IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

 

The recent lawsuit brought by the Dominion voting machine company against Fox News has taken an interesting turn.  If you haven't heard,  the voting machine company is suing the news network because it believes that the news broadcasters and commentators on the network echoed Donald Trump's assertions that Dominion's voting machines were rigged against him in the 2020 election.  Those assertions were echoed without any proof, even when Fox News knew there was no evidence for them.  Not surprisingly, the network has responded to the lawsuit by claiming that they have freedom of the press and we'll see how it turns out.

The really crazy thing here is that the company's lawsuit against Fox has turned up some internal communications between people at Fox working both behind and in front of the cameras who knew full well that many of the claims made by the guest speakers on their shows concerning the election were simply not true.  Not only did they know that were untrue, they sometimes expressed that in stark terms: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.”  Messaged on air personality Tucker Carlson to fellow on air personality Laura Ingram.  She responded by saying that Powell was a "complete nut.”  Powell was the lawyer who pushed some of the more aggressive (and crazy!) conspiracies about the 2020 election, and who was given multiple chances to appear on the network and rant away unchallenged.   Another on air personality, Sean Hannity, called Powell a "fucking lunatic".  Meanwhile,  Fox News president Jay Wallace described the craziness of on air personality Lou Dobbs by saying "The North Koreans put on a more nuanced show."

What this reveals is what those of us who do not reside in the right wing news bubble have known all along: while they may be sincere in their conservative beliefs, many people at Fox do not  believe many of their own stories.  They fully understand that their network is more about making money than news reporting or even pushing a political agenda.  Putting it bluntly, coming up with ways to make their mostly old, white, male audience angry so that they won't change the channel is their bottom line.  If that means putting on people on their shows that they themselves characterize as  "fucking lunatics", then that's what they will do.  

This cynical, money driven philosophy by the biggest news network in the country shows what a lie the false equivalency people draw between Fox News and MSNBC is.  You can disagree with Rachel Maddow all you want, but the idea that she would have people on her show that she knows are liars and allow them to spew nonsense without questioning them, is absurd.  These communications show that Fox News (and let's face, most of the right wing media) lie openly to profit from telling their viewers what they want to hear without ever challenging them in any way.

The specific reason behind Fox's turn to conspiracies after the 2020 election illustrates that point: it was Fox News that first called the state of Arizona for Biden in the 2020 election, which was a big step towards Biden's eventual victory.  When Fox viewers, egged on by Trump, were mad about this "betrayal" (even though the call was correct), they started turning towards the new, even more right wing network, Newsmax.  When Fox saw this happening, they quickly turned towards stolen election theories in their "reporting", inviting on Powell and other conspiracy theorists.  So, it was just all about greed, or as Hannity messaged about the possibility of another conservative network rising during the fallout from the Arizona call, “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”

"I DON'T KNOW IF THERE'S ANYTHING YOU CAN DO..."

 After the horrific beating video of 29 year old Tyre Nichols by five police officers was released to the public, Republican House member Jim Jordan spoke about it on "Meet the Press", saying "I don’t know that any law, any training, any reform is going to change...I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to stop the kind of evil we saw in that video.”  While he was understandably disgusted by the violence on the video, his assertion that there's no training or reform that would change things speaks volumes.  It's obvious that the majority of the Republican party don't want any kind of police reforms passed, and will simultaneously call overly violent police bad while opposing passing any kind of changes, much in the same way that they condemn mass shootings without supporting any gun control measures.  Police brutality and mass shootings are two things that the party would rather shrug off than deal with.

To be fair, that's not true of all Republicans; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tried in 2020 to pass some reforms after the killing of George Floyd, but his bill died in the Senate when Democrats didn't think it went far enough.  There is a chance that this latest tragedy could lead to some reforms, but it will be hard to get them through the Republican House.

And there are so many reforms that should be passed, from banning choke holds to having police stop pulling drivers over for routine moving violations (officers can photograph the offenders license plate and sent the ticket in the mail).  One of the big problems is that over the years, police officers have been getting surplus army material from the military, from rifles and body armor to tanks (!).  Add to that the fact that in cities where violent crime is a problem, special task forces with macho names are formed by the police (the police officers who beat Nichols to death were part of a task force called SCORPION) as a way to show the public that they're serious about fighting crime.  So you're arming these police officers with military weapons that make them feel more like soldiers entering enemy territory than cops and then telling them that they're part of an elite violent crime stopping force, and basically you have a recipe for violent behavior.

After the killing of George Floyd, not only were no serious police reforms passed on a federal level, the early cries of "defund the police" were later turned against progressives by Republicans, and funding for the police often wound up being increased (this in a country that has failed at dealing with our problems with addiction, mental health and homelessness).  Hopefully this time there will be some positive changes made, with perhaps the most important change coming in the training and screening process of the officers.  As Stephen Downing, a retired Los Angeles deputy police chief and former SWAT officer once said,  “The guys who really want to be on the SWAT team are the last people you should be putting on the SWAT team.”