← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Buster
Thread ID: 6104 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-04-11
2003-04-11 14:34 | User Profile
Commentary -- [url=http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml]http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml[/url]? itemNo=282047&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y Foxa Americana
By Rogel Alper
America's Fox News network has been demonstrating since the start of the war in Iraq an amazing lesson in media hypocrisy. The anchors, reporters and commentators unceasingly emphasize that the war's goal is to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The frequency, consistence and passion with which they use that lame excuse, and the fact that nearly no other reasons are mentioned shows that this is the network's editorial policy. The American flag lies in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, while the logo accompanying the programming is Operation Iraqi Freedom, the official name given by the Pentagon. Fox journalists display what appears to be genuine happiness, innocent and sincere, brainwashed in nature, in the expectation for the wonderful day when the American army leads the Iraqi people from slavery to freedom.
With effective, rapid and decisive rewriting of history, there is an impression that the network has erased past relations between Iraq and America. It is difficult to find any mention of the fact that the U.S. armed Iraq in its war against Iran in the 1980s, or that it turned a blind eye when Saddam Hussein brutally put down a 1991 uprising with chemical weapons after the first Gulf War. The argument about the connection between Saddam's regime and Al-Qaida and the attack on the Twin Towers has disappeared, and the "axis of evil," which also included Iran and North Korea, has evaporated. There's practically no mention of the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction and how they were hid from the UN inspectors as being the official reason for the war. There's no reference to the American economic interests in Iraqi oil wells. Every operation to take over the wells and prevent their sabotage was altruistic, for the sake of the Iraqi people and preservation of its assets and resources.
According to what is shown on Fox, the Iraqi people are the only oppressed people in the world. The network doesn't call on the government to free the subjects of the regimes of China, North Korea, Syria and Burma, nor does it express amazement about that contradiction in American foreign policy. There are no contradictions. Operation Iraqi Freedom is a gift granted by America, even at the price of its own soldiers, to the Iraqi people, as a gesture of goodwill. The world according to Fox: America always helps oppressed people wherever they are, to free them of their shackles. America has no economic interests; no cynical, instrumentalist realpolitik guides it. America is good and only has moral interests. The Iraqi soldier is called "the bad guy" on Fox. It's that simple.
As far as the war's motives are concerned, Fox looks like part of the propagandistic campaign of systematic disinformation by the Bush administration, while it accuses the Iraqi regime of disseminating false information about the situation on the battlefield. The motives for the war and measure of its justice are at the heart of the current conflict between the United States and its European allies, and has ramifications over its relations with Russia, China and the Arab world as well as its position as the global superpower. Just as the Iraqi TV deceives its viewers about the situation on the battlefield, Fox misleads its American viewers about the reasons for the war. If only the issue of the human rights of the Iraqi people was at stake, there never would have been a war.
But Fox broadcasts to the entire world. Like CNN, it presents to the globe the face of America and its perception of reality, and it exports its dark side, the infuriating side that inspires so much hostility: the self- righteousness, the brutality, the pretension, hubris, and simplicity, the feverish faith in its moral superiority, the saccharine and infantile patriotism, and the deep self-persuasion that America is not only the most powerful of the nations, but also that the truth is always American. Fox looks like the media arm of the superpower mentality, indifferent to any perspective that is not American and alienating vast portions of the world. Its war coverage is as governmental as that of Iraqi TV. This is American TV.
For some reason, ever since Fox showed up on Israeli cable, the other foreign networks have become unnecessary. CNN was nearly removed, BBC World has been thrown out of the cable package, and both are suspected of hostility to Israel. Fox, for whom Israel's enemies are "the bad guys," is the perfect alibi for the new fashion of censorship. Who needs BBC when there's Fox? That has dangerously narrowed the horizon of thinking available to the viewers of foreign news stations in Israel.
2003-04-11 15:54 | User Profile
Excellent find there Buster, and oh so true. And in a Jewish daily nonetheless. Hoo woodah thunk it?
Fox News is what Pravda was to the Soviet Union. It is what Granma is to Cuba. Recklessly unrelenting, passionately biased, dangerously insiduous, and every other array of negative adjectives you can put together, is what Fox News is and shall be as long as it exists. Every person I come into contact with at work, play, family, parrots what they heard on Fox News the previous night. I even find myself falling for the propaganda and feel the pressure to conform or be cast out.
Here's something to meditate on:
Mark 13:21-23 ***21 At that time if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or, 'Look, there he is!' do not believe it. 22 For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and miracles to deceive the elect--if that were possible. 23 So be on your guard; I have told you everything ahead of time. ***
2003-04-11 17:34 | User Profile
Watched the local Fox affiliate the other morning (not FoxNews proper)and in a 15-minute span, heard Iraq referred to - in ostensible "hard news" broadcasts - as "The Republic of Fear" twice as often as "Iraq".
Par for the course for a news organization that has consistently shunned the misleadingly-emotional word "war" for the reassuring we're-in-chargitude of "Operation Iraqi Freedom".
The news media in this country pays a lot of self-aggrandizing lip service to journalistic ethics and accountability. Yet if CNN or Nightline has ever run a 'town hall' on their own cowardly cave-in to the Administration in Gulf War One, I've yet to hear of it. Remember our Bulldog Press in Gulf War One, kids? Sticking to the script without even requiring a rough prodding, running in-house 'pool reporting' as if it wasn't being prefabricated for them, breathlessly exposing those Iraqi baby-killing atrocity stories as fast as Team Shmuel could crank em out ...as Operation Kuwaiti-And-Possibly-Kurdish Freedom marched on apace.
Here it is a decade later and that utter abandonment of those vaunted ethics and principles of a free press - Vichy-like in its shameful infamy - is one scandal our fearless standard-bearers of the Fourth Estate, so incorruptible in exposing others' corruption, have yet to unearth. So you can imagine what those upcoming Emmys and Pulitzers for this current round of spoon-fed disinformation & propaganda are going to be worth: even less than the nothing they're usually worth. Less than nothing.
2003-04-11 18:47 | User Profile
I was watching Faux when the Marines toppled the statue in Baghdad, and that ugly jew David Asman was really having a field day, let me tell you. In referring to Saddam's UN mouthpiece he sneered "you know - the guy with the combover problem?" This from a card-carrying member of the Kombover Krew. He just couldn't resist the temptation to rub his defeated enemy's face in the dirt in the ancient hebrew style.
All the self-satisfied Dittoheads & Freep Creeps love Faux Jews because they really think it's "their" network. "No more bein' forced to listen to them Commie liberals like Brokaw & Jennings! Now we got Shep 'n' good ol' Bill tellin' it like it is, jack!"
"An' for the 'deep stuff', there's Bill Kristol, Mike Ledeen, Dan Pipes, Dave Frum......."
2003-04-14 14:56 | User Profile
Speaking of FOX, check out Doonesbury today:
[url=http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.cfm]http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.cfm[/url]