Truth Has No Place Here
Happy Birthday Fox News
To quote President Franklin Roosevelt, “It is a day that will live in infamy” and I am not talking about Pearl Harbor but a catastrophe that has proven even more destructive than the surprise Japanese attack that pushed the U.S. into World War II.
The day to which I refer is even worse than June 14, 1946, the day that one donald “Soon to be Gen. Bone Spurs” trump was thrust into the world. The ignominious date that has proven to forever soil the American landscape was 25 years ago on Thursday, Oct. 7, 1996, the date that Rupert Murdoch, the media megalomaniac, named Roger Ailes as CEO for a new program launched on that fateful day, Fox News.
In the beginning, Fox News at least gave lip service to being a conservative news organization that backed Reagan economics and took to heart the late William F. Buckley Jr.’s call to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” But that ended and by 2016, Murdoch dropped the original “Fair and Balanced” slogan in preparation for the coming partisan war that channel would lead, clearing the way for trump and pivoting to give oxygen to the craziest and most absurd conspiracy theories that made up the meat of trump’s presidential campaign.
Here are a few of the more outrageous lies that were pushed by Fox, which was about to join at the hip with trump, completing a Faustian deal all about the bottom line for both the network and trump.
Birtherism was the name given to those liars (spelled trump and Fox) who claimed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was not a legitimate president. The facts, those stubborn nuisances to the Fox and trump team, were proven utterly false as Obama was born in Hawaii. The birtherism conspiracy did not die, as it was fed by Fox and trump for many years. Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the U.S. but that Hillary Clinton had started the rumor and Fox loyally reported it all. And I have some swampland in Florida for sale.
Death panels would come to pass if the Congress approved Obama’s Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The false alarm that Fox embraced was that if Obamacare became law, that government committees, death panels, would decide who would receive medical care and who would live or die. The phrase, death panels, was apparently created by Sarah Palin, the former vice presidential candidate, nut job and Fox News contributor. It goes without saying, but I’ll will say it because Fox News wouldn’t, that there have been no death panels and that Obamacare has made health care affordable to millions of Americans.
And who can forget how Fox churned up the waters and caused a Republican feeding frenzy by repeating the insidious claim that the terrorist killings at the U.N. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 12, 2012, could have been avoided if then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had done her job and provided enough security for the Americans. In the spotlight he received so benevolently by Fox, trump said during the 2016 campaign, “Look at Benghazi, our ambassador. He wired her (Clinton) 500 or 600 times asking for help.” Two years, $7 million and 800 pages later, a Republican House committee determined that Clinton was not to blame and had not denied requested security measures at the mission. And Fox said, so what, as the network continued to perseverate on Benghazi.
Another juicy, non-story that never passed the smell test but was nonetheless fueled regularly by Fox involved the July 2016 killing in Washington, D.C., of Seth Rich, a worker for the Democratic Party. The police determined that Rich apparently was a victim of a botched robbery but Fox reported that the murders may have been ordered by Democratic Party insiders because Rich was behind the leaking of emails from the Democratic National Committee to the Republicans. Good story, but no facts. Fox News retracted the story but its leading voice, Sean Hannity, kept the lie smoking on his radio program.
Hannity, that scion of irresponsible, lack of facts, bigoted reporting, kept hammering away on the existence of a “Deep State,” which those in the know knew involved a secret cabal of liberals in the federal government who were pushing for a coup against trump. Again, it would make a swell, fictional political thriller but sorry, the facts are elusive to say the very least.
Then there was the battle cry that trump declared and that Fox obediently repeated and repeated of the “fake news” of any collusion between trump and Russia leading into the 2016 election. Hannity, remember him, he said the later investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was “insanity” which is on the same keel as trump’s description of the “witch hunt” by Democrats and the deep state. Fox and trump tried to turn the tables and claim that Clinton and not trump should be investigated, something that Fox host Jeanine Pirro joyfully picked up on when one night she said it was “time to shut it (Mueller probe) down, turn the tables, and lock her up. That’s what I said. I actually said it. Lock her up.” Those words were quickly turned into a mantra of maniacs led by trump and his trumpers.
Now, turning to the white supremacists who brazenly marched in Charlottesville, Va., and were met by protesters, ending with the death of one protester after a white supremacist supporter drove his car into the group. Fox, through Hannity, raised the possibility that there may have been no real protesters, only actors who were paid to soil the image of the good, wholesome, American MAGA white supremacists, who trump said were not to blame for the violence. Possibly, but not on this planet.
And that’s just a sampling of the conspiracy lies fed by trump and Fox, including the one about Uranium One, a Canadian energy company that allegedly won approval to sell to a Russian firm after making donations to the Clinton Foundation. Totally baseless.
So thank you Fox, but I remind you that you never stood a chance of being a true media outlet. The day Oct. 7 was a portentous day for reasons other than the Fox birth, as another war began, this one not a war of words but a war of bombs and death and that would be the date that the U.S. and Great Britain launched air attacks against military targets and Usama bin Laden’s training camps, with the U.S. not leaving Afghanistan for 20 more years.
It also was a fateful day, when on Oct. 9. 1849, the great Edgar Allen Poe died in Baltimore when he was just 40.
The tragedy unfolded on Oct. 9, 1985, when Palestinian gunmen hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean and later pushed Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish-American tourist in a wheelchair, overboard to his death.
Anita Hill also grabbed the spotlight on Oct. 9, 1991, when the University of Oklahoma law professor, became a pre-#Metoo victim when she publicly accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of making sexually inappropriate comments when she worked for him. Thomas denied Hill’s allegations and later took his seat on the highest court in the land, with, you guessed it, the unending support of Fox News.
And on an Oct. 9, 1998, day Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, was beaten and left tied to a wooden fence post outside of Laramie, Wyo., and died five days later. The killers, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, are serving life sentences for Shepard’s murder.
But Oct. 9 isn’t all bad as it was the day in 1954 when Marian Anderson became the first Black singer hired by the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York.
And on Oct. 9, 2018, Taylor Swift, who had previously refused to get involved in any political matters, announced that she would be voting for Tennessee’s Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen.
See, it wasn’t all bad on Oct. 9.