Fox Business's lying crapsack Stuart Varney is very upset the lamestream media has not picked up his lying crapsack of a story about how Barack Obama is encouraging undocumented immigrants to go ahead and vote, because shouldn't that be a huge story, the President of the United States encouraging illegal voting by illegal aliens????? It would indeed be a very shocking story if Barack Obama had actually said that! Except of course for how Obama said nothing of the sort, and the lying crapsacks at Fox Business instead edited some video to make it
The right-wing attack on the press as a dangerous outlet for "liberal" propaganda is nothing new, it goes back a hundred years, to the culture wars of the pre-Depression decade.
It got charged up and focused during the McCarthy era in the 1950s--when television began to have a significant impact on our politics-- because of the tenacious reporting of a handful of journalists, most memorably Edward R. Murrow at CBS, who took down the Republican red-baiter and humiliated his claque in Congress (Murrow was subsequently marginalized and driven out by the suits at CBS, whose sympathies, then as now, lay with the Republican right).
One of McCarthy's claque was, of course, Richard M. Nixon, who famously blamed "the press" for his defeat at the polls in the California gubernatorial race in 1962 with the line, "you don't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." Alas, as it turns out, it was not.
But what really energized the Republican Party's anti-press meme and turned it into the form we see today was Nixon's Southern strategy. Republican operatives got a lot of mileage out of attacking "the liberal media" for unfairness to white Southerners.
When Northern reporters, especially at the three alphabet networks, started---at long, long, long last-- to give prominent and serious coverage to Jim Crow, lynchings and beatings, mass arrests, cops turning firehoses and savage dogs on peaceful demonstrators, the murders of civil rights workers, the murders of little girls at Sunday school, arson, death threats, and other such trademarks of the genteel tradition of the old Confederacy, resentment ran deep among white Southerners.
Nixon's people--including familiar names like Roger Ailes and Karl Rove--tapped into that resentment and turned it into a political weapon: a time bomb, as it turns out, that is still blowing up in our faces (and may yet kill off the democracy sometime during voting hours tomorrow).
They harped away at the notion that "the press" was deliberately distorting the record to make Southerners look bad.
The nation has had to suffer through a series of right-wing adventures in corrective journalism--an alternative news universe in which "the truth" was not subject to liberal bias. There's a straight, depressing line from William F. Buckley's preposterous (and segregationist) National Review in the 1950s, to Fox and Breitbart, and whatever Trump's people have in store for us after tomorrow's election, win or lose.
The upshot of all this was that Republicans have succeeded in creating the most monstrous creature of them all: the Republican voter, an individual who believes nothing he hears from any source in the real world: journalists, professors, scientists, nuns, the Pope, whatever: but who believes, at the same time, everything, literally EVERYTHING, he hears from Fox, or Breitbart, or the Trump campaign.
Stuart Varney is merely cashing in on this journalism universe. He dines richly upon the fact that he and the rest of the right's propaganda apparat have created a permanent audience of madmen.
Varney is a "business reporter" who, judging by his verbiage I've heard in the past, flunked Econ 101 and has been a stooge for every wacky economic scheme proposed by the GOP. He has now turned his estimable talent for making shit up towards political reportage with predictable results. A British accent does not automatically confer gravitas on a FOX non-journalist as Mr Varney so clearly proves
I mean, they're not NEWS, but they're sure as shit 'media'.
B+ for the NICE lettering on the sign!
D for the time wasted on it.
The right-wing attack on the press as a dangerous outlet for "liberal" propaganda is nothing new, it goes back a hundred years, to the culture wars of the pre-Depression decade.
It got charged up and focused during the McCarthy era in the 1950s--when television began to have a significant impact on our politics-- because of the tenacious reporting of a handful of journalists, most memorably Edward R. Murrow at CBS, who took down the Republican red-baiter and humiliated his claque in Congress (Murrow was subsequently marginalized and driven out by the suits at CBS, whose sympathies, then as now, lay with the Republican right).
One of McCarthy's claque was, of course, Richard M. Nixon, who famously blamed "the press" for his defeat at the polls in the California gubernatorial race in 1962 with the line, "you don't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." Alas, as it turns out, it was not.
But what really energized the Republican Party's anti-press meme and turned it into the form we see today was Nixon's Southern strategy. Republican operatives got a lot of mileage out of attacking "the liberal media" for unfairness to white Southerners.
When Northern reporters, especially at the three alphabet networks, started---at long, long, long last-- to give prominent and serious coverage to Jim Crow, lynchings and beatings, mass arrests, cops turning firehoses and savage dogs on peaceful demonstrators, the murders of civil rights workers, the murders of little girls at Sunday school, arson, death threats, and other such trademarks of the genteel tradition of the old Confederacy, resentment ran deep among white Southerners.
Nixon's people--including familiar names like Roger Ailes and Karl Rove--tapped into that resentment and turned it into a political weapon: a time bomb, as it turns out, that is still blowing up in our faces (and may yet kill off the democracy sometime during voting hours tomorrow).
They harped away at the notion that "the press" was deliberately distorting the record to make Southerners look bad.
The nation has had to suffer through a series of right-wing adventures in corrective journalism--an alternative news universe in which "the truth" was not subject to liberal bias. There's a straight, depressing line from William F. Buckley's preposterous (and segregationist) National Review in the 1950s, to Fox and Breitbart, and whatever Trump's people have in store for us after tomorrow's election, win or lose.
The upshot of all this was that Republicans have succeeded in creating the most monstrous creature of them all: the Republican voter, an individual who believes nothing he hears from any source in the real world: journalists, professors, scientists, nuns, the Pope, whatever: but who believes, at the same time, everything, literally EVERYTHING, he hears from Fox, or Breitbart, or the Trump campaign.
Stuart Varney is merely cashing in on this journalism universe. He dines richly upon the fact that he and the rest of the right's propaganda apparat have created a permanent audience of madmen.
Long ago I learned exactly what to expect from Stuart, and he never fails to deliver large steaming piles of it along with a smug British accent.
I, personally, will be voting for HRC just for a taco truck on the corner. I'm tired of waking 4 blocks for a taco!
That explains Paul LePage.
The hard working Americans she thinks so sublime create the demand that the drug dealers feed.
I've heard that Celebrities are graded from A list to E List.
Poor Ted! He didn't quite rate any letter grade but he did make the number two list.
Sorry, that's Ted Nugent grabbing his dick.
Varney is a "business reporter" who, judging by his verbiage I've heard in the past, flunked Econ 101 and has been a stooge for every wacky economic scheme proposed by the GOP. He has now turned his estimable talent for making shit up towards political reportage with predictable results. A British accent does not automatically confer gravitas on a FOX non-journalist as Mr Varney so clearly proves
And the southern strategy would have worked, too, if it hadn't been for those darned outside agitators. Darn them.
"Were that the case, a lot of people who were born here or naturalized would have their citizenship revoked"
SAKONYACHEN LIBULLLLZZ!!!43!!!!!
You had us at "Varney is the asshole."
Is this poor dolt so stupid he doesn't know this can be easily debunked? Yes, yes he is
I just now got the joke!
I got kids. I need to be able to look them in the eye and say, "I only got high when I needed to, not just when I wanted too."