Let's All Go Full-Throttle Attack Journalism Now!

Lately, I’ve been reading quite a bit about the fracas--and the fracas surrounding--that thing some call Fox News.

While the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News for public disparagement and lying about the company is now a fait accompli in forcing the Murdoch-owned propaganda mill to pay multiple millions for literally lying to its viewers about the creepy conspiracy to deprive the American people of their right to vote by contesting and even attempting to change the results of the 2020 election, the cackles against calling it to the carpet continue. Regardless of the clear malfeasance the network was found guilty of, some of the more propaganda-defensive pundits, both official and unofficial ones across the country, are weighing in like 300-pound canaries until they crush the issue into something resembling an absurdity.  

Oddly, no one seems to want to address the nugatory effects of attack journalism.  Even the more reliable mass media organizations, while politely sniping at Fox, summarily refuse to suggest the American people have a right to do something about its widespread misinformation and disinformation dissemination extravaganza.

That's actually a little surprising given the importance of mass media's role in providing the citizenry reliable information that will allow us all the facts we need to make competent political decisions. Even if the position of a reliably honest media was of such importance to the men who ratified the US Constitution that what is traditionally referred to as the Fourth Estate itself almost became part of it. The founders finally chose to allow mass media to remain in the possession of private interests because it would be too easy for a government to use mass media as a tool of its will in a tyranny directed at the rights of the American people.

According to Walter Lippmann, one of America's best interpreters of the role of mass media in American society and culture and politics, the line between news reporting and propaganda is razor-thin. Furthermore, while freedom of speech is designed to allow Americans to dissent against authority in public (the founders referred to "public freedom"), freedom of the press, differentiated from freedom of speech in the First Amendment, hinges on responsibility. Fox News is anything but responsible. In fact, not fantasy, Fox News and other "politicized" mass media platforms including the nearly 1,700 right wing AM radio talk shows serve as poster children against the possibility of commercial interests every doing something so rash as to self-regulate behavior and activities.

Worse, in terms of this politicization of mass media, another concept regaled by the supposed "conservative" mass movement--self interest--seems to have resulted in another strange display: a complete disregard of and contempt for the interests of others, particularly those who inhabit what is ideally considered to be a "friendly opposition".

After all, the political in all its manifestations is a relation, not a static fact about the self-interested individual. Possibly people like the Murdochs and their enablers don't realize this. More likely, they simply don't care.

What happens when one pays close attention to long-winded rhetorical fallacies on display all over the highly-politicized excuses for news reporting along the right fringes of simple sanity?  It's not a pretty picture to watch. Perhaps the most odious of those fallacies is the ad hominem, the personal attack, a fallacy that one side of a political discourse may use to deflect attention away from the issue under discussion and instead concentrate on the supposed personal flaws of one's opponent. All anyone who is even moderately well-informed needs to do to see this fallacy is to go to the Fox News online platform. Not only are the personal attacks everywhere on the site, but there is a great deal of confusion between fact and opinion: This latter problem is endemic in propaganda. In mass media news reporting there is a strict line separating straight news and editorialization. Even so, this line has become blurry across the country's media spectrum. Politicization of the news--sometimes in reaction against the government, other times in reaction to those reacting against the government--is a growing problem that really does endanger the sanctity of the will of the people, popular sovereignty, and the plain and simple ethical fabric under which a functional government must subordinate itself as a necessity.

What's becoming more apparent is that forces arguing against the very presence of a strong central government that is powerful enough to limit the excesses of the commercial sector have found a vast lacuna in government moderation of mass media. It's long been assumed that mass media doesn't need to be monitored by the federal government because "everybody knows" mass media is always going to operate above-board and consequent to actual facts. That is no longer true. When Rupert Murdoch defends Fox News, he declares he's "giving people what they want to hear". It's fairly obvious he isn't interested in "truth in broadcasting", mainly because financial profit is far more important to him than telling the truth.

Anyone who dissents or operates in a fashion contrary to the willfulness of far-out rightists, it seems, is subject to brutal attacks. That's a common tactic used by totalitarian mass movements, a tactic most well known perhaps by either the Nazi SA as it bullied its way into power previous to 1933 and even after as it consolidated power in Germany or the Iranian basij, a militant "enforcement" group that literally beats opponents or the disobedient to death on the streets of Tehran.

