“By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise. “ Adolf Hitler
To some, the rise of Fox News is an enigma that defies the principles of reason and truth. However, Fox news uses an old art that has existed for hundreds of years; the black art of propaganda. This skill of deception has set one group of people against another since the time of ancient Greece. The most infamous example of propaganda in modern time is the Nazi party’s public attacks on the Jewish population.
Fox news has mastered a diluted version of this cruel technique, which has brought them superior ratings compared to their direct competitors CNN and MSNBC. Conversely, having more viewers doesn’t correlate into having a quality news organization.
Objectivity essential for democracy
Honest and objective news is a necessity in a democracy. News professionals have a moral duty to maintain the highest level of integrity as the peaceful guardians of democracy.
A truly successful news channel or news program is one that keeps its citizen’s Informed to help maintain the people's control over their government and thereby over the corporations that are regulated by it. The method Fox uses has been perfected by corrupt governments and yellow journalism.
All governments have manipulated and divided their people in order to herd them into a course of action or inaction that best serves those with wealth and power.
Propaganda against liberalism
Fox News's methods of manipulation are apparent to any individual capable of independent thought and may even be somewhat amusing.
The actual exercise of propaganda, as it relates to Fox News, starts off by locating an inflatable story, one that can be molded into an example that will support the overall narrative. That narrative being that liberalism is un-American, that liberalism is out of control, and that liberalism will destroy the country.
Once Fox has a news story to build from, the angle of approach is set... the actors take the stage and the propaganda commences. An incensed host launches into an outraged tale.
There has to be at least one clear villain in this “shocking tale of immorality”. This “scoundrel” must be part of a significantly larger faction of the populace; this is essential in order to add a splash of fear into the malevolent cocktail of exploitation.
It is imperative that the audience trust in the gravity of the news story. The audience has to be infuriated enough to forgo critical thinking.
Rational thought cannot be allowed to defuse the controversy that has just been manufactured. Next, there needs to be supporting actors that backup the hosts initial staged reactions. Finally, a consensus must swiftly be reached amongst the panel… which concludes, that the villains must be part of a larger conspiracy, which undoubtedly leads back to those “unpatriotic liberals”.
Controversy over Muslim
An example of Fox news propaganda is its undeclared war on Islam. A specific story of this is the manufactured controversy over a Muslim mosque.
Fox News consistently reported that a mosque was planned to be built on ground-zero, the location of the former World Trade Center where over 3000 lives were taken in a terrorist attack on September the 11th 2001. This was a clear exaggeration of the truth.
The mosque was going to be constructed blocks away from the sacred sight. Not that this wasn’t bad enough, Fox News, feeling the irrational support for its false claim, like a shark drawn to blood, pushed the matter even further when the hosts suggested that the reason for the proposed mosque was to serve as the ultimate affront to US and its Christian majority.
Fox's hosts didn’t stop there; they were soon starting the claim along with their conservative talking heads that Muslims would see a Mosque being built on ground-zero, which was an exaggeration, as being a victory for the “Muslim terrorists.”, and would embolden them to commit more attacks. This is a perfect example of the truth being over-run by the fear and anger generated by Fox news.
Fox News has pro-conservative agenda
“Fair and balanced” is their trade mark phrase; however, it is a testament of how far this news agency is willing to go to misinform its audience. Fox news isn’t merely using its deceptive tactics to get better ratings, which is terrible enough; it is using these tactics to forward an agenda.
The agenda being one where the network audience is being manipulated daily into believing that the “ridicule liberal media”, should be mistrusted and liberals in general are bad for the country and should be kept from positions of power within the government as well as other important institutions of influence. This is done to help conservatives gain control of local and national bodies of government.
Pro-corporate anti-minority stance
At the same time, the network reinforces old stereotypes such as minority’s getting special treatment; like affirmative action programs while ignoring the centuries of discrimination and abuse, both physical and mental at the hands of the white population.
Such tactics are used to consolidate once again the white vote for the Republican Party and limit the influence minorities have on government policy. Finally, there is the pro-corporation stance it hammers away every single day; trying to convince its audience that corporations are more efficient in providing services than the government and should be allowed to take over more and more of the responsibility from government from building private armies that are not subject to the same laws as the government run military to perhaps taking over social security and turning it to a 401k type program where corporations and their executives stand to make billions in fees from the millions of new customers.
What Fox News doesn’t tell its audience is that it really supports corporations taking over so that the “peasants”, which include the majority of us don’t have a say on how things are run in the country.
The people behind Fox News want aristocratic type governance where the needs of the many are not as important as the wants of the few. Unfortunately, its core audience seems to have not been able as of yet to unmask this wolf in sheep’s clothing.
