THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 2023
Comically propagandistic: What could the late Roger Ailes have been thinking when he created the comically awful cable news channel, America's Talking?
As we noted yesterday, the unwatchable channel came and went within the space of two years. Lost to the world was such unwatchable daily fare as this:
Am I Nuts? (later named State of Mind): Hosted by psychologist Bernie Katz and behavioral therapist Cynthia Richmond.
What's New?: The latest hot gadgets, hosted by Mike Jerrick and later Brian Tracey.
Have a Heart: A talk/news show discussing the brighter side of the news and show-arranged charitable situations, hosted by Lu Hanessian.
Pork: A political talk show focusing on government waste hosted by John David Klein. The executive producers were Robin Gellman and Dennis Sullivan.
Bugged!: A comedic look at what bugs people, hosted by Brian O'Connor with Bill Gulino.
No more hours devoted to gadgets. No more "show-arranged charitable situations," a throwback to the ghastly late-50s hit, Queen for A Day.
No more Bugged!, "a comedic look at what bugs people." That said, though the program called Pork was now dead and gone, it pointed the way towards the Fox News Channel, the network where Ailes would hit it big by assembling a gaggle of propagandists disguised as one tribe's TV "friends."
As we chronicled on Tuesday, Fox debuted in October 1996. Within sixteen months, Ailes had come up with a winning formula:
Fox & Friends is an American daily morning news and talk program that airs on Fox News. It premiered on February 1, 1998, and is currently hosted by Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade on weekdays. Will Cain, Rachel Campos-Duffy and Pete Hegseth host on weekends.
[...]
Fox & Friends evolved from Fox X-press, Fox News Channel's original morning news program.
Gone was the remarkably unfriendly name, Fox X-press. In its place, viewers were given a title which promised them happy hours of access to friends.
Today, the friends consume the first four hours of air time on Fox each weekday. (Fox & Friends airs at 6 a.m., preceded by an hour of Fox & Friends First.)
On weekend mornings, Fox cracks the whip. Viewers are restricted to three hours of TV time with their good friends.
This morning, the friends were deeply engaged in a standard type of pseudo-journalistic practice. In a time which was less politically fraught, we might call it "comically awful undisguised propagandization."
Under modern pseudo-journalistic arrangements, the role of the friend has been transformed. To wit:
At one time, it was accepted that friends don't let friends drive drunk. In contemporary pseudo-journalism, friends don't let friends encounter epistemic or cultural discomfort.
With that in mind, the friends were busy early this morning, flogging standard red tribe topics. Their producers had spanned the globe in search of places where someone of a liberal bent had perhaps showed possible signs of somewhat limited judgment.
Fill disclosure! In a nation of 330 million people, someone is showing some form of bad judgment pretty much all the time every day. In a nation which has split into tribes, it will generally be easy to find someone from the other tribe who has behaved in such ways, or who may seem to have done so.
That doesn't mean that the friends on Fox might not discuss some actual serious topics. And so it went on this morning's show when they took us to California's little-known Spreckels Union School District, which describes itself this way:
About Us
Located three miles south of Salinas, the town of Spreckels was established in 1899 by Claus Spreckels to house workers for his Spreckels Sugar Factory. Rich agricultural land serves as Spreckels’ four boundaries and many community members work in ag-related businesses. The town of Spreckels was immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flats and used in 1955 in the filming of East of Eden.
Spreckels Union School District (SUSD) remained a one-school district until the opening of Buena Vista Middle School in 1996. Currently, SUSD is made up of two schools, Spreckels Elementary (K-5) and Buena Vista Middle School (6-8). SUSD serves the children from the communities of Spreckels, Las Palmas, the Highway 68 Corridor, Indian Springs, Pine Canyon, Creekside, Serra Village and Toro Sunshine.
Click here to learn more about the town of Spreckels.
When we clicked the proffered link, we were taken here.
At any rate, the district in question operates exactly two (2) schools. In one of its schools, some of its employees may have exercised limited judgment with respect to an 11-year-old student in the year before Covid—and as of this week, the district has agreed to pay $100,000 to the mother of that child, without admitting wrongdoing.
