In a special about swine flu and the vaccine for it, the Fox News host sounds almost reasonable -- almost
Glenn Beck
Fox News
Glenn Beck isn’t going to tell you whether he’s decided to get the swine flu vaccine, and whether he’ll be getting his kids vaccinated too. “I’m trying to give you the facts tonight, with no opinion,” the Fox News host said at the top of his hour-long special about H1N1 and the vaccine for it.
It may, of course, have been just that simple. But watching the show, it seemed like there was something else at work: It seemed like Beck was leaning towards the pro-vaccination side, that he, for once, doesn’t believe the conspiracy theories. It was one of those moments where some of what Beck does seems like an act, a vestige of the showmanship he learned while a DJ on morning radio.
The man knows his audience. He has to know that his usual trips down into conspiracism mean that there are people watching him who do believe that the government will be injecting an RFID chip into your arm so that they can ship you off to a camp where you’ll be held as punishment for refusing to be vaccinated. But he doesn’t agree with them, and that means a little dance — Beck debunks some of those fears, sure, but first he gives a little nod in their direction.
“We must take this threat [of swine flu] seriously,” Beck said near the top of the show. “I think the government has done a responsible job so far. However, the arrogance of those in science and politics that we have seen lately should give us pause.”
To start the special, Beck had two doctors on. One, Marc Siegel, is a Fox News contributor; he took the pro-vaccination side. The other, Kent Holtorf, specializes in bioidentical hormone therapy, an alternative medical treatment of dubious value. He took the anti-vaccine side. These sorts of he-said she-said debates, especially when conducted regarding issues of science, tend to give far too much credence to people who don’t have evidence on their side. In this case, that was Holtorf, who argued against many vaccines generally, relying in part on an argument that’s been repeatedly debunked about thimerosal, an additive, making some of the shots harmful.
In this segment, beyond the basic issue of having an anti-vaccination argument like this one on his show at all, Beck wasn’t too bad. But he did revert to type on a couple of occasions, playing to the more paranoid in his audience — after Siegel pointed out studies showing that the claims about thimerosal aren’t true, for instance, Beck held up a copy of an old cigarette ad that featured an illustration of a doctor.
Beck even went so far as to debunk some of the wilder rumors floating around the Internet, which include a myth that the swine flu vaccine contains an RFID chip that will allow the government to track people. But he wasn’t content to leave well enough alone, and started going back to his usual bag of tricks — not too surprising, considering the fears in some circles about RFID chips being the “mark of the beast,” a sign of the End Times.
“You have to know that the technology exists, but you also have to know that at this time there is no connection to the swine flu, there is no connection in any government contract, we can not find any government contract on these chips,” Beck said. “However, it exists, and you must stay vigilant. Be aware, watch for it. Watch the companies and the government. I don’t trust the government either. I know the days we’re living in. Vigilance is the key word.”
The fake “War on Christmas” outrage
It's become as integral to the season as caroling and Black Friday -- but the sentiment is completely manufactured
One of the defining qualities of late December is the predictable and ritualized nature of America’s holiday season. Other than discovering what’s inside the wrapped gift boxes, there’s no mystery or suspense to it anymore. The Christmas music starts right before Thanksgiving. Then come the flickering lights, the red-and-green decor, Hollywood’s vacation movie blitz, and finally, with media charlatans turning the key, the fake outrage machine rumbles back to life.
Like a narcissist’s souped-up 4-by-4, this turbocharged colossus of self-righteous indignation makes a lot of noise and leaves a mess in its wake — but ultimately says a lot more about its drivers’ pitiable insecurities than anything else.
This year has been particularly illustrative, as the fake outrage machine has caricatured itself like a Bigfoot-esque monster truck in a desperate bid for attention. In just the last few weeks, the Heritage Foundation billed an Agriculture Department initiative to raise revenue for tree farmers as a “Christmas Tree Tax”; Fox News said that standard federal safety warnings were proof that the government wants to “tell you how to decorate your Christmas tree”; and conservative activists criticized Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an Independent, for daring to consecrate a “holiday tree” — rather than a “Christmas Tree” — at the statehouse.
