I’ve been recovering from an injury and staying with family since I can’t walk right now, and I’ve caught a lot of Fox News is the last five days. Like I knew they were fucked by every segment is either about “Wokeism” (which seems a whole heck of a lot like Cultural Bolshevism) or “Biden’s Communist Agenda. The segment I just saw was them going to Little Mogadishu in Minneapolis and they walk up to three people and those people say they don’t speak English. They went in to say that this was destroying America with “separate cultures” and I was really expecting them to say something about the White Christian Blood and Soil but they must of cut to commercial before that. I guess this is a rant but Jesus fuck we are getting apartheid in 2022.
Is free speech good?
I often think we should be holding anything that purports to be informing the public to some kind of standard. Without a doubt, Fox News thrives in this zero accountability meaninglessness.
But knowing this fucked up state they would probably leave Fox News alone and go after leftwing twitter accounts. Why would a bourgeois state censor its own most effective propaganda outlet? We know the role of false consciousness in maintaining capitalism.
It just seems like the FDA said hydroxychloroquine was not a good treatment for covid and they had evidence-based reasons, but there were people on Fox News practically every day saying we should all be taking it. It seems like a pretty low bar to require "news" organizations to not tell people to take dangerous drugs during a pandemic in direct contradiction with the FDA.
And yeah, Fox News is the tip of the iceberg, but I still think destroying it would do much good. I don't know what we can do but organize a boycott of their advertisers. I'm sure they get a lot of direct funding from people that simply want to support the propaganda though.
Americans love having the freedoms to do the most useless, normally harmful shit. But the moment you talk about actual freedoms like worker control of labor and resources they get defensive as fuck. My grandpa literally told me today that America is the only country to attempt a government where the people rule.
Free individual speech in personal spaces, yes.
Free corporate speech on public platforms, no.
The never-ending reproduction of bourgeois cultural hegemony has me convinced that free speech is, in fact, bad. Every major media institution lies and fearmongers with absolute impunity. The Murdoch press is perhaps the most noxious, but everyone from the New York Times to One America News is doing the same shit, only catering to different audiences. These institutions as they currently exist need to be destroyed.
There have been several attempts at doing advertiser boycotts, but to me this just falls into the classic liberal trap of trying to do politics through consumption. I don't think it's going to cut it. When push comes to shove, the forces of reaction will shovel their money into a furnace if it means they can keep the public propagandized. MSNBC and Fox News are advertisements in and of themselves. Advertisments for empire. There is no need for them to turn a profit as long as it keeps the gears of hyperexploitation churning. The profit is just a bonus.
Yes, they are all clearly lying to everyone, else they would present one clear and consistent view across all outlets, which, by the way, has no market value for any participant. They cannot all be telling the truth but they can all be lying.
I think it's pretty delusional to think we can immerse people in such a inconsistent environment and lie to them constantly without ending up with a public that is basically functionally insane.
Fox News is bad but I think Sinclair is way worse. My parents eventually shut off Fox News because even they got the feeling they were being played. But the local news, they've trust the local news for decades. And Sinclair is way more subtle than Fox News, if you're not aware of this stuff it's surprising what they slip in there.
I know people who listen to "local" radio and watch "local" news and even read "local" (1%-owned) newspapers. I actually can't speak for the radio, but the local news seems to be basically nothing but petty crimes and cops solving them mixed in with one or two feel-good stories about like a local girl selling lemonade to pay for her brain cancer treatment, plus high school sports. I couldn't believe that people actually consume this kind of media in 2021, but I think large numbers of Americans get their news basically from these sources plus extremely cringe Facebook meme pages. That's it.
I used to think that we're surrounded by people who haven't changed their minds about anything since the nineties or even earlier—people who are living as though we are still in the 1990s, but with smartphones and internet—but their opinions now might be even more reactionary than they were back then.
My lib parents listen to NPR in their car. I know that's a step above local news but it still really did feel like nails on a chalkboard to me when I found myself with them in their car (in the before time) listening to that shit. Only a few years earlier than that, I used to love NPR. Radiolab made me feel so good. I even listened to Planet Money, although I remember in one episode, they asked an economist if the stock market was just going to keep going up forever, and that question was kind of too much even for lib me. I even listened to the Freakonomics podcast—a lot. I heard their entire episode when they did a fellatio-style interview of Boris Johnson when he was just the mayor of London. I stopped listening to Hidden Brain (aka soft phrenology) years ago but I remember the guy did one or two episodes about "billionaires bad," which was cool. I maintain that Shankar is better than the average lib unless someone here can produce proof to the contrary. I may have ultimately escaped NPR because their politics podcast either ignored or shat on Bernie in the 2016 primary which was pretty off-putting, although I still listened to every fucking episode of Nate Silver's podcast leading up to the general election. (He isn't NPR but might as well be.) Once they were completely proven wrong I lost interest in them.
What's so odd to me is that I know lots of fellow liberal millennials had pretty similar media consumption habits but just kept consuming liberal media even after it was completely, objectively, stunningly proven wrong in 2016. The process with me was gradual, not instantaneous, but 2016 really did profoundly shake me out of that ideological dumpster (and into this current one instead).
Because of my previous bourgeois listening habits I don't really trust myself to be in charge of any kind of leftist organization.
This might be a bit of a late response but I am in similar situation. I stopped listening to NPR and dont really listen to anything else but music now. Do you have any recommendations/ what you are listening to now after NPR?
If it's not Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, or related to Hegel or Lacan or Freud in some way, I'm probably not listening to it. My favorite podcasts are:
These should keep you pretty busy :)
What is the alternative?
Not really interested in the Speech Police pulling me over for trafficking in disinformation.
You're not allowed to display swastikas or do the nazi salute in Germany. I wouldn't mind that here.
We also used to have the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to at least pretend to present "both sides" of the issues. But I have doubts that such a corrupted state as ours would not hold leftwing perspectives to a much harsher standard than Fox News if they had authority to.
But would it matter? We get censored on social media regularly.
Maybe if they did it for the Confederate Flag. Even then, this shit is so comically easy to selectively enforce. I can absolutely see that guy who yanked the Confederate Flag from a white nationalist march getting busted for "Displaying Treasonous Symbology" while the original owners walk.
Sure. Back when broadcast media was a natural monopoly and cable didn't exist. The theory being that you didn't want a singular view dominating the three different local broadcasters in your media market. The FCC had a whole host of rules that regulated who could own broadcasting equipment, how it could be used, and what it could be used for. That whole period of time culminated in the Reagan Era. Any media system that gives us President Ronald Reagan and just kinda normalizes white nationalism under the Nice Polite Republican banner-head is maybe not so great in hindsight.
On top of all that, we had the House Unamerican Activities Committee, the Hollywood blacklists, and a host of other public-private partnership censoring tools.
It's a big game of wack-a-mole between various political and economic interests. But sites like this can exist and even flourish under the current laisse-faire rule of law.
A tighter media regulatory environment would be used first and foremost to silence leftists. White Nationalists would just reincorporate themselves as Concerned Citizens Councils or plead Religious Liberties Exemption and continue to fly by untouched.
Free speech exists so that no opinion or thought can be suppressed. It is good.
The problem with Fox News racism is that it is inherently in bad faith and manipulative.
It's not an "opinion" nor is it a thought, it's lies to manipulate the masses to hate outside minorities so that they look away from insane inequality and corruption from their own system. They're knowingly spreading falsehoods to lie to their audience, that's not what free speech is for.
If they were genuinely concerned about the consequences of mass immigration, it would be a different story. But since it's just random words with no motive but personal profit at the cost of others, it shouldn't be protected by "free speech".