Michelle answers:
How do I put this politely?
Fox News–a.k.a. NEWSCORP–was bought out entirely in the 1980s by a billionaire Australian named Rupert Murdoch. He still owns a controlling share of that thing.
And he has been hellbent since day one on a) making “tabloid style” biased news (if not fabricated info-tainment) the mainstream, and b) making sure everyone believes that mainstream journalism has too much “liberal bias”, whether it in fact has any or not.
Basically the guy is about as far right politically as Mussolini and wants–nay, Demands–that America become the same. In the early 1980s there may have been a point to it–a need for intelligent, contrarian journalism. But that was _how many_ years ago? Times have changed but their message hasn’t. If anything it’s become more dogmatic, doctrinaire and hard-line than before: right is right, hard-right is “more right”, and everyone else is wrong (and doesn’t deserve any freedom of expression, never mind any say in how the nation is run).
This wouldn’t be so bad, but: most of the Billionaires and One Percenters–your CEO Class in America–actually have it in their greedy, financial “best interests” to follow Murdoch, Fox News, and folks like the idiot Tea Party as far right as possible if only because it means “more tax cuts” that let these “people” hate and hoard money, and hate and hoard money some more.
If people like Murdoch, like the Koch Brothers, like all of the _other_ Tea Party sponsors, had it their way tomorrow, America would be a detuned sort of fascist state. We wouldn’t be at war because we’d be broke–we’d be a puppet dancing on China’s string one day, India’s the next, and Saudi Arabia’s the third. But otherwise, we’d be openly totalitarian. Ordinary citizens would either work on the Wal-mart plantation for prison wages or be tossed into a Meat Grinder for Soylent Green purposes. One Percenters would own 99 percent of everything and everybody, while the Bottom 99 Percent (the rest of us, mere citizens like you and I) would scrap and fight over _one measly percent_, as we live in rot and ruin, begging hand-to-mouth to get by. As it is in Somalia. As it is in Haiti. As it was in New Orleans, post-Katrina. As it’s becoming in Detroit.
That’s not even why it’s controversial though.
It’s controversial because so many, so many, _TOO many_ people, just eat this up. They swallow the Fox News propaganda stream–and yes, Rush Limbaugh himself admits that it’s propaganda–whole and unchewed upon. People aren’t even thinking about this crap–they aren’t even bothering to fact-check a damned thing. All they do is watch, and watch, and watch, and when they have their fill they hit the internet and regurgitate it right back at the rest of us, puking and parroting their “talking points of the day” as if they were automatons, robots with no thoughts of their own in their heads. They mindlessly copy and paste it all, line and verse, the way a religious fundamentalist quotes gospel. Not as a way to inform or enlighten, but as a _weapon_ with which to bully, browbeat, terrorize and silence. These people even get their insults, wholesale, from the same exact source.
It’s a group mind. It’s a really dumb sort of group mind–like lemmings who believe they are Borg, and that resistance is futile.
Among other things. That’s the controversial part–that otherwise intelligent, functional human beings can actually swallow this degrading line of bullsh=t and endlessly mouth it off to all that moves. And for some perverse reason we put up with it: the rest of us tolerate it when the fundies and rednecks and trolls and haters bully, threaten and attack us with this damned fool nonsense.
How anyone believes in this stuff I don’t understand, but the bullying–the relentless attacks and abusive conduct–has got to go. It’s _Going_ to have consequences, and soon.
It’s going to be a harsh, bitter winter if we end up _going back_ to the madness of the last decade of fail, to the policies of one nation, under Bush/Cheney (and their Arab and Big Oil, Big Banking butt-buddies).
