Day after day, hour after hour, millions of Americans tune in willingly to hear political diatribe that is specially designed to align their political beliefs in a particular direction.
Amidst stunning eye-catching graphics and up-to-the-minute news bytes, various pundits slam opinions on every possible topic in the realm of today’s Americana and also slam anyone who dares venture an opinion alien, or, as is more likely the truth, threatening to their own. And all who appear and work on the channel must meet the approval of the Big Man running everything.
And this Big Man who is the great determinator of what America should think and hear is not an American at all.
He is Rupert Murdoch. A man born into a financial kingdom of newspaper publishing. A man weaned from childhood on dealing with the contradictory opinions of a fickle public and how to manipulate them.
Going out on his own in teenhood to explore the alien world of leftist politics, he soon returned to the safer and more profitable world of his fathers right wing, business-friendly empire building. After building his own empire in the Australian media world, Murdoch cast his greedy eyes upon England as a basis to expand his empire and conquer new minds in a modern form of psychological warfare that Genghis Khan would never have understood.
Then he came to America.
He saw it as a lamb ready for the slaughter to set a feast from which he could nourish himself abundantly. Americans were more naive politically and pathetically ignorant of worldly political dealings than the rest of the English-speaking world except when it came to countries we had fought wars in. Our lack of understanding of much outside our own borders made us easy targets for manipulation and exploitation.
As CEO of the giant conglomerate FOX News, Murdoch set up his media organization as the spokesman and chief instrument for the wishes of the huge corporations that are intent on getting control over the American economic and political landscape.
Fox News offers itself as a fair and balanced news organization, which it is on all fronts except the political at which point it immerses itself in extremely manipulative mind play and phony doctrines. At that point it is a conservative hardliner and utilizes the most subtle tactics to keep up a face of being ‘fair and balanced’.
The liberals it has as ‘guest speakers’ on its show are carefully chosen to cow-tow to the conservatives on key points and to present their leftist side in a way that looks weak and inferior. They are ‘show-case liberals’, present in the same way that court jesters were to enhance the king by making themselves look foolish.
Conservative points are hammered into the audience using fierce rhetoric, stunning graphics and biased points of view. Specific points will be chosen and rehearsed backstage, certain catch phrases chosen that will be easy for the listeners to remember and then repeated on stage over and over again ad nauseum until they are accepted into the social fabric as being ‘truths’.
Any view counter to this offered by non-FOX vocalists will be systematically ridiculed and slandered the way grade school kids do when they want to make someone look bad. They pretend to be a mouthpiece for the common Christian working man but are really channels for the huge economic industries that are wanting to dominate our politics.
There is a think tank at work behind the scenes at FOX, one whose aim is to demolish any arguments opposed to its own set dogmas, to instill anger in it’s listeners and to organize and aim that anger at whatever target they choose.
They use the vitriol of the masses to act in favor of the FOX sponsors in power and to adapt the political power in the US toward the desires of these sponsors. The think tank will quickly access any situation that arises and determine the strategy needed to manipulate that situation to their advantage.
Their main tools are ridicule, demonization of its perceived enemies, inciting half truths that most people cannot distinguish from real truths, fierce affirmations of these partial truths and using seemingly endless amounts of money to promote these points of view.
All this, of course, comes down to: What does Murdoch and his media machine want to achieve? Only this, a reserved table in your mind and your thinking.
Well thought-out and nicely presented argument.