IRAQ WAR INTENTIONAL MISINFORMATION

Report of an empirical study (Oct. 2003) by two research centers at University of Maryland on public views of three misperceptions during the first part of the Iraq War (seven surveys conducted Jan.-Mar. 2003) that showed that, e.g., those who primarily watched Fox News were much more likely to be misinformed about the three misperceptions (that Iraq and al-Qaeda had close links, that WMDs had been found, and that world opinion supported the war).

For example, a graph (p. 13) shows that the study found that 20% of the respondents who primarily watched Fox News had none of the misperceptions, whereas 77% of those who got most of their news from NPR/PBS had none of the misperceptions. Eighty percent of those who got most of their news from Fox had one or more of the misperceptions, whereas 23% of those who got most of their news from NPR/PBS had one or more of the misperceptions.

The scholars who carried out the research offered no causes for these findings, i.e., why are Fox viewers more misinformed? But I will; there is no other conclusion that I can think of other than it is intentional purveyance of misinformation. The motives of the intentionality, I'm not so sure about. Perhaps profits mixed with ideology?

http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdfSee More

INFO-FRIGHTMENT

I always wonder about those people who use talk radio and cable news as if were legitimate sources of news. Journalism they are not--with journalism defined as a discipline of verification, which separates it from propaganda. Entertainment and propaganda they are. The political-entertainment media outlets are what they are, and that is an ongoing political campaign which uses sensationalism and scare tactics for the intentional project of spreading disinformation for a narrow political end. Fox, for example, lets its editorial policy set its "news" presentation. When do you EVER hear a fair discussion of issues on Fox or on talk radio? Ever?

Yes, the middle-liberal news outlets, such as the NYTimes, WashPost have their political views, but overwhelmingly they are relegated to the editorial pages where they belong! And, don't forget: they have their op-ed pages filled with conservative pundits. I frequently go to those two newspapers to read conservative views. Compare that with Fox and you get an idea of what Fox is: a one-sided, ongoing political campaign that has discovered a winning formula of dishing out "info-frightment." I would like to hear you argue otherwise. All you can argue is that they are "correct," not that they are fair and balanced. Whenever a media outlet makes you fearful (using code messages about race, your personal economic outlook, you personal safety, your religion, etc.), ask yourself what is going on. If it made you fearful, the message was purposefully intended. And, it worked.

For example, if you listened to the media outlets I am referencing, you would have believed there was going to be a NAZI take-over of the U.S. government last year! Or, that the Obama adm. was going last year to confiscate guns, even entering people's houses. Remember the run on guns sales? Why did that come about? Or, that Obama adm. is rife with Marxists! Or, that history does not count when it comes to understanding the current economic problems! It never stops with the talk radio and cable news campaigning. Why? It is monetarily profitable. Look at Rush's salary or Fox's balance sheet.

No, the current economic problems are complex, not limited to three items; but those three are huge. Current budgetary deficit spending is NOT the problem. In fact, we need INCREASED spending for now. Think back to the Great Depression. We now, as then, have a global downturn--just the time to NOT decrease spending (or raise taxes). But, the anti-deficit hysteria is simple to relay in the media. It's simple to understand and it causes fright--just the right formula for the media propagandists! Reminds me of the WMD scare leading up to the Iraq War, about which Paul Wolfowitz admitted was a false pretext.

So, why do you trust those media outlets? Which of your deep-seated fears are they speaking to? That the Anti-Christ is now in charge? That you will lose your religion? That dark-skinned foreigners will overrun the country? That a different race is getting more than its share? That traditional marriage is being destroyed (because someone else wants the same rights)? That deep concern for the environment is a conspiracy by "wackos?" That your [fill in a freedom] is being taken away? All of these come from the media outlets I am referencing.

And more: That the current president hates whites, hates the country, in un-American, is a Muslim, is radical, is a socialist, is a Marxist, is a Nazi--all these I have heard on those media outlets.

Why?

