This one clip captures the essence of the insidious propaganda that oozes out of the outfit called Fox news.
It compares the rabid attack on President Obama, by the sordid cast of characters at Fox, when Obama proposed the (carefully planned) meeting with Kim Jong Un to the obsequious fawning treatment of Trump, when he did so recently, with zero preparation and no real plans.
This is the kind of propaganda one finds in tinpot dictatorships and fascist regimes. We don’t expect this in America “the greatest country/democracy on Earth”.
And obviously, there is an audience that feeds off this crap; one can sense the power this ruthless daily onslaught of hatred-driven distorted but entertaining news, has over weak, uninformed and fearful minds.
There is also big money and profits behind it, not just from advertisement and merchandise, but from the power and government-control it brings to the puppet-masters.
No other single news channel has such a large, loyal and enraptured audience, an audience that shuns and abhors other news sources.
Here are a few questions to ponder over -
- Is this the future of news — news that titillates, entertains, generates anger and feeds your basic instincts, facts and truth be damned?
- Do we have to adopt these tactics to reach our audiences?
- Is the Internet helping people become more widely informed and skilled or has it become a sharper instrument of propaganda?
- Are Russian bots more powerful than the great thinkers, philosophers, scientists, educators, writers and journalists of our times in shaping public opinion and understanding?
- Will emerging technologies like big data analysis and AI, left to their own devices and/or controlled by oligarchs, make things worse?
- How can we fix this?