12 Days of Christmas Scorn, Day 3 -- Media Manipulators and Seditionistas Edition

Field Marshall Erwin Rommel (1891-1944) -- uh, wait . . .

by Noah

Today's Scorn Awards focus on media. For some reason, there's a heavy concentration of Fox and Fox-related honorees.


1. THE JOSEPH GOEBBELS REST HOME, ASYLUM, AND DRESS-UP AWARD

To Glenn Beck, the man who even dressed as Rommel on his book cover. Every day is Halloween if you’re Glenn Beck!

How did it end for Rommel, Glenn? Would you like an apple?


2. THE MIGHTY PROTECTOR OF CORPORATE INTERESTS AWARD

Duo of Pure Evil: Rupert and Roger

To Roger Ailes, president of Fox Noise and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group, and soon of Hell, for direction of unfair coverage done by unbalanced front men and women, agents of chaos and hate all. The whole thing about Fox, the very reason it exists, is to protect and advance the interests of multinational corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens. They do it, and do it very well, by manipulating the hopes, fears, frustrations, and dreams of the people most hurt by their agenda. They do it by leaving out key pieces of information and blending what information they do provide with fictions and even subliminal messages:


Who's that hiding in my Fox 5 logo? You won't believe how subliminally fair and balanced the answer is.

It's all designed to take in or manipulate their naïve and overwhelmed and overburdened target audience. The irony of taking the word of a very Far Right network owned by a foreigner who pushes questions about President Obama’s birth and citizenship seems to have escaped Fox’s impressionable fans. As the lead propaganda arm of the Republican Party, Fox continues to incessantly campaign against President Obama in a very disingenuous and dishonest manner. For instance, their recent making a mountain of a molehill when it came to the president’s recent sending of a letter to North Korea’s mental case of a leader, Kim Jong-Il. This letter was presented hourly, as evidence that Obama is come sort of un-American commie sympathizer. What Fox conveniently failed to mention was that their guy, George W. Bush, had done the very same thing.

That’s typical stuff for Fox, and they know it gets over on their naïve, pliable audience. Drastically exaggerating attendance numbers for wingnut events is another favorite ploy; even matching film of larger crowds from previous, bigger events to things like, say, a recent Michele Bachmann rally on the Washington Mall. It’s shameless stuff. Sometimes all you have to do is look at the tree foliage or the clothes that people are wearing and you can tell that the crowd scenes are not from “yesterday’s event,” or even last month’s. But antics like this are a measure of how stupid Fox thinks its audience is.

It’s supermarket-tabloid TV. The next thing you’ll see is them superimposing the obviously fake depictions of aliens you see on the covers of the supermarket tabloids onto the pictures they broadcast. At Fox, the games never stop. They are the most Pravda-like of our “news” outlets -- and remember, the word pravda means "truth"!

Downright comical, if it wasn’t so sad, and so subversive.

The new buzzword at the padded-cell network is hoax. Hoax is the concept and word Fox is drumming into the pliable and gullible these days. Everything that Repugs can’t understand, from evolution to the need for health care and insurance reform that is in their own best interests to global warming to the president’s citizenship, is a hoax. Now even the need for a minimum wage is a hoax. Fox (and others) will not be satisfied until we are all enslaved by banks and multinational corporations. Get used to it. It will be their most used word in 2010.



A Special Shout-Out should go to a creature named Ben Stein. Stein, literally a former game show host (Win Ben Stein's Money, see above), is the walking, carping definition of pompous elitism. He’s already on board the Ailes train to cuckoo land, recently calling climate change, evolution, and healthcare reform hoaxes all! He managed to go to the finest schools all right and leave without an education, or at least the knowledge of how to use whatever brains he was born with. His role on Fox is to basically be the cranky old guy who sits on his porch all day and yells at anyone who dares to walk by within his diminishing sight to get off his weed-infested lawn. Stein epitomizes the Repug bitterness toward 21st-century life and longing for a return to the 1800s. To him, everything is a hoax.

Except for the hoax of the George Dubya Bush “presidency,” which somehow has missed them completely.


3. MEDIA ASS OF THE YEAR AWARD

To Time magazine’s 12-year-old-boy reporter Mark Halperin, who created a photo of Sen. Mary Landrieux (D-LA) with a wad of semen in her hair and published it on the "The Page," Time’s joint site with CNN. And he still works for the company! Can a promotion be far behind? This also speaks volumes about the level Time and CNN have sunk to.

