Outfoxed

The Larger Background

Totalitarian regimes of the 20th century failed for a simple reason: they relied on the appearance of unity. Fascism comes from the Latin root word fascis roughly referring to a bundle of twigs bound together. It was this complete unity that Mussolini championed and envisioned when he was trying to turn the newly united Italy into a powerful nation worthy of its geographical affinity to ancient Rome. Any opposition in fascist Italy, and later Nazi Germany, was quickly and brutally suppressed. (Nazism, it should be noted, is not strictly fascism, as it centered around a pan-racial ascendancy, while Italian fascism was purely concerned with the nation state. Nazism was like Communism in that it relied heavily on a version of the future where everything would be in its proper place, but in the mean time some drastic steps would be necessary to reach the goal. Fascism was purely intended as a way to unite people's efforts behind creating a strong state.)

All it took was for the facade of the powerful government to be pierced, for a little crack to show the true weakness of the machine, and suddenly Benito and his wife were hanging from a gas station and all that had been built up was instantly dismantled.

More modern totalitarian states saw the theatre of elections every now and then as a way of showing how strong and popular the leader was. 99% of the electorate voting to re-elect the leader was the norm, that was the margin by which Saddam was re-elected in the last 'election' held in Iraq before the invasion and occupation.

But people knew that what they were living in was not a democracy. They knew that they had no rights and no power as individuals, and adapted to live within the system, but the entropic forces which exert themselves to bring down such a system are so constant that it requires near total control of the populace (hence, totalitarian) as in North Korea, for the leader to stay in power.

Everyone in Soviet Russia who read Pravda (lit. truth) knew that what they were reading was not the truth.

These systems have reached the limit, the experiment is all but over, and is a failure. I am defining success or failure here in terms of a party seeking to seize and hold on to power for as long as possible. The twenty-first century brings a more subtle, but potentially more dangerous and definitely more profitable route to power, by subverting democracy itself while preserving all of the institutions and mechanisms that were built to guard the government from those who would destroy it. Keep the courts intact, and only interfere in certain key cases; keep an elected legislature, but rig and gerrymander the districts so you can all but predict the result based on demographics; and weight rural votes more heavily than urban, largely non-white votes; and finally, exercise influence over the media, but preserve the appearance of journalism.

Fox News Channel

This is where Fox News comes in. It's run by a former political campaign strategist for Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr., and regularly trumpets the Republican party line each day. Through 'message control', i.e., a single, short memo sent to all employees each morning, an overriding theme is set for that day's news coverage. (All of this is documented in the book Outfoxed and shown in the film) The film shows Fox News Channel, as well as the local Fox Channel affiliates (which we can watch here) essentially have no journalistic integrity when covering news stories. They are, for all intents and purposed, a 24-hour-a-day infomecial for a single political party.

The Accomplices, and the True Crime

However, Fox News's existence isn't what is at the heart of the disease affecting American democracy. Rather, it's the other news channels which fail to point out the obvious about Fox, and instead try to imitate it to gain more viewers. The failure of American television news can be traced to the moment when network executives decided that news broadcasts should be profitable. Before that TV stations took pride in the quality of their news coverage. No one expected the nightly news to make money on its own. But as commercial interests prevailed over journalistic ones in the US's newsrooms, ratings became the goal rather than truth.

In the lead-up to the Iraq war, not a single major news source gave comparable coverage to anti-war views as they did to pro-war stories and guests. Despite the fact that only around half of Americans at the time supported the Iraq war, this view was nowhere to be found on television, or in most daily newspapers. They tyranny of the simple dictated that people don't want to think too hard, or be presented with a depressing story that might make them want to change the channel. So flag-waving and nationalism (disguised as patriotism) became an easy way to keep a fairly large chunk of the viewership tuned in and watching ads.

Every developed country on Earth has a national public news broadcast except the United States. The FCC, originally charged with allowing TV networks to use the public's airwaves (radio frequency is still considered part of the commons, like rivers and streams and parks, and thus 'owned' by the public) which mandated that TV channels serve the public by offering news coverage.

Over the years this has withered away and the US is left with a profit-driven oligopoly of 5 corporations which control nearly everything you see and hear in the US media. The dirty secret of all of them is that, while they may all compete for viewers, they all benefit from a pro-corporate, anti-populist, anti-labour message reaching the viewers.

The illusion of false choice will give people the impression that they have some control. A TV viewer who thinks Fox is terrible and decides to watch CNN instead is not getting a fundamentally different product, it's simply a little less overt. It's like being given the choice between Coke or Pepsi to give to your baby. You might research the two and come to the conclusion that Pepsi is better for your baby, but in the end it's all garbage.

I have lost nearly all respect for CNN over the years. Seeing how they played up the first Iraq war as a kid I could tell that something wasn't right.

Thank God You're Canadian

Fortunately we have the CBC here, and while it has a definite pro-establishment bent to it, that's still not nearly as disastrous as seeing what has happened to the ability of the average American to stay informed about the world. The consequence is, however, that the private TV networks in Canada have to measure themselves by the standard that the CBC sets.

Fox News applied to the CRTC to be allowed onto Canadian cable carriers (they were denied not for political reasons but because there were already 2 other networks in the same space). But, as was pointed out in a column in the Globe and Mail, Fox News, Not Here Yet, But Already Hilarious, when people have a standard by which to compare their nonsense it simply comes off as farcical. And nothing got the Fox News crew madder than the thought that we were laughing at them, always true of an insecure bully.

Link: OutFoxed home page and resources.

(ps. You can get Outfoxed off of suprnova, and it's definitely worth watching to see the diseased core of the rotting American republic.)