Foxy agitprop
Fox “News” and Trump and Dominion and a puppy.
Former President Donald Trump has been hit with a “soft ban” at Fox News, the Republican propaganda outlet that helped put him in the White House, several members of his orbit told Semafor in a piece published Wednesday. Indeed, while the network has lavished other 2024 GOP presidential candidates with interviews and airtime, Trump has not appeared since launching his campaign in November — even as the network’s own polling has him leading the primary.
It always depresses me to think about this. One evil guy – Rupert Murdoch – is why we’re in this hideous ever-worsening mess. It’s Murdoch’s world and we’re just the fleas.
Airtime on Fox — the most trusted major outlet on the right — is extremely valuable to Republican political candidates. They use it to build their brands with the network’s audience, curry favor with its powerful hosts, and raise money. Fox appearances can help politicians who are seeking the party’s nomination win their primaries. Trump, who used a regular weekly segment on Fox & Friends to boost his political profile and spent nearly twice as much time on the network during the 2016 primary as the next-most-frequent presidential candidate, is a classic case study of this phenomenon.
Classic and, you know, the one with the most consequence. The end of abortion rights to name just one item.
The Dominion filings provide some support for this theory. They show Rupert Murdoch casually and repeatedly ordering subordinates to use Fox’s airtime to help or hinder particular political candidates. At a real news network, the parent company’s owner issuing an edict to ice out a political candidate would be understood as so unethical as to be absurd — but that’s not what Fox is.
It’s a real rants network.
I sort of get sick of people talking about how Hillary Clinton outspent Trump; she did, but that’s because she didn’t get much free publicity, like the Donald did. He didn’t need to spend.
Just on a side note, did you realize rants is an anagram of trans? Just saying…
Eureka.! That is cosmic proof that this trans business was kicked off at the time of the Ranters, who were in reaction to such worthies as the Pilgrim Fathers and everything that is Right and Proper at the time of the English Civil War.!!
Aside: Another for the literary types: ‘T. Eliot,’ spelt backwards, spells ‘toilet’ – which is cosmic proof, as if any were needed, that (TS) Eliot wrote shithouse poetry.
So now they’re trying to distance themselves from him and punish him at the same time? Not reporting on Trump, or pretending he doesn’t exist is as unethical and interfering as giving him too much air time. Why not just skip the puppet show and let Murdoch run everything? Or does he prefer to hide behind the throne rather than sit on it?
YNNB,
I think the problem (from Murdoch’s point of view) is that he ISN’T a puppet master. The Murdoch family has a lot of influence through its media properties, but it’s not limitless. They didn’t want Trump to be the nominee in 2016, but it became clear it was going to happen with or without them, so they needed to get on board or risk losing their audience.
Same thing in post-election 2020: they all knew the Big Lie was just that. But they were terrified that if they didn’t put Sidney Powell and Rudy Guiliani and all those other freaks on the air to promote it, their viewers would desert them for Newsmax and OAN. So they did it. (Which, to be clear, is not an excuse or exoneration — it’s actually worse, both morally and legally, than if they were sincerely delusional.)
I saw someone recently put it this way: the Murdochs are terrified of their big name cable hosts, who in turn are terrified of their audiences.
There is no puppet master. It’s the inmates running the asylum. They want stories about the Ghost of Hugo Chavez rigging election machines so that the Big Caravans can carry billions of hardened criminals to steal our jobs and collect welfare and rape white women and spread a disease that’s a hoax but also a Chinese bioweapon but also easily treated with horse paste… and by God, that’s what the Murdochs are gonna give them, because if they don’t, someone else will!
Screechy, I love that image of the ghost of Hugo Chavez rigging our election machines. It might be slightly better than the influence Vlad Putin appears to have had.
Screechy: Right on the money.
The Murdochs of the world have a tiger by the tail. If they don’t hang on, it will eat them alive. As with all ‘successful’ politicians, they are followers, not leaders. They and pollies are poll-obsessed, for a start. Those who do not heed the polls will disappear down the plughole of History.
Pearl Harbour in 1942 was a truly historic Japanese blunder. It instantly ended all debate in the US re isolationism, and started all the wheels turning that led to two atomic bombs on Japan and its unconditional and abject surrender: a huge loss of face.
Whatever the course history might have run had Pearl Harbour not occurred is of course a pure, unknowable counterfactual.
It also led across Middle America to a tidal wave of indignation, of the strictly righteous variety, over the post-WW2 colonial revolution, particularly America’s ‘loss’ of China in 1949 to godless communism. That in due course set America up for its humiliation in Vietnam, under the delusion that the domestic revolution there was all about Chinese expansionism, and could be countered by setting up a series of American puppet regimes in South Vietnam.
The ‘American Century’ thus lasted from 1942 to 1975; 33 years.
The US now faces the huge global challenge of China, which since the Tienamen Massacre of 1989 has shed any pretence of or claim to democracy, and is its main rival on the world stage. (Forget Putin and the Russians.)
Murdoch, whatever he thinks in private, has to hang on grimly to the tail of the US Tiger, while feeding it what it wants to eat, and trying to avoid being himself eaten in the process.
Omar, Pearl Harbor was no Japanese blunder – it was the first kamikaze attack. Whatever the Japanese did, US oil sanctions would inevitably have brought the Japanese war machine to a grinding halt. Faced with that unthinkable loss of face the Japanese government decide to throw their country into a war they knew would end more or less as it did. (The nuclear attacks just made it a little less messy than it would otherwise have been.) The ‘American Century’ was always going to happen though the timings could have been a little different.