The White House Calls A Foul On FOX Fantasy News
White House communications director Anita Dunn gave the country a clear dose of reality this weekend by labeling FOX News as “the research arm or communications arm of the Republican Party”. Going further, she stated that when the President goes on FOX, “he is going on it to debate the opposition. Let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is”. These were extremely bold words for the White House to use. Why would they say these things about a major news network unless they truly felt that FOX had acted less like a legitimate news organization and more like Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda or the Soviet Union’s Pravda?
Propaganda is defined as the spreading of ideas, information, rumors or allegations to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause. Spend a day watching CNN and then a day watching FOX and the difference between real news and propaganda becomes clear. FOX News spends a very large part of their daily broadcast placing Obama and the Democratic Party in the worst light possible. This is done mostly through innuendo and speculation. They don’t come right out and say that Obama and the Democrats are evil. They simply ask insidious questions like “is President Obama’s health care proposals going to make you sicker”? Or “are Obama’s foreign policy positions making you less safe”? These questions are not designed to truly inform the public but to persuade it into believing that Obama is out to get them.
All of this started during the campaign and Miss Dunn explained it perfectly.
“If we went back a year ago to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that was a time this country was in two wars that we had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election what you would have seen were that the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and a something called ACORN.”
Add some Jeremiah Wright and a story or two about how great Sarah Palin is and you just about have 24 hours of FOX News election coverage.
The most blatant act of propaganda exhibited by FOX was their unethical promotion of the Tea Party rallies and protests. This was not news reporting but news manufacturing pure and simple. Even the protesters themselves say that they couldn’t have put on their show without FOX’s help and support. Fortunately, in the end they had little to show for their efforts except a measly 70,000 people holding hateful signs and an embarrassing video of a FOX News producer inducing the crowd to yell louder like it was the Jerry Springer Show.
To be sure, not all of FOX News personalities are driven to tear down the Democrats at all cost. However, they do not spend their time fighting back against the company line. Those times when they do actually speak out against the worst of the rhetoric are so rare that they actually become news itself on other networks.
Of course, all of this is old news to those of us who actually care about the truth. I would suspect that most of the people who watch FOX News are also aware of the propaganda but are simply willing to accept it because it plays into their own feelings and fears. But it is certainly something to actually hear a White House official tell it like it is instead of turning a blind eye. This hopefully will place FOX News in a tight corner. They now have to choose whether to push harder at the President and prove the White House’s point or back off from the worst of the propaganda in order to prove them wrong. Either way, the White House wins for now.
