Fox News Lies So Much Viewers Incapable Of Being "Good Citizens In A Republic"
A Fox News insider speaks out at the Jan. 6th hearing.
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC – Every now and then, the facade of bullshit on Fox News Channel breaks wide open and its easily-deceived viewers are momentarily bombarded with actual facts and truths, rather than the aforementioned bullshit. Occasionally, hosts like Neil Cavuto or former host Shepherd Smith, punch through and manage to expose their audiences to what’s really happening in the world.
The same thing happened during the coverage of the 2020 presidential election, when the Fox News decision desk was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden – a seismic event for both the election itself, Fox News viewers, and one-term loser Donald Trump. The consequences included a mass exodus of Red Hats to copycat networks like OANN and Newsmax. The network became an instant enemy of cults like QAnon, while the heads of true-believers exploded all across the Red Hat entertainment complex.
At 11:20pm eastern time on Election Night, Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer was walking through the latest numbers on the studio touch-screen map when he flipped back to the national map just in time to see Arizona had turned blue. “What is happening here? Why is Arizona blue? Did we just call it? Did we just make a call in Arizona?”
Yes. Yes they did.
Brett Baier jumped in, “OK, time out. This is a big development.”
It was absolutely the biggest development at the network since it has previously shocked the nation by calling Florida for George W. Bush in 2000. At the time, a guy named John Ellis was running the decision desk and made the call… for his first cousin, George W. Bush.
In 2020, however, the role of decision desk chief fell to Chris Stirewalt who, after crunching all the numbers, accurately landed on Joe Biden as the winner of Arizona’s 11 electoral votes. For telling the truth about who won the state, Stirewalt was fired with the excuse from Ruper Murdoch that ratings would dip whenever he was on. But I think we all know why he was canned along with 15 colleagues. My educated hunch is it was all Trump’s doing.
Nevertheless, Stirewalt gave testimony about his decision-making on Election Night to the 1/6 Select Committee investigating the insurrection to illustrate that even Trump’s favorite TV network knew he had lost. He also testified on Monday that it was impossible for Trump to win through the recount process, too, "He needed three of these states to change. And in order to do that, I mean, you're better off to play the Powerball than to have that come in."
Again, this was the main guy at Fox News – the capital city of Red Hat Nation up to that point.
Stirewalt went on to describe something that’s been lost in the post-hearing coverage from Monday’s proceedings. With rare firsthand insight and candor, he described his former network’s programming in a way we’ve seldom witnessed in the past.
Stirewalt told the committee, "And it showed to me how much television — the perceptions of events, of television as entertainment, news as entertainment and treating it like a sport -- had really damaged the capacity of Americans to be good citizens in a republic because they confused the TV show with the real thing."
A former Fox News executive who rose to a level of prominence, so much so that he had earned the prestigious duty of deciding presidential elections for the most popular news network on television, described Fox News as a “TV show” rather than “the real thing.”
We’ve seen hints about this before, but never in terms quite like this.
Much like a so-called “reality show,” Fox News is giving its viewers a dramatic interpretation of events rather than the actual events. Reality shows feature real people in their real homes leading real lives, but the events we see are carefully staged and edited to create fictitious interpretations of reality, loosely based on reality but far removed from objective reality. Tall tales.
In the early 1970s, Roger Ailes identified an untapped demographic: no one was programming national news broadcasts for America’s population of reactionaries and dumbshits. There wasn’t any network news for Archie Bunker types. So, in 1998, Ailes and Rupert Murdoch began delivering screechy, entertaining, easy-on-the-eyes confirmation bias for paleoconservatives and low-information voters – and we know there are tens of millions out there, like baby birds waiting to have nonsense regurgitated into their gaping yappers by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Steve Doocy.
In pursuit of this endeavor, Fox News and its relatives on the internet and AM radio dial, don’t enjoy the luxury of actual news providing that bias, so they curate the real news and then carefully sculpt it into a reality show for the so-called “poorly educated,” making the audience feel as though they have a voice. Then the network’s many opinion hosts incite those voices into political action. And right there is the primary source of everything loathsome we’re observing in American politics today.
Chris Stirewalt described this dynamic in a way only an insider could – and under penalty of perjury, no less.
Not to bury the lede, but the most chilling section of his remarks was the part in which he described Fox News viewers as having been too damaged by the network “to be good citizens in a republic.” In other words, you can’t sustain a democratic republic when half of its voting population believes in outright fiction passed off as truth. Sadly, we’re seeing this damage every day, from our online debates, to our elections, to our own dinner tables. And now, our democracy could have far fewer days ahead of it than behind.
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