Meanwhile, under the headline “‘Modern Grinches Step Up Anti-Christmas Efforts,” the Christian Broadcasting Network lashed out at cities for trying to respect the separation of church and state at holiday time, and the American Family Association continued its annual effort to denigrate companies that substitute “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas.”
To know that this machine’s outrage is indeed fake is to appreciate some telling facts about the alleged transgressions. For instance, the government’s recent revenue and regulatory moves were entirely routine and nonreligious, while Gov. Chafee was just preserving a long-standing tradition in a state founded as a haven for religious pluralism. Similarly, many cities are still including Christmas in their winter festivities — they are just including other celebrations as well. And if saying “Happy Holidays” somehow represents a “War on Christmas,” then none other than Christian icon Tim Tebow must be one of the aggressors’ lead field generals, what with the NFL quarterback now appearing in a television ad wishing Coloradans “Happy Holidays” — not “Merry Christmas.”
These facts, of course, are no deterrent to the fake outrage machine, because the machine’s operators aren’t really interested in preventing religious bigotry. In a majority-Christian nation whose politics and culture are steeped in Christianity, these zealots are interested in pretending their fellow Christians are somehow oppressed, contradictory facts be damned.
In propagating such an illusion, they’re not earnestly embodying their religion’s missionary spirit. Instead, they’re manufacturing victimhood, all to gin up sympathy and create a rationale to continue ramrodding their theology down everyone else’s throats.
That some feel this need to push their faith with such craven tactics speaks volumes about the nature of spiritual self-doubt today. Sure, our tumultuous world of bombast and chaos leads us to assume that the loudest are the most devout. But in practice, those who are truly comfortable in their faith are often the most humble about their orthodoxies because they have nothing to prove. By contrast, those who are the most insecure in their beliefs can sometimes be the most in-your-face about their dogma.
In that sense, there’s a “doth protest too much” tenor to the roar of the fake outrage machine. That self-indicting message may be difficult to detect amid all the exploding ordnance in the War on Christmas, but it’s there — and the more the machine revs its engines every December, the more that message comes through.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota
13. Megyn Kelly
Fox's perpetually outraged anchor will sell any dubious talking point with a sneer
Megyn Kelly is one of Fox News chief Roger Ailes’ favorites, and it’s easy to see why: She’s equal parts gorgeous and belligerent. She’s smart and quick enough to hold her own in any interview, and she has no qualms about beating the drum for whatever crackpot right-wing story line the network’s lead propagandists are currently pushing, no matter how dubious. Hence, we get a year’s worth of terrifying stories on the awesome political power of the New Black Panther Party, complete with unlikely Justice Department conspiracy theories and b-roll footage designed to unnerve old white viewers. When the story has outlived its usefulness, it’s summarily forgotten, and we move on to the next tale.
There’s really no one who better represents the insidious nature of the Fox project than Kelly. Hannity and O’Reilly are packaged and sold as right-wing shouters. Kelly’s an “anchor” who professes to have no partisan bias of her own. And she could very well be telling the truth! She doesn’t need to personally believe the things she says, after all. When she casually refers to the tax burden on “the so-called rich” (so called because they are, generally), she’s just doing her job. When Kelly, in the midst of excoriating a Democrat, claims that Fox personalities don’t regularly compare liberals and Democrats to Nazis, everyone (besides some unknown non-savvy portion of her audience) knows we’re not supposed to take her seriously.
I imagine that perma-sneer, that disgusted look of disbelieving contempt that remains plastered on Kelly’s face during the entirety of “America Live,” disappears the minute the red light on top of the camera goes off, because Megyn Kelly doesn’t actually give a shit about the National Day of Prayer or seriously believe the New Black Panther Party represents a threat to democracy. She’s just happy to have a job doing something she loves: being a reliable bile-delivery system for a massive political messaging organization.
