There was an absurd, likely planted story in Politico today about how Fox News had “moved to the left” here lately. I, personally, see no evidence of this. Looking at their website, a grueling, thankless task that was evidently too much for Politico, I noticed that every article was either Obama-bashing, Republican-fellating, or included celebrity boobs. The only “enterprise” reporting, and I use the term loosely, was a bunch of warmed-over hearsay smears from lil’ Tucker Carlson’s meal ticket, the “Daily Caller,” about how Media Matters is out to get Fox. If that’s moving to the left, what would a rightward tilt be? Calling for an end to contraceptive use? Oops, never mind.
As is annoyingly predictable at Fox, they’re having a pre-emptive hissy fit because Media Matters’ David Brock has a new book out called “The Fox Effect,” which lays bare Fox’s toxic impact on the public discourse. At times like these, I think the people at Fox are as dumb as they think their audience is; remember what happened last time they negatively hyped a book critical of their corruption and mendacity? Now US Senator Al Franken surely does. Their bizarre and spectacularly failed lawsuit against him sold an awful lot of books, and the rest is history.
Of course, since Fox is a right-wing outfit they perceive every defeat, no matter how humiliating or decisive, as more reason to double down on the crazy strategy that failed before, and hope for different results. But their imagination in so doing, given the rather paltry requirements of their viewers, has obviously gotten a little rusty. Just as they did with Franken, they relied upon sketchy, most likely fabricated stories from anonymous “inside” sources to smear Brock, all of whom paint an unflattering portrait of the of the man behind the argument they can’t refute. Undoubtedly, for their purposes there are many more damning details about Brock, although none of them would qualify as news. Yes, Brock has quite publicly announced a war on Fox, a worthy endeavor the rest of the media has been inexplicably too timid and compromised to attempt, and even accepted a grant from George Soros (cue the scary music) to pick up their slack. And why wouldn’t he? Virtually every guest who appears on Fox is on the payroll of one right-wing sugar daddy or the other, almost always via the same 501 c (3) non-profit (!) structure of Media Matters. Some billionaires are clearly more equal than others on Fox, but a shift to the left is in no way apparent.
I did find one video segment, though, that could have been out of a Michael Moore movie: Shep Smith having a table thumping, southern talking tantrum about corporate greed and connivance, in this case ATT’s fleecing of its customers for smart phone bandwidth. The customer in question was of course himself, which made sense. All righties hate Norma Rae until they have a reason to turn into her. It might have been a forlorn but valuable bit of public interest journalism for Fox, too, had ol’ Shep bothered to study his contract or found out what, say, a gigabyte was before he went on the air. He did neither (this is Fox, after all), but he ranted on quite persuasively nonetheless about how ATT was like a bandwidth crack dealer who had “fibbed” to him, something his elderly viewers must have found a bit baffling, given that they just found out the internet wasn’t a truck, and thus are immune to the addictive charms of smart phone bandwidth he described so eloquently.
Don’t worry, Politico, Fox is still Fox.