Newsweek came in second for this award. I despise Sarah Palin as much as the next sentient person, but their T&A cover objectifying her was uncalled for. There are plenty of more legit and substantive reasons to diss the future Miss Crazy Bag Lady of Alaska. A Dallas Cheerleader-style photo is not the way to do it. Next time they should just put a series of her mindless dingbat quotes on the cover.

This is the state of our media in 2009. Twelve-year-old boys and Bond-film-type villains like Rupert Murdoch deciding what childish message goes out. Can’t wait to see what they come up with in 2010!


4. THE SEDITIONIST AWARD

While we're on the subject, this one also goes to Herr Beck, for going so far as to lead, with the help of his employer at Padded-Cell TV, a rally of Republinuts to Washington so they could spout off about the president being a secret Muslim, not being one of “us,” not being born in the U.S., being a devotee of both Mao and Hitler (a commie and a fascist at the same time!), being black, and all that other neat stuff from the Republican belief system.

It’s not surprising that Beck would win multiple awards in 2009. He was a lead soiler of the year. And he has done more than anyone to demonstrate just what it is that Republicans stand for as they hold their freak signs high.


5. THE OSAMA BIN LADEN AWARD

To Sean Insanity, for damage done to our country through general nastiness, propaganda, and outright lying -- right in front of millions, right in prime time, five nights per week. The old man in the cave could not be prouder or happier. In fact, watching Sean is very much like watching those clips we get from Bin Laden every fortnight. Who needs truth when no pill will curb your appetite for destruction? Sean is a smart, squeaking, conniving little rodent. Just put a long gray Bin Laden beard on him and you’d be hard-pressed to discern the difference.

Like the wacko in the cave, Sean has learned his lessons well when it comes to manipulating the stressed and shafted. For Sean and all of Fox, it’s “Give me your tired and poor, and I will keep them that way.”


6. THE "I SPY FOR THE FBI" AWARD

To Repug radio host Hal Turner. Think Lou Dobbs’s mutterings and Glenn Beck’s bug-eyed ravings are as over-the-top as it gets in right-wing radio and teevee land? Then, it’s time you meet Sean Hannity’s buddy and former frequent phone-in guest, white supremacist and Holocaust denier Hal Turner. Fox may like Turner, but they haven’t hired him -- yet. Until then, he is relegated to his North Bergen (NJ)-based Internet radio broadcast and blog, where he pushes the envelope into territories that are usually explored more -- only slightly more -- subtly at Fox.

Turner has been a high-profile activist in New Jersey Repug circles. He got his start as North Jersey coordinator for, not surprisingly, the 1992 presidential campaign of current MSNBC resident Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan. Turner’s website has featured bomb-making tips and celebrated the fire-bombing of an apartment inhabited by some “savage negroes.” Want more? How’s this for a quote? “When enough illegal aliens get killed, they will stop coming to the country.” Eat your tiny, barely pulsing heart out, Lou Dobbs!

Hal Turner may have to wait a little longer for that call from Roger Ailes, though. This summer he was arrested by the FBI, after having expressed his outrage over a ruling by a panel of the Chicago-based U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals dealing with gun ownership. Said Turner about the three appellate judges on the panel, “Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges deserve to be killed.” He also provided photos, phone numbers, work addresses, and even a photo of the building where they work, with a map. The murder of Dr. George Tiller wasn’t enough for such people. Hannity’s friend also referred, in recent posts, to the killing of the parents of another Chicago federal judge, Joan Lefkow, saying, “Apparently, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court didn’t get the hint after those killings. It appears another lesson is needed.” There’s more, but you get the picture. It’s the kind of stuff you hear and see at Teabagger rallies.

My question to the FBI is this: How, at the end of the day, are the kinds of things Turner says different from Bill O’Reilly’s verbal attacks on Dr. Tiller before his murder, or even Newt Gingrich’s anti-government code-speak before the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City got blown up?



Turner now says he was an informant for the FBI. Maybe provocateur would be a better word. Stay tuned.


TOMORROW: Day 4 -- Teabagger Edition

1. The Sign of the Times Award
2. The Psychobabble Award
3. The P. T. Barnum Award
4. The I’m So Damn Cute, I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Education Award


THE SERIES SO FAR

Day 1: Con Men, Grifters, and Outlaws Edition
Day 2: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same Edition

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