Bullying. On the TV set. And online. On the AM dial. Attack journalism isn't journalism at all.

Since Rush Limbaugh discovered he could grow an audience like what sometimes happens inside a moldy kitchen drain with his almost constant personal attacks, the ad hominem has become the tactic of choice for the right-wing version of Toastmasters International. Day in and out, one can witness supposedly rational, mature adults behaving like schoolkids posturing on the playground. In fact, as most of us see, the ad hominem was the style of Donald Trump--from before he was a presidential candidate in 2015 all the way past his loss to Joe Biden in 2020.

When people are already angry, feeling economically disenfranchised, alienated, and nihilistic about politics, the government, and about democracy, science, medicine, higher education, a two-party system, and even singular public figures like Obama or Hillary Clinton, it's cynical and hateful to take advantage of them simply to muster up enough votes to foist a two-legged battering ram to the top of the little dogpile. That's right. Trump was and is so narcissistic that all his advisers and supporters needed to do was flatter him and he'd do anything they wanted him to do. What? Need a $1.7 trillion tax cut? Easy. Just say nice things to Donnie. Meanwhile, attack anyone who questions his sanity.

I remember the conservative mass movement's turn into attack generation in 1987 well.  Limbaugh had just hit the air like a whiffle ball, and lots of people thought he was clever. Sure. Say clever things, get a laugh, and you gain agreement via positive reinforcement and operant conditioning. Say something funny and get a reaction. Reactionaryism is a conditioned response to stimuli. Say ugly things after conditioning viewers and listeners with humor and wit, and yup. yup, yup, viewers and listeners will respect the authority you pretend you have because after all you make them all feel good whenever you crack a joke. and a buddy of mine called me, urging me to tune into Rush, “because he’s funny”.  

That friend of mine, who at the time was rebelling against the adult world for reasons that likely had to do with how he was raised by strict, traditional parents who likely didn't give him consistent discipline, and who also forewent a university education, found himself "quite impressed" in listening to Rush Limbaugh as he traveled for his employer. "He's funny", my friend exclaimed. "He tells all kinds of tasteless jokes!" The year, 1987, had Ronald Reagan on the ropes by his own unconscious petard via the Iran-Contra Scandal, and while many people were beginning to see the faultiness of the conservative mass movement's hegemonic bid to control everything and literally turn the country into a retrograde nostalgia for the Fifties crossed with the mid-19th Century, Limbaugh was pioneering a way to both bully the opposition and condition supporters and listeners.

Suddenly, the personal attack became a fad.

Because I retain respect for my friend, and because I was curious, I tuned in to listen one afternoon. I tuned into an earful of vulgarities.  Of course, 1987 was an era where the tasteless joke--racist jokes, gross jokes, etc--and I left figuring Limbaugh was merely another tasteless joke like another radio titan of the time, Howard Stern.  As Limbaugh's influence grew, so did the number of "conservative" [read: reactionary] propagandists of the personal attack got on the bandwagon of hate and bullying. The fungus among us was proliferating into rhetorical warfare, coarsening public discourse to the point of inanity. Suddenly, rational and reasonable discussion between opponents had been poisoned. Later, the first national politician to capitalize on nastiness and personal attacks, Newt Gingrich, dirtied the public face of politics in government, and public discourse suffered at the hands of more bullying.

The personal attack twisted mature discussion into "fighting words". Unsophisticated people take umbrage under the regime of the personal attack. They don't see it as a fallacious way to win an argument so much as a way to channel their confusion and rage. My friend? Not a sophisticated man well educated enough to know the difference between citizen discourse and being tastelessly funny. That was sad to see.

Those who were both alive and awake in the late 1990s remember the outright vulgarity of the GOP’s attempts to impeach Bill Clinton.  That truly was scary. The President of the United States was under an attempt to impeach him for a peccadillo he engaged in with an aide while in the Oval Office. What? Was his creepy behavior a threat to national security? Was it tantamount to the treason Ronald Reagan got away with during the Iran-Contra scandal? Actually not. Most who witnessed this agreed that the entire thing was. . . another bullying incident. Clinton wasn't "obeying" the "ideological correctness" diktats of the far-gone rightists. Disobey on the streets of DC or Tehran or Berlin? Prepare to be attacked.

