How Fox News Created a New Culture of Idiots

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/media/how-fox-news-created-new-culture-idiots


News Corporation Chief Rupert Murdoch, seen here in 2011, said that News Corp. would donate $1 million to help victims of superstorm Sandy in New York and New Jersey, and urged other firms to follow suit.

Assholes largely share a thick sense of moral entitlement. Just as hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, late 19th and early 20th century businessmen like Cecil Rhodes, Albert Beveridge and John D. Rockefeller all felt a need to invoke entitlement on a cosmic scale, in effect sensing that something might be majorly amiss. In stark contrast with the grandiose reasoning of the era of colonialism, the asshole in more recent modern life often requires little or no pretext of larger cause for the special privileges he feels entitled to enjoy. He will usually have some sort of rationalization ready at hand — he is not the psychopath who rejects moral concepts altogether — but the rationalizations are becoming ever thinner, ever more difficult to identify. This newer, purer style of asshole often just presumes he should enjoy special privileges in social life as a matter of course and so requires little by way of reason for taking them as the opportunity arises.

The older style of asshole is comparatively easy to sort into types, according to their different thick entitlements. To the extent we can identify a definite moral outlook and confidently reject it as wrong, we can even take comfort in our sense of clarity about how the asshole goes awry. The newer style of asshole is more disquieting because he is harder to pin down. His thinned-out and shifting rationalizations won’t necessarily settle into any particular sustained moral perspective that we can confidently identify and challenge as wrong. Instead, his sense of entitlement is mainly identifiable in functional terms, as the stable disposition to come up with some such rationalizations or other, as the situation requires. Because the newer breed of asshole is harder to pin down, we will pay even greater attention to the details of our exemplars, if only to illustrate that there is indeed a newer, thinner, and purer asshole style. (And, again, where you don’t share my moral and political opinions, you might think of different examples of the same general type.)

* * *

Earlier assholes presented examples of self-aggrandizement in the name of a larger moral cause. The newer style of self-aggrandizing asshole needs little or no such pretext.

[MadHound]

1. Oh, Fox is part of the cause, but not the entire reason.

The rise of hate radio, the radical expansion of evangelical religions, other media outlets, the general dumbing down of this country, the rise of American nationalism, the backlash to the sixties, you can't point to one and only one item and say "This is the reason". Americans were racist nationalist idiots long before Fox came on the scene.

Probably the biggest factor has been the rise of the religious right in this country and the unholy alliance between fundies and the Republican party. But other factors have also played major roles including, yes, Fox.

What is really sad is that the entire country has drifted to the right as a result, including the Democratic party.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. It's affected the way that people talk to each other.

I'm holed up with my 90 year old father because of the storm, to protect his safety. He's talking to me in ways he never did. He's combative, irascible, and downright rude when I talk to him. He's told me to leave his house. He's been depressed since we lost power because he has no FOX News. He only reads Murdoch's rag (New York Post) and when we've had a one-hour generator donation, he's tuned into hate RW radio. He's been inundated with crass, angry talk and thinks this is how you talk to people. He doesn't recognize me as his daughter who is here to help him as he lives alone.

[justiceischeap]

3. I also blame it on school's phasing out civics classes

I don't remember much from my high school days but I do recall some things and civics class is one of those. I think I learned invaluable things in that class. Now how many high school's still offer a civics class? Maybe near an election there's a civics lesson, but I had a whole semester of that. Maybe if we have civics classes you wouldn't have politicians in Texas and Iowa talking about having UN poll monitors arrested, cause they'd know they receive diplomatic immunity. Simple things like that. Maybe people would know that the President isn't responsible for gas prices or that the Senate and Congress create laws, not the President. Maybe they'd know why the Founding Fathers didn't want a religious test and that stating "I believe, no matter how horrible rape is, it's God's will..." isn't something a politician should be talking about in the first place to get elected, nor should it influence his/her views when it comes to legislation.

// RANT

[GoCubsGo]

6. Many of these know-nothings sat next to us in civics class.

When you look at most of the people spewing garbage, they're usually over 50. Most of them were taught civics. I'm guessing they either slept through it, or forgot everything they learned back then.

[ananda]

4. La Rochefoucauld: Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.

He should be cited.

[Skidmore]

5. That is an evil man.

I consider him to be just as destructive to this nation as any Al Qaeda terrorist.