Today as I went through my ritual morning perusal of news stories, this one from the Daily Beast caught my eye...Why Tea Partiers are Boycotting Fox News.
After I cleaned up my spit-take, I read the article, and noted with some level of astonishment that the Tea-Party -- the very Tea-Party that Fox News has spent the better part of 4 years shilling for, the very Tea-Party that they've deified much as the Israelites deified the Golden Calf -- now see Fox News as too liberal.
Another spit-take later I started thinking on just how much more the crazy-stupid the Teabaggers have become since bursting on the scene in 2009, and taking over the House of Representatives (and the Republican Party) in 2010. I also thought about Fox News, and their evolution -- or lack thereof -- since the election. What occurs to me is actually rather scary. It's not that Fox News has suddenly gone all liberal on them. It's that the Tea-Party has gotten even MORE Bat-Crap crazy.
Like most liberals, I generally watch Fox News in small manageable doses, largely because I a.) prefer to get the bulk my news and information from reality-based media, and b.) don't care for the icky feeling of my IQ points slowly draining away down my leg. But what from what I've seen, I really haven't noticed much of a change in the conservative network or their reporting since the 2012 election. They still routinely have guests that are vehemently against gun-control (despite their boss Rupert Murdoch being for it). They still play the role of apologists for the Bush administration. They still have Sean Hannity, the guy who promised to waterboard himself for charity but wussed out. Bill O'Reilly is still there, throwing out a new boogeyman for the social conservatives -- The War on the Easter Bunny. The news-models on Fox and Friends are still nothing more than airhead news models. And while Obama was receiving Israel's highest civic award, the Presidential Medal of Distinction, Fox News was promoting a documentary called "Obama, Enemy of Israel" (presumably in answer to MSNBC's documentary "Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War"). In essence, not much has really changed over at Fox News. They still cater their "newscasting" to the lowest bitter, moronic, inbred, racist, idiots of conservative "movement". But evidently that's not enough for the Teabaggers. They want it to be all about the lowest bitter, moronic, inbred, racist, idiots of the Tea Party movement.
The Daily Beast article is about a three day Tea-Party boycott Fox News that took place over this weekend. This is the second boycott of the network by Tea-Party activists, allegedly because of what they call the network's "left turn" since the election. They cite the network's "silence" on Benghazi (despite a nearly two week stretch where they screeched about little else), and a Roger Ailes interview where he said Republicans and the network need to modernize their messaging. Not what you want to say to a group for whom modernization means indoor plumbing. They accuse the network of being complicit in what they call a Benghazi "cover up", and want the network to devote at least one segment on Benghazi every night on two of its prime-time shows. They also want Fox to devote special investigative resources to uncovering the "truth" about Obama's birth certificate. In essence, they want Fox to become even less "fair and balanced", which they couldn't achieve if they replaced all of their news anchors with clones of G. Gordon Liddy.
These are people who support Todd Akin's assertion that women posses a magical vagina with super spermicidal shield that blocks sperm in case of rape. They support people like Richard Mourdoch who believe that children conceived in rape are "God's intention." They buy into the crazy conspiracies of Glenn Beck and Wayne LaPierre, and see women like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Orly Taitz as "smart". They worship at the altar of the most ignorant hate-filled voices in this country. They have become so far gone as to have actually outgrown Fox News as the echo chamber for their recommended daily allowance of Bat-Crap crazy. Instead, they choose to look to sources like Breitbart.com, Drudge, World Net Daily, Daily Caller, and Blaze. Incidentally, these are all sources used by...wait for it...FOX NEWS!
The pathological lack of introspection that is inherent to the Tea-Party prevents them from seeing the obvious. Fox News hasn't become less conservative or more liberal. They haven't suddenly gone out and hired Keith Olbermann to replace Bill O'Reilly. They haven't tacked away from the crazy-stupid that has made them the leader in cable news. In fact, they haven't really done anything differently than they've done in the past. In essence, the Teabaggers' problems aren't really with Fox News. The Teabaggers' biggest problem...is with the Teabaggers.
No comments:
Post a Comment