What were the cable news viewers known as The Others hearing about this morning? For an NBC News report about this particular matter, you can now click here.
In our view, this matter involves some serious questions about the way school systems should function. That said, you'll hear more about such incidents on Fox, very little on our own blue channel.
The friends on Fox were pushing buttons all through today's early hours. As is often the case, they talked about some topics which won't be discussed in any way on our own blue tribe's cable channel—and not everything they said was blatantly crazy or wrong!
Still and all, we increasingly live within a news culture best characterized by the unfriendly term, "Segregation now."
The friends on Fox serve gruel to one herd. But what do our friends do?
Tomorrow: Almost never the twain
Somerby always seems to ignore the gendered aspects of his complaints. When he lists the so-called inane features in his morning Washington Post, he highlights the ones that would appear on a women's page: advice columns, fashion, lifestyle and society articles. So here he highlights the Fox and Friends morning programming:
ReplyDelete"Today, the friends consume the first four hours of air time on Fox each weekday. "
The first four hours, on other stations occupied by morning shows anchored by women with programming for women. Why? Because women are at home with kids, getting the family through breakfast and off to work or school. Then women leave the TV on in the background while they have coffee and begin morning chores around the house. In some neighborhoods, women do this together with neighbors, in others, the TV is their social networking. TV caters to that fact of women's life. But Somerby thinks Fox invented friendliness when it is normal female sociability that he is describing and generally deriding as somehow pernicious. But we already know that Somerby doesn't like women much -- so he blames women for the downfall of society, the widening gap between tribes and our sliding into the sea.
But women are not voting Republican these days, so this strategy of Somerby's may be misguided. And the trolls keep asking me why I comment here when Somerby has so little commentary that is to my taste. It is because of shit like this.
You seem really stupid and crazy.
DeleteSomerby seems stupid and crazy.
DeleteNo, the 12:12 unnamed dude wins, since despite your weird quirk of insisting on sharing your dimwitted thoughts on the writing of a very bright man, whom you seem to think you can read the mind of, namely Somerby, whom you seem to live to clumsily insult, as if anyone alive cares what you think, you really do seem, at least to all except maybe some subset of the freaks here who have all drunk the same “anonymous” kool-aid as you have, to be both quite stupid and quite crazy.
DeleteCalling someone a name is abuse, not discussion or argument. If you are too stupid and lazy to engage with what someone says, it would be better not to embarrass yourself with a comment that is the equivalent of "I don't understand this so it must be wrong." That goes for you too, Eric.
DeleteI’m new here, I’m a Republican, but not going to vote for Trump. 4:56’s point makes sense but also has me worried that Trump has cost us the women’s vote.
DeleteOver here on the liberal blogs, we heard about the school where all of the black children were ordered to attend an assembly where they were blamed for lowering the school's test scores and coached on how to improve their test-taking skills -- by race, not based on their actual prior performance. That outraged one mother, whose child was among the highest performing in the school and yet was told she had to attend and be harangued for poor scores, implicitly labeled stupid. Of course this happened in FL. And that incident had a lot more to do with segregation than this thread of Somerby's.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/26/florida-black-students-test-score-elementary-school
Is it a good thing that people in that FL school are so beknighted that they don't realize how wrong this was to do? Will they be talking about that on Fox? Does Somerby care that racist things are still happening to black kids?
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with schools that show empathy for ALL children and try to help them, even the ones who are transgender. Does Somerby know what happens when a gay or transgender child has a parent living in the dark ages? It is difficult for them, much like the kids unfortunate enough to grow up in fundamentalist cults or with hyperreligious parents or with drug addicted parents or alcoholics. Schools observe and try to help kids in a variety of difficult situations, because the well-being of the child is more important than politics or whatever kooky parental beliefs are making a child miserable. In some circumstances, the law is on the school's side (as when parents refuse medical care for kids based on faith healing religious beliefs, at least in CA), but in other situations, the law is against the child even though what the parents are doing may be psychologically damaging. Many such kids wind up as runaways or they commit suicide. Schools are doing the right thing when they try to help, in my opinion. Somerby's mileage obviously varies.
