Shame.”

“Putting him onstage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate who didn’t get people killed in the process of trying to end the democracy he’s attempting to once again run, normalizes what Trump did,” DC police officer Michael Fanone wrote. “It sends a message that attempting a coup is just part of the process; that accepting election results is a choice; and that there are no consequences, in the media or in politics or anywhere else, for rejecting them.”

As Umair Haque observed, “The Dems are seriously underplaying the danger of an entire media ecosystem basically being swung to the furthest right. That’s a gigantic warning sign of democratic implosion.”

When even Fox News attacks CNN for its lack of journalistic ethics, irony is officially dead, buried and rotted.

Howard Beale: Ever More Prophetic

“We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our TVs while some local newscaster tells us today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

“We all know things are bad. Worse than bad.  They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy. So we don't go out any more.  We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. 

“Let me have my toaster and my TV and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything, just leave us alone.

"Well, I’m not going to leave you alone.  I want you to get mad …”

— Howard Beale in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976). I always made that movie the capstone of my journalism ethics class.

Fox News Staffers Pick Bad Day to Stop Sniffing Coke

Bingo!

Lies Are Fox News' Most Important Product

In its constant quest to gaslight its willing victims, Fox News uses panic mongering, character assassination and ad hominem arguments, psychological projection and flipping, the rewriting of history, scapegoating, conflation of violence with power, bullying, confusion, populism, invocation of the Christian God, saturation, the disparagement of education, guilt by association and diversion. 

Fox News’s most basic propaganda technique is simply to lie about facts, and it does so constantly. For example, which political party a politician belongs to isn't a matter of opinion. It's a fact Fox News lies about.

Fox News suddenly identified disgraced Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina as a Democrat on the very day he admitted his philandering.

A coincidence? But Fox News also suddenly changed Congressman Mark Foley's party affiliation from Republican to Democratic the very moment it was inescapably confirmed that Foley was sexually soliciting teenage male pages in Congress.

Every “mistake” Fox News makes manages to falsely malign Democrats and/or shield guilty Republicans. 

Odd, isn’t it?

America's Dizzy Delirium of Desire

One of the most difficult lessons to learn in life, because it is counterintuitive, is that if some is good, more may well be worse, even much worse. 

The whole of the American consumer advertising industry is dedicated to helping us forget that lesson, if we were ever smart enough to learn it.