Bullying. I remember where I was when I saw Tom DeLay, by profession (and ironically) an exterminator from Houston, seemingly tried soaking Bill Clinton with an unethical fusillade of ideological insecticide. Right. DeLay, one of the most corrupt Congressmen in the nation, telling the entire world how sincerely he sided with morality in his shame over a president who would commit adultery.  All for display. A means to the end of "getting back at" the President for being disobedient to the ideology DeLay preferred.

Where was I? Homeless. And drunk. Living in a fleabag motel off East Samuells Boulevard here in Dallas, Texas. I'd really sunk into despair by the time the impeachment debate in the US House took place. DeLay's sanctimonious self-righteousness so angered me that I called the offices of one Representative, Pete Sessions, and suggested that DeLay had so much hot air inside his head that perhaps he needed a hole in it to help him let off all that steam.

Sessions called the Capital Police. Suggested I had made a threat against DeLay. I don't even remember making the telephone call. I was literally that drunk. The next day, an FBI agent visited me. Politely, he told me that he was obligated to check on me as part of the rules, and that nobody at the FBI thought I had made a threat. I apologized. I also told him I have Bipolar and was homeless. He visited my mother and told her off: There was no way it was a good thing to allow their son to be on the streets while suffering from Bipolar Disorder.

OK. I guess I've got an FBI file. Hilarious. I'd reacted to incendiary bullying by a Representative of the American people. DeLay got away clean that day. Nobody accused him of threatening the President of the United States--even though that is exactly what he was doing. And yup. It was a real show. Just like the Jerry Springer Show where people actually beat each other with chairs over disagreements egged on by Springer.

Regardless of the disgust factor generated by Springer's daytime TV show, it was also obvious Springer was registering social commentary over the other political developments in the country: the rise of attack journalism designed to infuriate the ignorant.

Only a few years later, by the way, DeLay was charged and later indicted for money laundering, campaign finance violations, and conspiracy.  He reluctantly resigned from the House.  Too bad we didn't know that before he went on national television to tell us all about ethics, morality and decency in what might be called "instrumentalized sanctimoniousness".

Another corrupt chump.  Out preaching morality almost like Elmer Gantry.  See gantry, oil derricks, and oil and gas lobbies. I suppose that if one goes on the offensive with personal attacks as loudly and as arrogantly as you can, no one is going to see you, the attacker, are more corrupt than your target ever was.

Only as late as a Saturday night in April 2023, in the appropriately-named town of Waco, Texas, another "bitey" chump--Trump--a person I like to refer to as either Shouty McAdderall 45, or Trumpachev, lied to his audience of eager thrill seekers.  It was all attack and bullying tactics. In his words, he is the only virtuous man left alive in the US, a virtuous man who is being "victimized" by "far left extremists and socialists" who are designing to so impugn him that he'll lose--what? Another bid to overthrow the government.

The elephant trumpets, the ignorant love it.

In the Trump-O-Rama circus act regarding wall building, by his "word", the Grifter Messiah had succeeded in securing the border from "bad hombres", and thus saved the United States from the overthrow by "infiltration" and "subversion" by Spanish-speaking peasants by building a "strong", "powerful" wall. Right, Donnie: 40 miles = 2,000 miles, and it’s “mission accomplished”.  Did the crowd clap?  Or did it come down with “the verbal clap”?  The verbal clap: a sexually transmitted disease spread by attacks, fraudulence and lies. Of course, the audience in Waco--wacko is what we here in Texas sometimes call it, albeit affectionately--ate it up. Like moon-pies, like three-day-old doughnuts, like Big Macs and Happy Meals.

Yes, it's likely many residents of Waco, the ones mainly who attended the rant rally, are angry, feeling disenchanted with the American Dream and are in various degrees of financial difficulties. For some pretend billionaire to mouth their anger and literally channel it is what a demagogue does. A statesman doesn't capitalize on such fears and discomforts. A statesman offers to do what he can to help people. He doesn't make vague comments revealing his insularity and paranoia that "dirty poor people" from South of the border are going to ruin everybody's lives.

