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what surprises me about fox is that everyone does not seem to know that it's a conservative media outlet. it's infotainment is by definition pre=chewed to slot into the political filters that the business model presupposes. so it is manifestly not a "news" outlet. it is an information stream that performs an assimilation operation, one which harmonizes it with the political viewpoints the business model assumes are held by its central demographic. i have no access to information not in the public domain, and i know the model---so it's not hard to find.
what fox's success is testimony to is the resistance to critical interaction with information that's a result of the legion failures of education to teach these skills and demonstrate their importance.
information streams are assimilated wholly into a consumer space, and what is seemingly sought from it is gratification. because "markets are rational"---the circulation of money is the confirmation in this blinkered, stupid system----it is understood as reasonable that infotainment be the norm and that the providing of gratification be the aim. there are any number of gratifications, btw: that of being horrified plays to a kind of voyeurism; the gratification of being paranoid plays to a kind of narcissism (if you are personally under threat, that fact in itself confirms in a backhanded way your Importance in the World---who would bother being a threat to you if you were not Important?); images of chaos and destruction play to an affirmation of distance (you watch it from your living room--it is a form of entertainment) across which the cheap, one-dimensional emoticons of sympathy and pity can flow (providing you the gratification of performing some act of public Largesse by giving o so deeply of your one-dimensional self)
dissonances play back into a consonance of Demand Structures.
disruptions make more desirable the Norm of buying commodities.
in this period of collapse of empire, the centrality of this Norm is the mainspring of wholesale denial.
infotainment is predicated on maintenance of that Norm and the sense of continuity which underpins it.
remember that "news" is an advertising delivery system that trafficks in particular types of "contact" with a "reality" that is always distant, like a movie that you watch.
in this context, fox is merely a particularly obvious, particularly self-referential version of the same basic machinery that is everywhere in the dominant media. from this viewpoint, conservative biais and "liberal" are versions of the same basic machine, which is geared around you as a consumer, you who wants commodities, you who needs to feel safe in order to indulge in the rituals of Purchase.
but that doesn't mean that therefore there's no difference between conservative and other forms of biais. there are differences. self-referentiality, self-confirming arguments are one indicator---more present in populist conservative ideology, slightly less elsewhere.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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