BEHIND ENEMY LINES, What I learned watching Fox News non-stop for a week

I recently made my annual pilgrimage to the land of my birth, visiting my mom in Kansas. As good as it always is to see the ole family homestead and catch up with what’s going on in the land of Oz, this occasion also entails being subjected to the near constant presence of Fox News on the TV. Normally our three-day visit with the family in tow doesn’t allow for a lot of TV time so I can tolerate the brief exposures to Tucker, Hannity, and Ingram without too much mental anguish. This year’s trip was a bit different as I left the rest of the family behind in Florida, and spent an entire week alone with Fox and Friends, and Mom.

This probably won’t come as a huge shock to anyone when I reveal Fox News has been a biased source of information for a long time. To be fair, all news organizations bring certain biases in their coverage, after all they’re run by people who each have their own world view. However, Fox News has always been orders of magnitude beyond the acceptable propensity to tilt their coverage compared to most other national news networks.

Fuzzy Facts

Fox has justified this by claiming their big nightly shows like Sean Hannity were commentary and not subject to the same level of objectivity as their daytime news programming. In the past there seemed to be at least some truth to that claim. Fox has always had a hard news division that presents world events in a factual manner, even if through a conservative lens. This line between hard news and commentary has always been fuzzy at the network, but based on my recent foray into their programing it now appears to have completely vanished.

Fox News has morphed into a coordinated propaganda machine. Throughout the day their programing presents consistent pro-Republican messaging with little regard for objective reporting. Nearly every program on Fox News is an exercise in twisting the facts to fit their messaging. When that isn’t possible, they’re not above inventing a narrative out of whole cloth. They still have Bret Baier who pops in occasionally with some legitimate reporting before they plunge right back into the mire of right-wing talking points. And they’ve perfected their indoctrination messaging. I’m not sure anyone could watch this all day long without being affected by it. I even found myself occasionally thinking they were making valid points. Then they’d veer into lunacy and my sense of reason would kick back in.

Number One, In Lies

And make no mistake about it, my mom is not alone in watching Fox News throughout the day. At any given time during the day there are 2 million people tuned into Fox News, a total that doubles for their primetime lineup. This audience is concentrated in senior citizens who are more likely to watch TV for long stretches of time, especially during the day. More than half of their audience is over 50 even though that demographic only accounts for a third of the country’s population. Fox isn’t just the top-rated news channel, but is easily the number one overall cable channel with Tucker Carlson being the most watched cable program.

It’s truly shocking that the highest rated 24-hour news channel in the country has sunk to this level of misinformation without it being a scandal. For those of you that haven’t spent much time watching Fox News in a while I took some notes over the course of that week. I wanted to give some sense of what millions of our fellow Americans are choosing to subject themselves to everyday.

I Did It, So You Wouldn’t Have To

One of the major themes was immigration, and how Democrats have instituted “open borders.” They seem oblivious to the fact their reporting on immigrant detention centers and the deportation of some Haitian immigrants directly contradicts their open border claims. They actually tried to make the case that if you have walls on your house, that proves walls work at keeping people out. This apparently proves Trump’s was correct in pushing for a border wall. I guess it didn’t occur to them that houses actually have walls on all sides and a roof, so the analogy doesn’t quite work. Yet they seemed to think this was very clever on their part.

There was also a bizarre claim that numerous Democratic lawmakers supported Trump’s border policies and were only opposing it now for political reasons. Of course, changing our immigration policies was one of President Biden’s signature campaign issues and he won the popular vote by a wide margin. Prior to 2016 even most Republican lawmakers considered building a 2000-mile-long border wall as folly. None of this is to say there aren’t problems at the border. However, there was never any attempt to cover the root causes of the problem and how multiple administrations have kicked the can down the road rather than deal with this difficult issue.

Who Surrendered to the Taliban?

Afghanistan was another issue that came up on a regular basis. It was just jaw dropping to hear multiple Fox anchors discuss Biden’s surrender to terrorists without ever mentioning it was Trump who negotiated the withdrawal. Occasionally they would make a passing reference that Trump wouldn’t have pulled out if the Taliban didn’t live up to the agreement. They made that claim knowing Trump continued to pull out troops despite repeated Taliban violations of the deal. They also ignored Trump’s attempt to rush the final withdrawal prior to January 20th. In fact, Trump described Biden’s withdrawal announcement as, “a wonderful and positive thing to do.” The idea that the end result in Afghanistan would have been different under President Trump is sheer fantasy.

