Fox News and a lesson for America.
My wife and I were having a discussion after watching a video talking about the Fox News settlement and the pending suit from Smartmatic. I said, "When your business model depends upon you lying to your viewers, eventually something has to give and there will be trouble."
Fox News began as a reaction to the realities of the world. Nixon was always upset at the Press. He thought they were after him, when the reality is they were after the facts or the "truth", which he and Conservative have never thought they were accountable to. When he was forced to resign, his aides, Roger Ailes and Pat Buchanan really started pushing for a Conservative media ecosystem, which would allow Conservatives to put their narrative out without having to account for the realities on the ground. 40 years later, we have Fox and its more extreme clones, Breitbart and the right wing web, and thousands of AM radio stations pushing a right wing agenda. Fox, OANN, and Newsmax have been caught up in the tangle of their lies at this point and we are starting to see the beginnings of some consequences. How much further they will go is still a big and open question, as there are very rich and powerful people behind the whole idea of Conservative media.
So, this got me thinking about something that I talk about regularly on DU. Mythology v History. Again, Conservative forces in the US aided somewhat by us Liberals, have pushed within our history curriculum the idea of "American Exceptionalism" the myths of our founding from trying to push slavery into the background, to framing the Westward Expansion in terms of "brave pioneers" while glossing over the near extermination of indigenous people, to our fraught and tenuous experience with immigration v the exaltation of idea of "give me your tired huddled masses..."
We have Whitewashed MLK Jr and Frederick Douglas into proponents of the "American Dream" rather than vocal critics with aspirations of making us live up to the ideals.
A person who responded to one of my posts said it succinctly "Literally all our problems stem from or are exacerbated by a history that we refuse to acknowledge." The US is facing a "Fox News moment" where our refusal to acknowledge and accept the uglier parts of our history, is creating or exacerbating a group of people who are becoming more extreme because they are threatened as the myths they grew up believing are pierced by accurate accounting of events.
Back during the Carter Administration, President Carter said that we were at a crossroads as to what we wanted to become as a nation, we could sober up, face our issues and emerge with a new purpose of living up to our ideals, or continue with the pursuit of wealth and power. Reagan came along shouting USA USA!! and saying we should "Never Apologize..." and most of the country went for that, instead of maturing into a true world leader.
We are at another of those moments, but the stakes are higher. Do we continue wallowing in the mythology we have been taught, or do we face our history and work toward our ideals?
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