Some in mass media call this idiocy "performative politics". It's all a performance. The politician is a sort of game-show contestant who postures for the crowd to make it seem dramatic and thus powerful. Strong men lift others up. Weak men put others down.

Does that mean conservative "attack journalism" is supporting weakness? Probably.

After the big show in Waco, Trumpachev had “his people” fetch him about a half-ton of MacDonald’s fast food.  He even told the fast food worker he knew more about the MacDonald’s menu than the fast food worker did.  After all, he'd been criticized for poor dietary hygiene in his refusal to even eat anything beyond a Big Mac and a Coca Cola. We all tittered when we learned he'd put ketchup on a $50 sirloin. And even better, in a world of coarsened discourse, we all laughed outright when, while watching the US House ratify Joe Biden's electoral college totals, he tossed his Big Mac at the wide-screen TV set in the White House cafeteria. Where he sat, all alone. A tantrum. By a 77 year old brat.

The big mac.  Now there’s a word.  Mac is slang in “gangster talk” for a person well-acquainted with the business of being a mobster.  You mac on a woman--which means you're hitting on her. Trump is a serial come-on when it comes to women he deems beautiful. Even if he can't later remember who they even were when they accuse him of sexual assault or inappropriate touching in a women's dressing room at a clothing store.

Like many of his well-heeled supporters who glean full advantage in ginning-up "the base" with attacks and coarsened discourse, Trumpachev is a gang-banger.  Someone get him a spring roll made of Big Macs to eat in the hay. He'll spring for a roll any day of the week that ends in Y.

See? I'm either personally attacking him or telling the truth. Which is it? Can anyone tell if it's on a drive-by hit-and-run Fox News report? The quip arrives with impact at point-of-sale and then disappears into the ether like a UFO. You don't have time to think about what just happened. You only react in a deeply subconscious way. Stormy Daniels--spring roll. All kinds of gals--spring rolls. Melania Trump--a professional spring roll. When will all this "high rolling" end? Round and round he goes and where he stops nobody knows.

What's puzzling is that Trump has turned sawing mawkishly insulting things into a political tactic designed to gain free televised propaganda for him. He'll make an uncalled for noise, and whoa, the cable news channels are ablaze with a "can you believe what he just said?" reaction. Yup. Stimulus-reaction, filed under the "if it bleeds it leads" category in the dustbin of history. If what he's just said--a death threat to his former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example--impresses his audience as a daring exploit, then he's rewarded his audience with some "feels". While standing accused of no less than 91 felony counts, he's prohibited from buying a firearm--but there he is, in a gun store, buying a pistol, and posing before the admiring cameras as commentators nationwide are aghast at his blatant disregard of the law.

But the MAGA base loves it. He's defying the government. He's one of us. He's doing what we feel like doing.

Remember my brush with the FBI over a potential threat to Representative Tom DeLay? His colleague Pete Sessions called the Capitol Police. I could have been jailed. But Trump? He just threatened the life of a general. He's still out walking around. Something is seriously wrong with that. . . an example of "unequal justice under the law". Again. And again. He's sued for five million over a character attack against a woman who argued he sexually assaulted her, loses the defamation case, has to fork up the money, and look: the very same day he does it again. Attack, attack, attack.

Ironically, Trump gave Rush Limbaugh a posthumous Presidential Medal Of Freedom for...attack journalism. Or propaganda. The line is razor thin. Let's side with the propaganda to be safe--and sorry at the same time. That was a shocker. The mass media? Like lemmings, they went into full-on freak out feeding frenzy mode. More publicity for a grifter who really knows how to manipulate the mass media.

Attack journalism is designed to upset people. To alarm us. To satisfy our sense of powerlessness in the face of all the things the powerful do that honestly or dishonestly defy the principles of simple common sense. And of course, attack journalism is a real moneymaker.

Think of how Fox News rolls day after day:

ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT The chyron rolls: Be upset, viewers! This one's a real outrage! And like the chyron, the money spews into the pockets of a billionaire grifter named Rupert.

Hey. Attacking and bullying people is profitable. That must mean it's good.