The Martyrs

The network is also going full force into promoting Lt. Col. Stu Scheller and Lance Corporal Hunter Clark as martyrs of the Biden administration. Scheller posted a series of YouTube videos criticizing senior military leadership’s policies in Afghanistan. He continued posting videos even after being ordered not to. At one point he stated his goal was to “bring the whole system down.” Fox News personalities are claiming he’s being prosecuted for speaking truth to power. He can speak truth to his superior officers, what he can’t do is take that public. Allowing such behavior undermines military discipline. Even Scheller acknowledged he was violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). It would be shocking if he wasn’t arrested and charged with multiple violations.

Lance Corporal Clark is under investigation for speaking at a Trump rally. The military teaches every new recruit they can attend political rallies in civilian clothes. What they can’t do is identify themselves as a member of the military and then participate in a political event. It’s important that the military maintains neutrality on political issues. Clark took to the stage to tell his story about saving an Afghan baby as the troops were withdrawing from the country. Participating in a Trump rally is a clear violation of the UCMJ. Prosecutors will make a determination of criminal charges or administrative punishment after they complete the investigation. It seems likely he’ll get off with either a light punishment or a warning. This investigation is a routine matter of military justice, not evidence of a conspiracy to silence the military.

The network’s anchors are also trying hard to turn the fact that approximately 700 Afghan immigrants chose to leave temporary holding locations as an urgent national security crisis. They claim the bumbling Biden administration accidently let these Afghanis wander away without being vetted or monitored. In reality, these Afghan immigrants are fully vetted and have American visas. They were at these holding centers awaiting relocation services. As visa holders they are free to travel about the country unmonitored, they are legal residents of America. Most of the people who left already have relatives here, so they opted to forgo relocation services and went to be with their families. Watching Fox News you wouldn’t know any of that.

Dem vs Dem

Perhaps the most common theme I saw that week was how the Democrats are coming undone and are in open civil war with each other. The radical left-wing is determined to sink Biden’s agenda and are demanding the adoption of their socialist agenda according to Fox. It’s true there are differences of opinion within the Democratic party, but when has the majority party not had internal differences? The same thing is true of the Republicans, but there was no mention of that. It was just earlier this year that multiple Republicans voted to impeach Donald Trump, some of them were later censured by the party. The Republicans stripped Liz Chaney of her leadership role within the party for opposing their twice impeached president. Just recently a third of Republican Senators broke with Mitch McConnel and voted for the Democratic infrastructure bill. Despite this, Fox News is only focused on divisions within the Democratic party.

But the Children

They’re also trying to paint Democrats as trying to prevent parents from having a say in school curriculums. They repeatedly showed a clip of Virginia Democratic governor candidate Terry McAuliffe saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” What they usually fail to show is the comment was about his veto of a bill when he was previously governor. The law would have led to banning books that a few parents objected to, regardless of their academic merit. The network was only interested in portraying Democrats as elitists rather than covering the issues involved in the bill.

Magic Money

Perhaps the most ridiculous story the network invented that week concerned the Democrats attitude towards the cost of the infrastructure bill. The Fox talking heads seriously attempted to sell the idea Democrats think the $3.5 trillion bill won’t cost any money. They would act out a little routine about how shocking it is that Democrats don’t understand how money works. Yet they also showed video of White House spokesperson Jen Psaki stating the bill won’t add to the deficit and won’t cost people making under $400,000 per year anything. She most definitely did not say it wouldn’t cost anything, only that most people won’t pay anything extra for it. It’s just flabbergasting to watch them continually twist the words of Democrats into something they clearly didn’t say.

This is only a small sampling of what goes on all day at Fox News. They called Dr. Fauci the Grinch. They referred to Virginia Governor Northam as Governor Blackface. They repeatedly said Democrats support infanticide, often singling out “of black babies.” They would state the administration’s position on an issue followed by, “of course we know the truth.”

There is no way to characterize the programming at Fox News as anything other than propaganda. They’ve moved past simply being partisan to straight up misinformation. In a free society you can’t stifle dissenting opinions, but the garbage coming out of Fox News is straight from the playbook of a banana republic dictator. Fox News has become a case study proving the adage, whoever controls the message, controls the masses.