The Fox problem

Fox News has long since abandoned any pretense to being a news organization. It is now an unapologetic propaganda arm of the racist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, Republican movement in America that has reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump. Long gone are the dog whistle codes to provide a face-saving façade. As Jon Schwarz points out, Fox News has done more to incite domestic political violence than Trump, and he discusses the history of how the network was designed to serve this purpose.
[Read more…]

Elite racism can be just as sincere as common racism

Amanda Marcotte has an interesting piece where she says that the recent Megyn Kelly episode explodes the common myth that exists among the intelligentsia that the elites are too sophisticated to really buy into racist ideologies and that when they do indulge in race-baiting, it is part of a cynical but conscious political strategy that does not reflect their real views. Such people can often point to ‘friends’ to dispute the characterization. It is this kind of thinking that may have prompted NBC to hire Kelly despite her past history of race-baiting at Fox News where the willingness and ability to do so is practically a job requirement. But even though she was no longer working at Fox, she still went there.
[Read more…]

John Oliver on the menace of Facebook

I have posted before about how Facebook has dominated access to the internet is countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka and this has led to the rapid spread of wild and false rumors that have been exploited by Buddhist extremists in those two countries to launch attacks on their Muslim minorities.

In last Sunday’s segment, John Oliver discusses in detail, using Myanmar as an example, how bad Facebook is and how they let things get way out of hand before they started doing anything. He ends the segment with a far more accurate ad for what Facebook really represents.

To engage or not to engage with racists?

If you blinked, you might have missed the media flutter about the New Yorker magazine reversing its decision to invite Stephen Bannon, one-time Svengali to Donald Trump, to be interviewed at its festival. The reversal was caused because editor David Remnick received a lot of criticism and pressure, with other invited celebrities such as Judd Apatow and Jim Carrey saying they would not attend if Bannon was there. Of course, this has resulted in the usual right-wing whining about the ‘intolerant left’, that they are being ‘de-platformed’ and denied the chance to voice their views.
[Read more…]

Online abuse against inclusive ads

Many businesses have realized that society is changing and that targeting their advertising campaigns to exclusively young, white, heterosexual, conventionally attractive people is not longer acceptable even as a purely marketing strategy, since the majority of consumers do not fit into that narrow demographic. But advertisements that include more diverse people seem to anger some people who then go on social media to rage in the ugliest ways against the people shown.
[Read more…]

Whatever happened to Rush Limbaugh?

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used to be constantly in the news because of the extreme views he expressed. His radio show is still on the air daily, as far as I know, but we rarely hear about him. The same goes for other conservatives like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin who used their ability to take extreme stands and shock people to gain publicity for themselves.

I do not miss them at all but am curious as to why they have become largely marginal figures. It could be due to the operation of a media version of Gresham’s law that “bad money drives out good”. Alex Jones and Donald Trump have cranked up the outrageousness to 11 and thus hogged all the media attention and effectively muffled the voices of others in the marketplace of conservative extremism.

I am sure that there are still ‘dittoheads’ (what Limbaugh fans are called) out there who listen faithfully to his show. But he himself does not seem to be able to gain much attention from outside that world.

Exploding the myths about free speech

Cory Doctorow has a good essay where he critiques the recent alarms sounded by conservatives (triggered by the banning of Alex Jones and his Infowars from some social media platforms) that the left is dominating the digital media world. These conservatives are arguing that America always used to be a country where people would ‘fight to the death’ to defend the right of those with opposing views to express themselves, and that that ethos is now disappearing. Doctorow says that this rosy view of the past is rubbish.
[Read more…]

Begin the countdown to the genital identification

Kimberly Guilfoyle is a Fox News personality who has abruptly left the network. She has also revealed that she is dating Donald Trump’s son Don Jr. who is in the process of divorcing his wife. Although she implied that she was leaving voluntarily because of the relationship and that she might be working for the White House in some capacity, there are now reports that she was forced out for misconduct.
[Read more…]