The Lies They Tell: How to Stop the Fox Propaganda Machine
As presidential aspirants announce their candidacies in an already mind-numbing procession, the “Sliming Bowl” is well under way. No candidate has been smeared more than Barack Obama, and no smearer mre relentless than Fox News, as the short video (right) by Brave New Films demonstrates.
“Sliming” is the rabid, rapid, media barrage of persistently repeated lies and innuendo mastered by the right-wing media machine, which aims to tar candidates with negative associations before their campaigns get rolling. Or alternatively, to bruise them enough so that they will suffer under the burden of damaged goods as they try to gain footing.
The conservative roots usually puts out a speculative story through Fox News or Matt Drudge (of the Drudge Report), a powerful mouthpiece for the Bush White House. Then the right-wing echo reverberates as the lies make their way to talk radio and the right-wing blogosphere. Eventually, it gets picked up and carried by the mainstream media, with few understanding where the story originated.
In fact, disinformation conjured by the conservatives often has its most profound impact with the steady cooperation of the corporate press in repeating their lies. How many people still think that Al Gore said he invented the Internet?
Obama bashing
While McCain has taken a much-deserved beating for his hypocrisy, blatant efforts at total disinformation have been aimed at Barack Obama, the fresh-faced Democratic candidate and senator from Illinois.
Obama has been hammered for a whole grab-bag of alleged misdeeds, most which he had nothing to do with—such as his name, his early schooling, and his parentage—while other “nuggets of expose,” like the fact that he smokes cigarettes, is treated like a deep, dark media secret.
Fox News, with its Muslim bashing, leads the way in the smear campaign against Obama. A catalogue of Fox’s propaganda aimed at Obama has been collected by Greenwald, whose highly popular film Outfoxed got wide distribution through Blockbuster, Netflix, and thousands of house parties across the country two years ago.
Paul Waldman, of Media Matters and the Gadfly, charts the first of what are already many false stories spread about Barack Obama—that he attended a fundamentalist madrassa when he lived in Indonesia as a boy. Waldman writes:
When insightmag.com, a website owned by the right-wing Washington Times, put out a breathless report trumpeting the fantasy, Fox News immediately jumped on board, as did Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest of the talk radio bile spewers. “Why didn’t anybody ever mention,” asked Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy, a man who makes Larry King look like Oscar Wilde, “that that man right there was raised—spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father—as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa?”
This sentence contained no fewer than five falsehoods: Obama wasn’t raised by his father, his father left the family when Obama was two years old, his father wasn’t a practicing Muslim, Obama wasn’t raised as a Muslim and he didn’t go to a madrassa. “Well, he didn’t admit it,” chimed in co-host Brian Kilmeade. “I mean, that’s the issue."
No comments:
Post a Comment