It is important to know what Republican partisans are watching.
Juliet Jeske watches a lot of Fox News.
[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com and subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]
Juliet Jeske watches a lot of Fox News.
She says she watches Fox so others won't need to. She presents what she knows in a Substack blog and a podcast.
Let me make two points, then show a bit of her work.
One. Viewers of Fox News learn almost nothing about Trump having done anything illegal. They hear that prosecutors are persecuting a completely innocent man, timing their indictments strategically to cover up real news stories, like new revelations from Hunter's laptop. Fox viewers don't hear that a jury awarded $5 million to a woman Trump sexually assaulted, which the judge termed "rape." Fox News viewers don't learn that Trump possessed and hid souvenir documents, some top secret, and was given multiple requests to return them, that he spurned those offers, and then hid them and lied to the government about hiding them, and blabbed about the secret documents to visitors to Mir-a-Lago. What they hear about the "document case" is that thug FBI agents invaded his home from out of nowhere, for no reason, and found golf shirts, and that he is being indicted for that out of malice and a weaponized justice system. Fox viewers do know something happened on January 6, probably instigated by Nancy Pelosi or the Democratic moles in the FBI, and that Democrats are somehow conspiring to claim Trump had anything improper to do with it.
They do know about Hunter Biden's laptop. By rights they think it should have been the most important news story of 2020, bigger than Covid, bigger than the election. Yet somehow, they hear, Biden's minions convinced Trump's government to treat the laptop as suspicious in origin, so the government managed to keep the laptop story from getting the play it deserved. They know Hunter Biden is or was a drug addict and that he flagrantly used his relation to Joe Biden to get sweetheart jobs. They knew his laptop computer contained sex photos. They know that people accuse Biden family members of taking bribes and getting payoffs. They know that Republicans are on the hunt for the goods on the "Biden crime family" and that the shocking truth will be revealed sometime. They know that the economy under Biden is in a tailspin, bad and getting worse on every metric, and that everyone is miserable. They know that cities with Democratic mayors are hellholes of crime, carjackings, drugs, and murder, done often by people with dark skin. They know Trump secured the border but Biden ruined everything. They know that the U.S. is a weak laughingstock on the world stage, which allows Ukraine, Russia, and China to take advantage of us. They know that regular-looking patriotic people having breakfast in diners in Iowa and New Hampshire scorn Biden and love Trump. They know that Biden is physically weak and senile, incapable of dressing himself, much less serving as president.
Two. Almost nothing leaks in from outside this news bubble from "fake news" sources, either direct reports from the White House or other primary sources, or via reports from traditional media. Fox is a sealed container.
It is for that reason that this sixty second clip from Fox News is both amusing and instructive. A Fox & Friends host, the usually reliably on-message Steve Doocy, creates an excruciating moment for his co-hosts. He opened the door a crack to the outside. It was as if he was farting uncontrollably or in some other way embarrassing himself and the network. Watch:
Downcast eyes. Stiff jaws. Blank faces. Endure this. Get through this.
I am grateful to Juliet Jeske for finding and sharing this moment from Fox. Hers is one of about fifteen sources of news that I both subscribe to and pay for. A few of those are on-line versions of printed journals, i.e. NYTimes, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New Yorker, the regional Oregonlive, and the local Rogue Valley Times. I also subscribe and pay for about a dozen independent journalists who write and have podcasts. They are entrepreneurs, able to carry out their work because people subscribe and pay them, usually voluntarily. Substack is a vehicle for letting them write, distribute, and get paid for their reports.
This blog is free and always will be. I prefer to keep the blog completely non-commercial. (I retired from being a financial advisor and did OK.) But some journalists can afford to do their work only if they get paid somehow. Instead of working for a newspaper or magazine, they are entrepreneurs on their own. They provide a service and I want them to succeed.
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| https://decodingfoxnews.substack.com |
[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com and subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]
10 comments:
Thomas Jefferson said, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”
The ignorance of those on the far-White isn’t Fox’s fault. Fox “News” is just feeding its audience the bullshit they want to hear. The bad news is that Fox is America’s most popular “news” source. I’m not sure there is any good news.
When such a significant portion of our population becomes so delusional that they can’t even accept our election results, I’m afraid our freedom is likely to become a delusion.
I never watch Fox News, but sometimes I hear about what they are doing. Some of what Peter listed is false and ridiculous. Some of it is true.
The mainstream media and the big social media companies did, for instance, suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. I watched that happen in real time.
If you analyzed MSNBC the same way, you would come up with a similar story of biased coverage. Ditto for CNN.
I read RealClearPolitics.com every day. They have what seems to me to be very balanced coverage.
There’s good reason why responsible media and anybody with a clue were skeptical about the Hunter laptop story. It’s called provenance. It had been in too many other people’s possession for too long. And sure enough, forensic analysts found that people other than Hunter Biden had repeatedly accessed and copied data for nearly three years; they also found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed and written files to the drive, both before and after the New York Post story.
This is just one small example of so-called conservatives believing whatever they want to believe, regardless of the facts.
Incorrect, it is the fault of FOX news that it has no ethics. The Dominion case showed it.
Or do you defend drug dealers for likewise giving people what they want?
FOX News is toxic to democracy because it is based on lies.
The Biden laptop story was not suppressed. There is nothing there.
Or do you also fault media for not having any updates on the Titanic?
Virtually ALL media is corporate owned.
You're free to choose ignorance.
The idea that Hunter Biden's Magical Laptop contains the trove of illicit secrets that will finally bring down the "Biden Crime Family" is right up there with flat-Eartherism in terms at once hilarious to behold yet simulation depressing because so many people appear to believe it.
Let me see if I have this right:
In 2019, a random computer repair guy takes over and turns in to law enforcement a random laptop that Hunter Biden forgot to pickup after it was repaired. It was in possession of law enforcement *while Trump was president* for well over a YEAR before the 2020 election yet for some reason, a group of Trump's own DOJ appointees decided to conspire with social media companies and the media to "suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story" because... reasons???
If you take even a minute to think about it, it almost starts to make Flat Eartherism seem logical by comparison.
The Biden laptop story was not suppressed.
Really? This sure looks like “suppressed“ to me…
———————————
Twitter doesn’t have a “censoring department” that blocked The Post from tweeting last fall, CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday — but he wouldn’t reveal who was responsible for the blunder.
At a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media, Dorsey said Twitter made a “total mistake” by barring users from sharing The Post’s bombshell October report about Hunter Biden’s emails.
Twitter also locked The Post out of its account for more than two weeks over baseless charges that the exposé used hacked information — a decision Dorsey chalked up to a “process error.”
“It was literally just a process error. This was not against them in any particular way,” Dorsey told the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
https://nypost.com/2021/03/25/dorsey-says-blocking-posts-hunter-biden-story-was-total-mistake/
Mc:
I wasn’t absolving Fox for feeding their ignorant audience the bullshit they want to hear, but simply pointing out that Fox isn’t what made them so ignorant. It’s ignorance that threatens our survival as a free people, not all the vultures taking advantage of it.
Hunter Biden’s laptop, “Obamagate,” massive voter fraud, the Dominion voting machine “scandal,” – all these were supposed to produce bombshell revelations that would divert us from the Republican cult leader’s well-documented crimes and corruption, but nobody with a brain believed it for lack of evidence.
Nice post. I love the looks on the faces of the other two. They're thinking "Oh, s$it. I wish he'd stop talking."
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