Recently, in an argument with some repulsive talk radio hack, Kelly defended not just her own paid maternity leave — the sort of professional perk that a high-powered attorney like herself would (justifiably!) feel totally entitled to — but went on to seemingly endorse European-style government-mandated paid leave for all, including fathers. The fact that a pre-leave Kelly had savagely mocked the idea of paternity leave is amusing but unsurprising. She’s a former attorney. Her primarily professional skill is convincingly making whatever argument you pay her to make. (She said as much to Rebecca Dana, in fact.) Which is so much worse and hackier than being a simple ideologue.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Her offhand claim that police pepper spray is “a food product, essentially,” which seems like a very rough first draft of a right-wing talking point that was not quite ready for standard use by the noise machine.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
17. John Stossel
The cable news clown is a poor ambassador for libertarianism
I’d say it’s nice to have a libertarian presence on television regularly, but there are I believe more libertarians on television regularly in 2011 than there are morally ambiguous antiheroes on premium cable dramas. (What we really need are more socialists — Americans are sick of capitalism!) And Stossel is not a great brand ambassador for the “free minds, free markets” crowd, because he’s a silly clown.
Stossel’s a ridiculous local-news “consumer watchdog” reporter who discovered Milton Friedman. He’s the worst of simple-minded sensationalist television news masquerading as a maverick because he’s “politically incorrect” (a term that when self-applied invariably means “an asshole”).
If I were a libertarian, I’d be embarrassed by Stossel’s prominence. Sneering contempt for supposed liberal shibboleths is not actually a well-considered political philosophy. There’s nothing “libertarian,” for example, about not believing in climate change. That’s just tribal corporatism, totally disconnected from any economics-based belief about the superiority of market forces over government industrial policy.
Stossel rehashes received wisdom without truly understanding, let alone questioning, any of it, which is basically what conservatives think every leftist college student is doing. The limits of his conclusion-first mode of advocacy journalism are exposed when he’s forced to apologize for reporting his predetermined conclusions even when the evidence doesn’t bear them out, like when he attempted to report that organic produce (which hippies and liberals like) is more dangerous than conventional produce (which is grown and picked by the great free market god, who bestows his grace on giant agribusiness conglomerates), only for it to be revealed that his own tests showed no such thing.
Of course, it’s perfectly libertarian to profess not to see what exactly is unfair or exploitative about the widespread practice of unpaid internships, a system that provides profitable organizations with free labor while offering work experience only to college students privileged enough to devote significant amounts of time to unpaid internships. “I built my career on unpaid interns,” Mr. Stossel says, which does at least explain the quality of research that goes into his specials.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
In which Stossel plays a clip from the film “Gasland,” a documentary exposing the dangers of natural gas extraction for people living near the extraction sites, and then announces that it is perfectly normal for your tap water to contain highly flammable amounts of methane. “Weird stuff happens,” Stossel says. The fact that a peer-reviewed study showed that water wells close to natural gas mines had 17 times the levels of methane in the water than wells farther away from fracturing sites is just one of those nutty coincidences.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Who’s winning the Fox primary?
The conservative cable channel treads carefully in Gingrich-Romney race
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney (Credit: AP)
The Republican primary campaign has become a two-man race, with unloved ostensible front-runner Mitt Romney currently suffering the indignity of trailing in the polls to self-satisfied serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. Where does the unofficial communications arm of the conservative movement stand on the race? They’re noncommittal, thus far.
We all know the basic facts: A lot of conservatives see Romney as completely unacceptable. The more pragmatic ones see Gingrich as wholly unelectable. Fox News is run by consummate conservative elite Roger Ailes. Ailes has two objectives: Generate ratings and elect Republicans. The Gingriches of the world excite Fox viewers, because of their shamelessness. Romney excites no one, but he’ll need Fox’s support if he ends up the beneficiary of a Gingrich collapse.
Fox has indulged its audience’s brief surges of affection for unelectable fringe candidates, from Trump through Cain, but the channel’s always been careful to remind the base that they may eventually have to hold their noses and vote for Romney. Karl Rove, who’s already running a shadow campaign against Obama, has made this point explicitly during his Fox appearances.
