Tag Archives: Greed

The Rot and Greed Inside Fox “News”

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Fox “News” is in the news because a lawsuit revealed what the company’s leaders think of their viewers, i.e. they prefer comforting lies to truth and if Fox doesn’t feed them enough comforting lies, they’ll change the channel and Fox won’t make as much money.

Brian Stelter explains (behind the Atlantic’s paywall):

The basic story of Fox News and the 2020 election is well understood. Fox’s relatively small news operation covered the vote count accurately; this coverage infuriated President D____ T____, the MAGA base, and Fox’s opinion stars; some viewers temporarily flipped to further-right outlets, such as Newsmax; and Fox panicked.

But thanks to Dominion Voting Systems, which is pursuing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, we now know that the network’s sense of crisis was even more intense than it appeared from outside. With the case careening toward trial, a court filing [last week] revealed some of what Dominion found during the discovery process, including eye-popping messages from Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Fox’s senior management. “Getting creamed by CNN!” Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, wrote to its top executive after seeing the overnight ratings on November 8. “Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it.”

He was right. Some of Fox’s top shows began broadcasting a better story, one that its viewers did want to watch: a conspiracy-laden tale about crooked Democrats stealing an election. Dominion is arguing that Fox knew full well that [the] voter-fraud allegations were bunk, but promoted the lies anyway.

Whether or not Dominion prevails in court, and many experts believe it will, the lawsuit is already forcing an ethical reckoning over Fox’s disrespect of its audience. Hour after hour, day after day, Fox stars kept signaling to viewers that T____ might still win the election not because they thought he would, but because they were worried about their ratings. And we all witnessed the consequences on January 6….

On November 12, 2020, nearly a week after Joe Biden clinched the presidency, … Hannity pretended that the outcome was still in doubt. He said the election was not fair. He cited “outstanding votes that have yet to be counted” and “more reports of dead people voting from beyond the grave.” And, crucially, he talked at length about Dominion….

The Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich … had the audacity to tweet the truth. She wrote that “top election infrastructure officials”—including some in [the current] administration—had issued a statement saying “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

… Carlson flagged Heinrich’s tweet and told Hannity, “Please get her fired.” Why? Because her minor Twitter fact-check of an out-of-control president was exactly the sort of thing that Fox’s fan base could not stand to see.

“It needs to stop immediately, like tonight,” Carlson wrote. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Hannity replied and said he had already sent the accurate and thus offending tweet to Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott.

“Sean texted me,” Scott wrote to two colleagues…. Scott was bothered too. She worried that reporters at other outlets would notice Heinrich’s tweet: “She has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted”….

The new legal filing by Dominion is such a showstopper [because] we can read exactly what the leaders and stars of Fox News really think. This is my biggest takeaway: In the days after Biden won the election, while T____ tried to start the steal by shouting “Stop the Steal,” the most powerful people at Fox News were not concerned about [informing their audience or] the health of U.S. democracy. They were concerned about Fox’s brand and their own bottom line.

Stelter has talked to people at Fox:

A senior staffer at Fox railed against the network’s journalists and math wizards who had called Arizona for Biden, calling them “arrogant fucks”.

[A] former morning-show producer told me, “We were deathly afraid of our audience leaving, deathly afraid of pissing them off.”

A veteran staffer [said] “I feel like Fox is being held hostage by its audience”…

Sources at Fox [have] told me to think of it not as a network per se, but as a profit machine. They feared doing anything that would disrupt the machine. 

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, also describes Fox “News” as a “machine”:

The latest filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation suit against Fox nails something critics have long argued for. Fox is not a news organization. It’s something else. But what is this thing? I will try to answer that.

The Dominion suit establishes that Fox stars (like Tucker Carlson) and executives (like CEO Suzanne Scott) were fearful and enraged when some of their own people blundered into delivering a true and accurate report about the 2020 election. Think about that. When its own talent reported the facts truthfully, the result was a company crisis….

If Fox is not a news organization … and it is not “opinion” either (because the Dominion filing shows the hosts are frightened to share their real opinions) then what is it, exactly? Some common answers: It’s entertainment. It’s propaganda. No, it’s just ratings.

[It’s] the commercial arm of a political movement that has taken control of the Republican Party. The product is resentment news. Current ways to resent. Success in that market makes for political power. [It’s] a kind of machine.

By “machine” I mean to evoke both the manufacture of politicized grievance for fun and profit, and the kind of machine through which Richard Daley rose to power in mid 20th century. A machine in the sense of the Cook County Democratic Machine. Again: not a news organization.

Dominion’s filings describe a time when the audience took charge of the resentment machine. Power traded hands for a bit. Viewer backlash from a correct call in Arizona felt ruinous. Stars with shows and executives nominally in charge of Fox saw how weak their positions were.

Fox has to accept that its powers are limited. The Fox audience can veto events that in the rest of the world unquestionably occurred. You’re not a news organization if your audience’s refusal to accept what happened prevents [you from telling them] what happened.

Both the Republican Party and Murdoch’s fear-and-loathing machine know they cannot control the core audience for commercialized resentment and white nationalism, which will turn on anyone who interferes in the free exercise of its many hatreds.

We are faced with a vicious circle. There is an audience for right-wing fake news. Fox cultivates that audience by giving it fake news. That makes the audience want more fake news. So that’s what Fox gives them. We might think that Fox’s audience will shrink when they realize they’re being lied to and otherwise manipulated. But since they get their news from Fox “News”, they’ll probably never hear about it and won’t believe it if they do.

A Short Note on Being a Con Man

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From The Washington Post:

On the campaign trail in 2016, Txxxx had offered one simple way to underline his separation from his properties: He just wouldn’t visit.