PROPAGANDA VERSUS NEWS

Finally, someone in the mainstream media has evaluated in a public forum the truth about Fox News Network. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010031102523.html

Journalism has as its basis the verification of facts; otherwise, it is propaganda. I could list a page of untruths that Fox has allowed to suffuse its evening "opinion" shows (when most Americans are watching) which it knew to be false. In some cases, it later claimed it never said they were true. Many times it allows its "contributors" to tell the lies without correction. Other times Fox says it was covering a "rumor" as important "news" (with the news "value" of many people believing the rumor, partly due to Fox stirring up the rumor), later asserting that it never claimed the rumor's veracity. (Sure keeps it in the public awareness, though.)

As far as knowing the difference between straight news and opinion shows, I'd say many Americans do not distinguish between the two (although they might "know" the difference), especially if the opinion shows--Fox's entire evening format--conforms to viewers' ideology and preconceived biases. Also, the bottom-of-the-screen news runner sometimes does the trick of editorializing.

In sum, Fox's overall modus operandi is not journalism--requiring verification--but at best editorialization and at worst propagandizing. Fox is what it is--a political campaign. That's okay, but journalism it is not.

FOXY TO A TEA

As a close, conservative Republican friend of mine admitted, "If the Republican Party had won the last presidential election and Congress were controlled by Republicans, they would have had to do nearly the same with the economy as did the Democrats." In our discussion he said that Republicans, if in power, could not have let the economy go into a Depression, just as the Democrats could not. There would necessarily have been deficit spending--no way around it, or let the economy tank.

My friend says he is glad the Democrats won the last election, because now they will take the unthinking blame for the problems created mostly in the Bush Administration when it inherited a budget surplus and then started two unfunded wars while it cut taxes for mostly the rich and extended a hugely expensive, unfunded Medicaid drug-benefits package, all during a shaky economy. All this left Obama holding the bag for a trillion dollars, plus what will turn out to be a two trillion-dollar war in Iraq. Americans are amnesiac vis-a-vis the political past.

The party in power now should get credit for saving the American economy. History does matter.

The horrendous deficits that run out ahead of us are the real problem, not so much current government spending that pumps the economy so that we have a chance for the longer-term future. Those long-term deficits are truly horrendous. Will those who do not understand our situation be ready to make the drastic and painful changes, such as increased taxes and drastically cut benefits and programs, including Defense? It is now unimaginable the changes that will be required. When that time comes, the Fox-Tea Party might have its wishes come true: nearly non-functioning government at all levels, with few services, extremely high unemployment, and people scraping out a meager existence. If we are to have a chance in that medium- to longer-term future, we must have spending now. Go ahead and blame the Democrats; the Republican-Fox-Tea Party will have its chance at controlling the disaster. Perhaps add another war? Give further tax cuts to mostly the rich? All while waving the American flag and creating lots of billionaires and blaming the poor?

Pelosi's comments about the Tea Party movement (TPM) and the Republican Party are obviously political. But, it is still true that there are some connections and overlap between the TPM and the GOP, which the latter hopes to control for its electoral benefit.

What is also salient are the connections and overlap between the TPM and Fox Politico-Entertainment Network. It is truly difficult to disconnect where one ends and the other begins. Does anyone deny this? Hannity, Beck, and another Fox host staged their shows at TPM rallies. Fox gave inestimable free publicity to the TPM. In truth, it is the Tea-Fox Movement.

CLIMATIC HYSTERIATAINMENT

No need anymore to broach the subject of the hacked emails about supposed lying about climate-change data, because it looks very likely that there was no such lying. The British scientists involved have adequately explained their use of words, such as "tricking" the data to mean the reconciling of databases; i.e., they apparently used the word "trick" to mean "massage" the data, to make them correlatable. Nothing in the hacked emails looks like a smoking gun. If there were, we would certainly have heard more about it from real scientists, not the news-entertainers, who have now fallen silent on the topic, too. (One of their ploys: create doubt without support, then cast about for something else.)

Where's the evidence other than that some British scientists used their odd, idiosyncratic language? In truth, there's a great deal of other, independent, evidence from a variety of studies about global climate change--e.g., re the ice caps--even if there had been some collusion at that single British research center (which, as I said, looks doubtful).

