(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Tall order [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-20 Just a handful of days ago, I got into a discussion with someone here about the fact that just about everything we know about the world we learn from second- and third-hand sources. Therefore, we’re reliant on trust in these sources for nearly all of our beliefs about the world. I will say that most of the things that every single one of us encounters is taken on faith. There are plenty of things that are not proven by one's own hand. Almost all of the news, other than the items that you yourself may have witnessed firsthand, are accounts given by others that we accept on the basis of trust. We cannot verify everything ourselves. So belief is already on ephemeral ground. Interestingly enough, I came across a segment of Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show All In last night, where he led with the same idea. Hayes: The late Rush Limbaugh enshrined the battle lines in what has become a famous, or infamous, monologue on what he called “the four corners of deceit”: Limbaugh: So we have now the four corners of deceit, and the two universes in which we live. The universe of lies, the universe of reality, and the four corners of deceit: government, academia, science, and the media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. Hayes: “Government, academia, science, and the media”—“corrupt... exist by virtue of deceit.” This is what Limbaugh and the conversative movement taught people, hammered into their head, day after day, month after month, year after year, that they, the Rush Limbaughs, the Fox Newses of the world, are the sole source of reality. They exist in the universe of reality and everyone else is in the universe of lies. And you can’t trust anyone but them, the Rush Limbaughs and the Fox Newses. You can’t trust the government, government officials or government statistics. You can’t trust scholars. You can’t trust scientists. Or the mainstream media, reporters. And, of course, knowledge. What we know about the world is inescapably predicated on trust. We just can’t verify firsthand the overwhelming majority of things we know about the world. I wasn’t there for the randomized control trials for the vaccine, for instance, right? So what we do is we use trust as a means of coming to know about the world. For example, if a reporter for the New York Times says, “I have seen this atrocity happening on the ground in Ukraine, and I’ve talked to folks that saw it, firsthand witnesses. They told me about it.” Um, I can’t go check for myself. Right? My disposition is to trust that it’s true. Not completely, right? I would look for other verification, see if other outlets report similar findings as a kind of verification. We’ve seen that with atrocities and massacres that have happened in Ukraine. He then transitioned to commenting on Fox and that whole right-wing media corridor, where they have instructed (that is, conditioned) their audience to distrust all regular avenues of source information, by default then placing all trust in the source left standing, which is Fox et al. Hayes: But trust is the foundation here. And those trust relationships with credible media sources, researchers—again, government statistical entities… They end up being the way that we form a lot of knowledge of the world. The American right has made it their mission to sever each of those trust relationships, to cut their base off from any other institution that produces knowledge. Hayes goes on to say that Trump then usurped this model from underneath Fox, forcing them (‘them’ being Murdoch & co.) to buckle under the weight of his braggadocio and bullying, even when it came to reporting on something as serious as the 2020 presidential election, and that they are so powerless to change this model that they are chained to Trump, or to anyone who out-demagogues him. This is where I disagree with Hayes, because it’s clear that, in November 2020, Fox had about 2-3 days, if not a full week, in which it as a vehicle and platform had yet to decide on a firm direction on how it would cover Trump’s loss in the election. I mean, radio silence—they were rather stunned. Meanwhile, competitor networks were showing people dancing in the street in celebration. It was not until Donald Trump, Jr. came out with a tweet (and perhaps an Instagram or YouTube video) chastising weak or fair-weather Republicans for not sticking by his father that Fox committed to the narrative of a stolen or fraudulent election. In fact, he called for “total war”. Fox caved to audience desire and outcry; but Murdoch & co. also succumbed to top-down pressure. (I think Fox bet on the house—that is, they bet on Trump being able to back up his assertions or that, against all odds, he might find a way to stay in office. They thought they could roll the dice, no matter how long those odds were.) What Hayes fails to consider is the fact that Trump & Fox, from Day 1, had a symbiotic relationship, a synergizing relationship. They never criticized him, even when he made not only gaffes but serious mistakes. They helped build his untouchable persona of someone who was never wrong. They spit-shined his image for five straight years to that point. So when it came time for them to rebut his absolutely odious claims of false victory, Fox would have had to have come clean to their entire audience, and they were not prepared to do so. “talent” Even Rachel Maddow, who’d been keep informal tabs on the situation at the rival network, kept expressing over a span of two to three weeks her puzzlement over what was going on at Fox, why they weren’t declaring Joe Biden the winner of the election. That lack of declaration was just the fertile ground that allowed Trump’s lie to grow. His lie was not actively stomped out at the very time it needed to be knocked down. By standing to the side—even letting some evening talent carry Trump’s water—Fox obeyed or heeded DJT JR’s call for Republicans to stand behind his father. Hayes believes that Fox has made it so that they’re locked into their model, in a deathgrip with its audience where it cannot change without fatally driving away market share. And while the latter may be true—that audience members would leave in droves—the description that Hayes paints does not fully capture Fox’s relationship in all of this, as a node. It is so entangled in burnishing Trump’s brass statue that it has become part of the apparatus; and now Trump’s success is its success. Witness Trump’s low last year, just after the midterms. His mojo was at low ebb, having sat through the January 6th committee hearings and suffered the humiliation of the FBI search of his mansion. With the loss of the Senate and the evaporation of what was forecast as a mighty “red wave,” Trump could have been put out to pasture. Several media figures were suggesting just that. But here is where Trump played the media, and not all media but right-wing media in particular. He held his anti-Semitic dinner with Kayne West and Nick Fuentes. Nick Fuentes, white supremacist. The rest of the media universe decried the meeting because of the underlying meaning of such breaking of bread—during Thanksgiving, no less. But here’s the thing: right-wing media could not criticize or scold Trump on that axis. Much of the conservative subtext for decades has rested on the idea of stereotypes and the belief that some groups are naturally inferior to others; and indeed that subtext has become more and more explicit and in plain view. The audience not only is on-board with this idea but has incorporated it into their hearts. So Trump was able to create this spectacle that got universal media attention, but he chose the one axis on which and the other right-wing outlets could not criticize him without turning off viewers entirely. Quite cunning, quite instinctive. Trump emerged with the GOP back in his breast pocket. It’s an interpenetrative relationship. Fox is sutured to him. He is a wingless bird that they are determined to attach two helium balloons onto each wing. They are fully invested in his success, in helping create this illusion of flight. They have no other choice. For all intents and purposes, Fox aided in the insurrection, at least in setting the stage for the administrative (Congressional) side, giving those 140 lawmakers leeway to take those patently illegal, conspiratorial votes to reject legitimate electors’ votes. Fox was in on it. So they really cannot turn back now. They have committed themselves to their own manufactured view of reality. They’d have to commit to unwinding time itself to disabuse their viewers of the ersatz reality they’ve spun for the audience at home. They not only would need to come clean but explain over and over, along the course of weeks or even months, exactly how they misled their viewers; and they’d have to convince viewers to stay put and hear them out. (They might even have to back all the way to the 2000 election with the Brooks Bros. riot and the execrable SCOTUS decision, because their tall tales go back that far.) They’d have to make the truth more compelling than their lies—and the viewer would have to trust them while they recanted. Tall order. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/20/2164937/-Tall-order Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/