RICK BLAINE: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
CAPT. RENAULT: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
A croupier hands Renault a pile of cash, his winnings.
CROUPIER: Your winnings, sir.
Something strange is going on at Fox News. The network’s execs are suddenly acting as if they care about the credibility of their “news” network. But is their concern real or is it just more hall-of-mirrors fakery inside the propaganda puzzle palace?
Whether it’s a pretense or not, the executives’ change in behavior can probably be traced back to an incident on April 7, when a representative from Media Matters, the progressive watchdog group, confronted Fox owner, Rupert Murdoch, at a forum and asked him if it was ethical for Fox News to promote the Tea Party.
“No. I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party,” Murdoch answered. “But I’d like to investigate what you are saying before condemning anyone.”
It is noteworthy that Murdoch said he’d need to “investigate” whether Fox News promoted Tea Party events. He was either being disingenuous, or he doesn’t watch his own network. As Eric Burns, Media Matters president, said on Countdown April 16:
BURNS: FOX has invested an enormous amount of time and money in the tea party movement. Essentially, they did all but create the tea party movement to begin with. They‘ve run over 100 promotional spots on FOX News, touting tea party events. They‘ve lent their talent out over the last year to host tea party rallies. They‘ve even sponsored tea party rallies.
Burns is referring to a promotional campaign on Fox last April, when the network gave what amounted to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars’ worth of free on-air promotion to nationwide tea bagger events on Tax Day. The network even sent its on-air personalities, including Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Neil Cavuuto, out as draws for crowds in Atlanta, Texas and California.
According to Burns, after confronting Murdoch at the event on April 7, Media Matters sent him a packet of information about Fox’s Tea Party promotions to help him with his “investigation.” Murdoch never responded to Media Matters, of course, but in the weeks since the encounter, Fox officials have done two things that are unprecedented in the network’s 14 year history.
First, the Los Angeles Times reported that network executives called Sean Hannity back to New York from Cincinnati within hours before he was set to do his show live as a benefit for a local tea bag group on Tax Day, April 15. But this incident was a bit of a puzzler, too. According to the Times, Fox execs were said to be caught by surprise and even angry that Hannity would use his star power — and his nationwide broadcast on Fox — to benefit a local tea bagger group.
The officials claimed they learned about Hannity’s appearance on the day of the event. But if that’s true, it would appear that, like the boss, they have not been watching their own broadcasts. Hannity promoted his appearance in Cincinnati on his show for a week prior to the event.
(Time Magazine TV critic James Poniewozik summed it up nicely: “Attention, Tea Party: You do not make money off Fox News! Fox News makes money off you!”)
The second incident is even more suspicious-making. On March 29, Karl Rove was driven from a book signing in Beverly Hills by Code Pink protesters who attempted to arrest him as a war criminal. Last weekend, when Rove, a paid Fox News contributor, appeared on “Fox and Friends,” the most amateurish show in the network’s line-up, the no-name weekend hosts had the temerity to run the clip of his contretemps with Code Pink and ask for his reaction — you know, like real journalists might do on a real news program.
As you can see in the video above, Rove — who is one of the most practiced liars on the planet — reacted with what appears to be an Oscar-worthy lamentation on this betrayal by his own home network:
“This is sad, you people are recycling stuff that happened three to four weeks ago, this is a small blemish on what was a great trip,” Rove said when asked about members of the group Code Pink who showed up at a March 30 book signing in Beverly Hills, Calif., called Rove a “war criminal” and brandished handcuffs.
“It was a blemish,” he insisted, adding that there were no such incidents at other stops on his book tour.
“Please don’t paint this as much a sign of anything,” he continued. “These are sort of sad and pathetic people … Can you imagine being some kind of nut wandering around with handcuffs? Let’s not give them any more attention.”
If, as it appears, Rove was prepared for the question, this was a staged event designed to generate headlines like “Karl Rove Angry at Fox And Friends” from our friends at Crooks & Liars, and “Karl Rove Slams Fox News Hosts…” at Huffington Post.
The subtext of the charade appears to be, “See, we ask tough questions to right wingers, too.” But, of course, they don’t. So what is going on here?
If Fox were a real news organization, it would be reeling from a series of embarrassing episodes over the past few months:
- In August, a poll found that about three-quarters of people who restricted their news consumption to Fox News said they believed Republican lies about health-care reform — that it would cover non-citizens (72 percent), lead to a government takeover (79 percent), cover abortions (69 percent) and institute “death panels” (75 percent). If Fox were a real news channel, this would have been seen as an abysmal failure, and heads would have rolled. In this case, not only did Fox ignore the poll results, with the exception of MSNBC, all the top legitimate news outlets ignored them, too.
- In January, when Pres. Obama addressed the House Republican conference in Maryland and, in an unprecedented move, took questions from his bitterest enemies on live television, CNN and MSNBC carried the entire event, but, as soon as it appeared that the president was presenting facts about reforms that were contrary to the disinformation believed by Fox viewers, Fox cut away from the live feed.
- When Roger Ailes was asked about this incident on “This Week” — not by the guest host, Barbara Walters, of course, but by a guest at the round table, Arianna Huffington — Ailes gave this fatuous response:
HUFFINGTON: Roger, you clearly are in ratings, but if you are in ratings, can you explain to me why FOX went away from the meeting the president was having in — why did you go away, 20 minutes before the end?
AILES: Because we’re the most trusted name in news.
In other words, we are so successful at fooling our audience into trusting us that we don’t have to answer questions about our credibility.
- In March, when Pres. Obama went on Fox to talk about health care reform, Fox on-air personality Bret Baier delivered what may be the worst presidential interview since the invention of television. But what appeared to be rudeness — not to mention lack of respect for the office of the presidency — was in fact a deliberate strategy to intentionally disrupt Obama’s message on reform so that, once again, Fox viewers would not be exposed to the truth about what was in the bill. Baier’s performance would have embarrassed a real news organization — compare it, for example, with the kid glove treatment of George W. Bush received across the board interviewers from U.S. broadcast outlets — but, from Fox’s perspective, Baier did a masterful job.
- Also in March, David Frum, a former Bush speech writer, said “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”
- Earlier this month, an audio recording surfaced of extreme right-wing Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a member of the Christian Corporatist cult, the Family, admonishing a constituent not to believe everything she heard on Fox. “Don’t catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody’s no good,” he said.”
But does all this mean that Fox cares about its journalistic integrity? Does it even need credibility? Its core audience certainly does not expect or require it.
It’s tempting to wonder if Fox officials are acting out of an awareness that even though the network is enjoying astounding success today by delivering what amounts to Obama-era anger porn to its rage-addicted base, the writing is on the wall. They know that the audience for Fox is literally dying out. The median age of Fox News viewers is 65 years old — and young people are staying away in droves from the conservative movement in general and the Republican Party, including tea bagger groups, specifically. Their audience pool will be dried up more or less by 2020.
Over the next few years, change is coming to Fox, whether its superannuated executives — Murdoch is 79; Ailes is 69 — like it or not. Only time will tell if these recent incidents are signs that they are taking initial steps now to realign the network and its brand in order to enter the legitimate news arena in the not-so-distant future — and if so, whether the ideologues who run Fox News have the ability to operate a real news network.
Stay tuned.