Romney went from trailing in the Fox News appearances list to getting more uninterrupted airtime over the last week than any other candidate. But Gingrich beat him in minutes the week before. And Newt was just on Hannity last night, where he seemed much more comfortable than Romney did in his earlier sit-down with Bret Baier, a tougher interviewer by any standard.
Watching Fox this morning, clips of Gingrich’s Hannity interview were replayed multiple times. Ron Paul’s devastating anti-Gingrich ad was excerpted for a minute, followed by a clip of Romney sounding like he believed in anthropogenic climate change.
The network seems, in other words, undecided at the moment, or at least willing to see if Gingrich can pull this out without humiliating himself like he always does. The Rovians may yet win the day, but for now Fox seems to be joining the GOP base in convincing itself that Gingrich is electable.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Right-wing press demands liberal media repeat “Occupy shooter” smear
How a disturbed would-be presidential assassin became another bizarre conservative meme
Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez
Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez tried to kill President Barack Obama, by firing a gun at the White House, and one would think that that combination of “hating Obama” and “using a gun” would make using him to smear liberals a bit of a stretch, even for Fox and the rest of the right-wing press. You’d think that they’d shy away from even mentioning the guy, as they generally do in prominent cases of decidedly right-wing politically motivated violence. You’d be wrong, though, because they’ve all decided that Ortega-Hernandez is the Occupy Wall Street shooter.
Ortega-Hernandez will soon be a minor historical footnote, like the guy who tried to crash a plane into Nixon’s White House, Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, the weird guy who may have been a part of a secret plot to kill or scare Jimmy Carter, John Hinkley, the guy who tried to crash an airplane into Bill Clinton’s White House, the guy who fired bullets at Bill Clinton’s White House and the guy who fired bullets at George W. Bush’s White House. What did all of these people have in common? Their motives were … slightly difficult for rational people to comprehend. They tended to be paranoid and disturbed and their stated reasons for wishing the president dead were usually fairly incoherent.
Ortega-Hernandez wanted to kill President Obama because Ortega-Hernandez thought himself the second coming of Jesus Christ and was convinced Barack Obama was the antichrist. It’d hard to make any sort of coherent political point out of that.
But because of a bad bit of reporting — bad but understandable — ABC initially said that police suspected Ortega-Hernandez had spent time at the Occupy DC encampment, before heading out to shoot the White House. Police may have suspected that, but there’s been no evidence whatsoever that it’s the case. (He seems to have more of a connection to Oprah than Occupy, but no one is calling him the “Oprah shooter.”)
The truth has not dissuaded Fox News from repeatedly referencing Ortega-Hernandez’s completely imaginary time spent at the Occupy camp. The NRA’s radio show did the same.
But the fact that it is now known that there has never been any evidence linking Ortega-Hernandez to any Occupy event anywhere has not stopped conservatives from … crying about liberal media bias against conservatives. John Nolte at Big Journalism says: “the MSM is working overtime to make sure no narrative is created from the suspected White House shooter’s connection to #OccupyDC.”
Right, because … there’s no connection. Except that some guy at Occupy San Diego said something stupid and regrettable about feeling sympathy for the crazy guy who shot at the White House. Which is, as “connections” go, a stretch!
So here we have a wholly invented right-wing meme based on fantasy and one out-of-context line from a now out-of-date news story, repeated endlessly in an attempt to unfairly smear a political movement they despise, and the fact that responsible media outlets aren’t repeating the smear is an example of the nefarious leftist media conspiracy. Sorry the New York Times isn’t repeating this particular lie, guys!
I for one wonder why the media ins’t investigating the shooter’s connections to the University of Texas College Republicans.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Page 1 of 80 in Fox News
Obama Continues to Box In His Opposition 
The Fictional Obama 
Bishops' rift with Obama about politics, not religion 
A match made on Craigslist adult services 
Can’t see the forest for the wood 
The things I carry 
When I lost the ability to type 
Pop art, the beaded edition 
The beautiful banality of high school 
The unemployed meet MacArthur’s tanks 
Demi’s last night out 
One day you’re in 
Pitch and catch 