Notice again that Somerby is so coy that he doesn't describe what the article is about -- you have to click the link. Why? Is he afraid to talk about such issues in his own words or does he get pennies for linking? What would it hurt to actually tell his readers what he is talking about?
I could make many observations, such as
ReplyDelete1. People are individuals, not components of an ethnic group. Grouping people based on their ethnicity is racism.
2. Positive is better than negative. Rather than focus on the bad students, the school would do better to find out how the good students perform well and encourage other students to copy their behavior.
3. The "gap". There's nothing wrong with students from one ethnic group out-performing another ethnic group, on average. Faulting a school for the size of the "gap" leads to some terrible policies. E.g., some schools today are reducing education in advanced mathematics. Their goal is to make white and Asian students stupider, so they won't be as far ahead of black students. This is insane.
You can help but snicker at an anonymouse objection that students were drilled due to their skin color rather than individual performance.
DeleteYou think it is funny when people object to putting all the black kids in a room and calling them stupid? What is wrong with you?
DeleteDavid includes the words "on average," but these kids weren't selected for their below-average scores. They were selected based on skin color, with the assumption that the black ones would have the lower scores. That obviously isn't true for every black child, nor are all the white and Asian kids necessarily high scoring. Further, the difference between Asian and white kids is trivial and doesn't justify the fuss David keeps making about it. Asian kids have not suffered the historical discrimination and institutionalized racism that black kids encounter, nor are they routinely called stupid to their faces.
DeleteDavid also confuses crystallized and fluid intelligence. A person can have the ability to do higher math without being taught that content and vice versa. What you learn is not the same as learning potential or ability. Asian kids will learn math later -- failure to provide acceleration in K-12 schools will not make Asian kids "stupider" as David suggests. It will enable them to focus on different things, such as reading the whole play in English class intead of excerpts.
"Alabama attorney general says he has right to prosecute people who facilitate travel for out-of-state abortions"
Deletehttps://www.cnn.com/2023/08/31/politics/alabama-attorney-general-abortion-prosecute/index.html
This is what David means when he claims conservatives support smaller less powerful government.
Anonymouse 3:07am, no, I think it’s funny that you object to this, but have no problem with telling white kids that they have been warped by society starting with their first breath.
DeleteQuestion: What’s wrong with you? Answer: You’re dumb as cow manure.
What on earth are you talking about? Who tells white kids they are warped by society? And when did any of us say it was OK to tell them that? You aren't making any sense. Is this how people talk or think over at the Republican blogs? Are you using some sort of shorthand for memes circulating over there?
DeleteDumb as cow manure and disingenuous is no way to go thru life, kid.
DeleteBut you will.
Tell us about it, Cecelia. You’re obviously speaking from personal experience.
DeleteSomerby’s post today is repulsive.
ReplyDeleteHe posts about a case where a child, who was experiencing gender dysphoria, has an abusive mother who then, herself, was taken advantage of by powerful right wing lawyers and sued a school that was behaving appropriately.
By the way, studies show that so called “rapid onset of gender dysphoria” is not something that exists, that so called de-transitioning is harmful, and that gender affirming care results in positive mental health outcomes.
The result of the case was that the school settled for a relatively small amount and admitted no wrongdoing, in order to prohibit further psychological damage to the child.
If the mother or the powerful right wing lawyers actually thought the school was damaging children, they would not have just taken the money and run.
Now the child is stuck with an abusive mother, and no one to help them navigate through this difficult situation.
Somerby hints that Fox News viewers are hearing some truth about the case that the blue tribe is not, but this is false. Fox News is using this case to benefit and promote their destructive right wing agenda, at the expense of a CHILD.
The mother of the child accuses the school of being “predators”, offers no evidence to back up any of her claims, yet does not counter the fact the the child voluntarily sought help from the school since they were not getting support from home.
The mother/lawyers just took the money and ran.
Fuck Somerby, he is a piece of shit.
Utah momfluencer arrested after her malnourished and wounded child runs for help — headline says.
ReplyDeleteSometimes desperate kids seek help at school.