Russell Brand vs FOX NEWS

Here’s my two cents:  Fox News is not news.  Fox is really an experiment born from an idea that started in the Nixon white house.  A Nixon media consultant wanted to find the most effective ways to reshape public consciousness and manipulate the electorate around conservative ideas.  Television news became the vehicle to get American voters to subscribe to the paranoid racist oligarchical beliefs of one man, Roger Ailes.  Ailes’s legendary paranoia is thickly laced throughout every Fox News program.  He taps into the angst and fears of poor working class white Americans who have lived through quite a bit of change over the last 50 years.  With African Americans getting the right to vote and gaining measurable political power.  The large and fast growing population increase of Latin Americans.  The transition into a globalized economy which outsourced hundreds of thousands of American jobs that supported a large number of middle class families.  Then add the recent collapse of our financial system and home market, the large increase in low pay jobs, two decades of stagnant wages and you have a lot of reasons to be angry.  The remedies for solving all of this and addressing income inequality are hard to explain to a layman and there’s no easy solutions.  Fox News gives their viewers an easy solution and tells them exactly who to blame.  Minorities, liberals, and immigrants.  It’s the simple answer they were looking for, and years of racial resentment bubbling just below the surface makes that simple answer very believable to them.  Fox News tells the racist it’s ok to be racist… if it weren’t for the blacks getting government handouts paid for by your taxes and hard work, you’d be able to make a middle class living.  If it weren’t for the illegal immigrants taking your jobs and taking advantage of our resources you’d have enough money to send your kids to a good school.  If it weren’t for the liberals and their fight against Christianity, God would bless America once again just like our national anthem says and we’d all prosper.  If we’d just deregulate everything and trust the market our economy would grow.  If the liberals hadn’t gave up on capitalism and democracy and switched it for socialism, our jobs and factories wouldn’t be moving overseas.  All of these false narratives are highlighted and reinforced over and over again in Fox News reporting.  Every news story gets spun and tweaked to fit one of those false narratives.

Fox News stories and reports are constantly getting debunked by fact checkers and legitimate journalists but the built in paranoia of Fox News trickles down from Ailes, to his on-air talent, directly to the Fox News viewer.  They are told not to trust the mainstream media (which they renamed as”lamestream media”).  They do not read or watch any other news at all.  Even if shown undisputable evidence of a Fox lie, they will not believe it.  Ailes has a captive audience which he uses to manipulate American politics.  He convinces people living below the poverty line that a minimum wage increase would hurt their family.  He convinces a McDonald employee that they should pay more taxes than their millionaire employers.  He convinces young uninsured people that they don’t need any health insurance.  He convinces his viewers that reducing the number of black people voting is not only a good idea but also not racist.  He convinces those who are currently out of work due to the bad job market, that cutting their unemployment benefits will help them find employment sooner, even though there are no jobs to be found.

So Russell Brand is not exaggerating at all when he says Fox News is more dangerous to the United States than any terrorists network could ever be. #SociallyUrban

Russell Brand vs FOX News?  Who’s the winner?