“I may never see these places again,” Txxxx said during a rally in August 2016. “Because I’m going to be working for you. I’m not going to have time to go play golf. Believe me.”

The Post continues:

Txxxx has now visited his own properties 270 times as president — with another visit planned for Thursday, when he is scheduled to meet GOP donors at his Washington hotel.

Through these trips, Txxxx has brought the Txxxx Organization a stream of private revenue from federal agencies and GOP campaign groups. 

From a golf news site:

Since taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, Mr. Txxxx has reportedly been on the grounds of his golf courses or played golf elsewhere 288 times since becoming President, and that’s as of Aug. 22, 2020.

The cost of Txxxx’s golf rounds to the American taxpayer varies by round and course, but it has totaled so far in the tens of millions of dollars. The Secret Service has spent at least $550,000 in third-party golf cart rentals and over $500,000 to stay overnight at Txxxx-owned properties, including his New Jersey country club.

When he says “believe me”, which he often does, he should at least say “please”.

One of Those Charts

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The last time we had a big overhaul of the federal tax code was in 1986. Back then, the poorest 90 percent of the population owned 3 1/2 times as much as the richest 1/10th of 1 percent. I’ll say that again. In 1986, the net worth of the least wealthy 90% of Americans was 3.5 times the net worth of the richest 0.1%.

That’s not the America we live in today. As of 2013, the richest 1/10th of 1 percent owned as much as the poorest 90 percent. To repeat: the net worth of the richest 0.1% was the same as the net worth of the poorest 90%. 

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I’m sure the red line goes even higher now and the blue line goes lower. We should keep this astounding economic inequality in mind when we have the opportunity to vote eleven months from now. That will be eleven months after the Republicans ram through another overhaul of the tax code, one that helps the richest Americans get even richer.

In a Way, It All Turned Out For The Best (Wolf of Wall Street Edition)

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Even for Netflix customers, curiosity sometimes wins out and it’s worth $1.28 to rent a DVD from one of those big vending machines at the grocery store. That’s how we ended up watching The Wolf of Wall Street the other night, instead of waiting to see how long a “Very long wait” would be. Unfortunately, the minority of critics who said The Wolf of Wall Street is a bad movie were right.

Maybe it was a good idea for Martin Scorsese to use the story of these crooked stock brokers if he wanted to make another Goodfellas. But he ended up with a movie that is ridiculously long (3 hours) and repetitious. It isn’t funny or suspenseful. It’s merely excessive. Since I never cared about the characters, I should have given up, like I did with Scorsese’s Shutter Island. But since I’ve seen almost all of his movies (all the way back to 1967’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door), I kept watching (in three installments), partly out of respect and partly to see if it would get better. It didn’t. It was just more of the same.  

If you’re open to watching a movie about terrible people who look like they’re having a wonderful time, consider watching Goodfellas again. But not The Wolf of Wall Street.

Needing to return the DVD to the store in order to avoid being charged another $1.28, I figured I’d use the trip to buy some more milk. The wait at the express lane wasn’t too long, but the best part of the transaction was when the clerk handed me the receipt and announced that I had just saved $1.40 on my purchase. Simply by using my A&P customer card. 

But wait! That meant my rental of The Wolf of Wall Street and subsequent visit to the store had returned a profit of over 9%! Not bad at all!

Of course, there was the time spent traveling to the store, the cost of gasoline and three hours of weak entertainment that could have been better spent. But if you put all that on one side, and balance it with the curiosity I satisfied, the knowledge I gained and that 12 cent profit, it all turned out pretty darn well. 

Plus, if I convince just one of you to skip The Wolf of Wall Street, our collective life on Earth will be a little bit better (“saving the world since 2012”). Unless you could have made a profit.

After a Major Event, Life Goes On, But Surreptitiously

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gnote1A major event? Yes, finally replacing my aging but handy Blackberry with a new Android smartphone (good-bye, Verizon, you bloodsuckers!).

Some might say it’s only a phone. It feels more like a lifestyle. You can’t do that anymore. Do this now. How do I do that? Guess! Or download an app. Which app? That app! Wait, what did I just do? I must have touched something. Oh, no!

Come on, why do you zoom in on Google Maps by pinching your fingers together instead of spreading them apart? Isn’t spreading them apart a more expansive gesture? And why can’t I spread my fingers apart in the prescribed way? It’s probably a genetic defect. Those of us who can easily carry out the correct two-finger spreading motion are now better-suited to getting around and finding mates. The rest of us will tend to stay put and die alone. If only I could remember the Alternate Zoom Technique:

In addition to pinching the screen to zoom, you can also double-tap on your map, hold, and then scroll down to zoom in, or scroll up to zoom out.

Coincidentally, the New York Times reported more from the Snowden Files today:

When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spy agencies have plotted how to lurk in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.

In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up….

[Among] the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from users’ smartphone identification codes to where they have been that day.

Fortunately, I don’t play with angry birds. But Google Maps is said to be one of the best sources of information for the intelligence agencies. The Times quotes a secret report from Britain’s G.C.H.Q. suggesting that “anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a G.C.H.Q. system”. Thank you. No problem.

We know that corporations collect whatever information they can about us. Now we know that the NSA and GCHQ are doing the same.

But assuming that we don’t want to stop using our phones or the internet and we can’t get our governments to stop this spying, we can take some solace in the fact that these people are collecting so much data, they don’t know what to do with it. Most of us will never stand out in the crowd.

However, if you happen to be planning a terrorist attack, or want to tell the President he or she is a jerk, you should definitely avoid Angry Birds. Or communicate the old-fashioned way:

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