The linked Youtube video of an RT.com telecast is risible. It indicates more what the government of Russia wants to disperse about global climate change than it does about the actual science of global climate change. For, RT.com is "Russia Today," the new, well funded, state-run, state-owned Russian-government news agency of RIA Novosti, whose mission statement reads, "to present the Russian point of view" (I obtained this from RT.com; also see Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)>), when actually it presents the Russian GOVERNMENT's point of view. It is a cheerleader for the Kremlin, just as FOX Entertainment-"News" and the rabid Michelle Malkin are cheerleaders for the U.S. Republican Party and very conservative American ideology, including being anti-climate-change science (no matter what the science says).

With the recent 10% drop in the American public's belief in the science of global warming, Fox Entertainment-"News" has been successful in this matter, just as it was in creating the hysteria about Pres. Obama's "plan" to propagandize and brainwash America's elementary-school children. Remember that? It certainly was entertaining, in an hysteria-creating sort of way. See a pattern?

Addressing the Malkin article--that there was a conspiracy to suppress a paper by an EPA researcher--here's this article, a fairly recent one, from the NY Times, which obtained those four emails and more, under the Freedom of Information Act, and interviewed the EPA researcher, who, it turns out is not a climate scientist (this frequently is the case): <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/science/earth/25epa.html?_r=1>.

Then, there's last week's (21 Jan. 2010) release of a report by NASA showing, among other things, that 2008 was only slightly cooler than 2005 which was the warmest year on record. It is a disingenuous reading of data to claim that the Planet is cooling when only one year is cooler than a previous year, especially when that year (2005) was the warmest since the 1880s. The trend is continuously upward with only small deviations from the upward trend. Please read the Agence France Press article (<http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/22-5>) and/or the NASA article (<http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=249>).

I will be glad to consider (again) the argument that climate scientists in the 1970s said that the Planet was cooling. That has been adequately denied by the one scientist who supposedly claimed the Planet was cooling (he did not, as he says). You can easily find his statements online. That the Planet was supposedly cooling was based on a sensationalist news article or two written in the general press to grab attention. Climate scientists did not claim the Planet was cooling. That fiction should have been dropped by now.

Present evidence that climate scientists said the Planet was cooling in the 1970s. (Even if they did, it would be of only historical interest.) Present evidence that the Planet is currently cooling (away from the long-term warming trend). Present evidence that counters the consensus, among climate scientists, not just an isolated few, that the Planet is warming and that there's the probability, to a significant degree, that it is due to anthropogenic causes.

This should be a matter of science, not a creation of Fox Entertainment-"News" and Michelle Malkin and Sen. Inhofe. The science is of the utmost importance to civilization. We can, and must, do without the ideologically motivated, hysteria-creating, news-entertainers.

PROPAGANDISTIC WORD-IMAGES

MediaMatters was being much too generous when it labeled as "obtuse" E. D. Hill's recent use of the word "terrorist" on Fox Network in relation to the Obamas. Obtuse means dull, insensitive, stupid, difficult to understand. Hill's words, however, are manifestly understandable. It seems to me they must be seen as calculated effort to sow frightful word-images in the minds of Americans. Think of it: a professional TV commentator does not make a slip of the tongue on the order of saying "terrorist" when speaking of a presidential candidate.

This was no less intentional than Sean Hannity--another Fox Network entertainer-propagandist--keeping alive through a couple of news cycles the false story about the supposed use of the word "Whitey" by Michelle Obama. Fox and Hannity unconscionably claim it was just covering the story about a "rumor," a rumor they were reasonably sure was false--there was never ANY evidence--because the rumor machine about the Obamas has been working overtime for some time now. Yet, they kept alive a lie. Thus, Fox Network must be understood as a prime cog in the anti-Obama rumor machine.

Prepare yourselves America: What we have seen so far is just the warm-up to the juggernaut Swiftboating of the Obamas. Those of us who understand this must keep struggling for truth to find its way into the civic forum. Otherwise, Fox, Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh will rumor us and slip-of-the-tongue us into another administration of barbarity and--I can use this word with verity now--obtuseness.