FOX's Telling Response To Juan Williams

by Richard B. Simon

FOX "News" commentator Juan Williams -- late of National Public Radio -- says in this video that the Republican field for 2012 is weak, and that the only one with enough charisma to go up against Obama is Palin -- but she is not on the same "intellectual stage".

The response from the FOX "News" panel is that of 8 year olds when one classmate talks back to the teacher: oooohhhh. Fox News Sunday host and supposedly temperate "journalist" Chris Wallace seems stunned. He suggests that Williams is going to get a lump of coal -- in his stocking, from Santa claus -- and rapidly ends the program.

Oooohhhh, Juan. You're in trouble.

In FOXworld, saying what's obviously true means you're a bad boy -- if it undermines what Jon Stewart would call FOX's "narrative".

You'll be punished Juan.

That didn't take long, did it?

So much for FOX's much-ballyhooed championing of Juan Williams, truthteller, supposedly canned by an NPR that can't handle the truth -- or divergent opinions. Williams, a few months ago, admitted on FOX that Muslims in traditional garb on airplanes make him nervous. NPR clumsily fired him over the comment -- but Williams' firing was overdue. On FOX, he had long been tagged as "NPR Analyst", which meant that FOX viewers thought he was representing NPR -- and, by default, arguing from a "liberal" opinion position. Williams' (and Mara Liasson's) presence on FOX undermined (and continues to undermine) NPR's credibility as an objective news source. It's something that neither Liasson nor Williams seems to understand, but which FOX programmers know well.

FOX agilely moved to humiliate NPR by hiring Williams at $1,000,000 a year -- and Williams spent the next two weeks or so throwing all his recently former NPR colleagues under the wheels of the train by assailing NPR as a sort of One Party State.

In context, numerous studies (like this one, regarding belief in the false facts that underpinned the Iraq War) have found that NPR listeners and PBS watchers are the best factually informed consumers of non-print news, and that FOX "News" watchers are the worst-informed. So FOX's assault on NPR is understandable. FOX's mission vis a vis NPR is to present NPR as FOX's opposite.



Which it is -- just not in the way that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes would have you believe. FOX's spin is that NPR is, like FOX, a "news" organization with a political agenda, to get Democrats elected.

But that's not accurate. In fact, NPR is FOX's opposite because it is a real, old-fashioned news organization, presenting fact and a reasonable and reasonably balanced menu of opinion in what is probably a center-left cultural context -- hence the perception of a liberal bias to its news presentation. But NPR presents very little from the far left or the far right (the real far left despises NPR, too).

Undermining NPR is part of FOX's dual mission -- to dominate the "news" business and to get Republicans elected.

Fox is a disinformation/misinformation machine. It strings together decontextualized factoids in a miasma of half-truths and untruths. It's a propaganda campaign being waged against the American people by a multinational corporation aligned with other multinational corporations. The goal is to elect politicians who will remove "regulations" -- also known as "rules" -- and thereby allow multinational corporations to function in a world without rules.

It's something few Americans would actually want. So FOX's presentation depends on the viewer's ignorance of fact and sensitivity to emotional appeal.

NPR's existence undermines not only FOX's narrative, but its credibility.

That's what facts do to propaganda.

FOX "News" has been moving openly since January 2009 to pit Palin against Obama. She was Glenn Beck's very first guest, the day before Obama's inauguration.

Williams knows she doesn't have a chance against Obama -- but at FOX "News" -- for whatever reason -- that's heresy. When Williams says Mike Pence has no charisma, Bill Kristol looks like he's going to cry. And the other FOX panelists respond as if Williams has just pissed on the rug.

Bad boy, Juan Williams. You popped the propaganda balloon -- and had the last word.

No Christmas for you.