The Authoritarian’s Media Machine – FOX News

Despite repeated denials by Senator Obama and his campaign team, the misinformation from Fox “Noise” still gets around. Sean Hannity made two attempts in January and February to link Obama with the statements by others (Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright) which he has renounced. Here is an exerpt from Brave New Films that shows how this propaganda is like a virus infecting the minds of citizens and voters.

I was on the phone with my parents telling them about the video I was working on, FOX ATTACKS! Obama part 2: Spreading the Virus, and brought up how FOX (Sean Hannity, in particular) has been desperately trying to create a connection between Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama because a magazine founded by Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and run by Wright’s daughters recently gave Louis Farrakhan an award. I told my parents how Hannity went from saying the magazine gave Farrakhan the award to claiming Wright gave him the award (which he didn’t) to saying that Obama “associated” with Farrakhan (which he hasn’t). Hannity would mostly use these “stories” so he could rattle off some of Farrakhan’s most offensive comments and mention Obama in the same breath, effectively linking the two in the minds of FOX viewers. He just wants to say, “Obama — Farrakhan — racist — anti-Semite” over and over again until they are linked, just as FOX did with “Iraq — Al Qaeda — 9/11 — terrorism” in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Of course, Hannity almost never mentions that Obama has repeatedly denounced Farrakhan’s racist, anti-semitic, and inflammatory remarks, has called for more cooperation between the black and Jewish communities, has spoken before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and has been defended by the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and other prominent Jewish organizations. But Hannity doesn’t want his viewers to know this. He just wants them to have a vague impression that Obama is an anti-semite and a black separatist.

When I mentioned this example to my parents, my dad said, “Wait, didn’t Louis Farrakhan give Obama an award and Obama accepted it?” When I told him that this was completely off, he said, “Oh, I guess I must have heard it wrong.”

The author goes on to describe his father as not a “current events junkie,” “reasonably well informed,” a reader of The Economist and “not conservative or a FOX viewer.”

So, why does this misinformation get around and what can be done about it?

One reason is that other networks pickup on the same misinformation and repeat it. During the February 26, 2008, Democratic debate, Tim Russert, of MSNBC, pressed Obama on his relationship with Farrakhan. Russert did this repeatedly.

Another reason the virus spreads is that Sean Hannity is not the only FOX celebrity to generate misinformation about Senator Obama. The Brave New Films video below touches on a litany of lies from Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda propeller called FOX News.

 

 

The most egregious part of the FOX bias comes at the end of the video when they equate Obama with Hitler.  There is one very large truth ignored by FOX that makes this analogy just another lie:  Hitler lead his country to ruin because, among other things, he had an authoritarian personality.   Professor Altemeyer’s research about the authoritarian personality has made him the expert on the subject and a major contributor to John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience.    I asked the professor, “Is there any thing that you can say about the likelihood that Senator Obama has any authoritarian tendencies?”  He replied, “My PERCEPTION of Barack Obama is that he would be quite an  UNauthoritarian leader.  I of course don’t know what he’s like when he’s  making decisions, but he talks a great deal about consultation with a  lot of points of view and openness. Something we haven’t seen in the  White House in at least eight years.”

Also, according to Professor Altemeyer’s research, the only threat by authoritarians in this country is from a minority of Republicans, supporters of these Republicans like Rupert Murdoch, certain celebrities at Fox “Noise” and many Protestant evangelicals.

What can you do about the spreading of these lies? Sign the petition demanding that other media stop spreading the FOX virus. Here is what it says:

Fox is a Republican mouthpiece, not a legitimate news organization. Real news organizations must reject Fox’s smears of Barack Obama, not parrot them.