Shubhranshu Choudhary says "Journalism has to become everyone's
business," but Faux News says journalism is nobody's business, including,
especially, their own…
When you see a headline like,
Dimbulb Rants Against Idea Of A Black James Bond,
it’s only because Dimbulb has run out of other things to rant about.
There is literally nothing repugicans did not attack in 2014, and to
recount such a list would take up too much space to post here.
In fact, one could make a list of such lists, which
are popping up everywhere. The sad thing is that these are not your good
old fashioned lists of political disagreements of the sort the country
used to see. No, these are paranoid-ridden, conspiracy-laden,
jaw-droppingly, catastrophically stupid, lunatic fringe outbursts.
And in case you’re worried, Faux News even managed to
get another one in before New Year’s Eve: Anna Kooiman out-Hasselbecked
Elisabeth Hasselbeck when
she suggested Sunday
on (yes) Faux and Friends, that the metric system was to blame for the
loss of yet another Indonesian airliner. If you’re drinking something
now, put it down.
According to Kooiman, we should be looking at the “different way other countries train their pilots.”
You know, because, Pssssst, they’re not like us.
“Even when we think about temperature, it’s
Fahrenheit or Celsius. It’s kilometers or miles. You know, everything
about their training could be similar, but different.”
Just listening to it, I think a part of my brain died. Maybe my soul.
I think we can safely pin the Air Asia loss on the fact that, as
Deutsche Welle tells us, the airline does not meet international aviation safety standards.
There are literally millions and millions of flights
to and from countries that use the metric system, because pretty much
the entire world uses the metric system except for the United States,
Liberia, and Burma (though some elements of the old Imperial System
are still used in the United Kingdom, Canada, and elsewhere the British
Empire once reigned).
The point is, of course, if the metric system was to
blame, planes would be falling out of the sky far more often than
crossing it.
I could give up here, because I’d like to say there
is nothing more stupid than what I just detailed here, that it would be
impossible to top that, but we all know that would not be true.
I think this Elisabeth Hasselbeck tweet speaks for itself:
Because yes, NFL scandals have everything to do with Benghazi.
But even that was not the epitome of repugican
stupid in 2014. There is the idea that President Obama was somehow
responsible for Ebola. That the Ebola outbreak was deliberate. Despite
these assertions, we find ourselves inexplicably alive today. And here
Obama had
all those handy FEMA coffins standing by…
Media Matters for America
calls this
“the year on the fringe” but I think this might be overly generous.
Ebola fever infected the entire wingnut fringe of the political spectrum:
There was Michael Savage and Alex Jones, true, and the ubiquitous Wing
Nut Daily columnist, but there was also Alan Keyes, who regularly runs
for public office (and now that one-man-kook-fest Gordon Klingenschmitt
has shown it can be done, could actually succeed at long last), and Keith Ablow at Faux News, which is as mainstream as it gets. Laura Ingraham also got into the act
All that stopped right after the midterm elections,
showing how serious about it they were. But the fact remains they still
said it. And there is that whole personal responsibility thing repugicans like to harp on. Of course, that doesn’t apply to them, only
others, just like religious freedom, that other thing they like to harp
on, applies only to them, and not to others.
If you want an ecology-themed list, Media Matters also has that,
The 6 Most Ridiculous Attacks on Clean Energy In 2014, which mostly involved simply making stuff up. You know, like Benghazi and Ebola (above). My own favorite is
Lush Dimbulb’s claim that “Mass transit is total control. It is the way the government can totally control the movement of the population.”
Imagine how upset brain-dead Lush must have been
over the domestication of the horse. Heck, I’m not certain at this point
if repugicans entirely trust the invention of fire.
Not only have repugicans told some whopping big
lies this past year in the furtherance of their agenda against humanity,
but they have been, well, just plain mean. And another list at Media
Matters that might interest you is their
Worst 2014 Smears From Wingnut Websites. Number One on the list is a typical example of thoughtless mud-slinging:
Daily Caller Columnist
Blamed Gay Service Members For Rise In Military Rape. A Daily Caller
columnist claimed that the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which
allowed LGBT soldiers to serve openly, was responsible for an “uptick in
same-sex rape” in the military. [Media Matters,
8/28/14]
Because THAT makes sense.
If we’re thinking about the third big issue of the
year after Benghazi (a best-seller since 2012) and Ebola, Obamacare,
Media Matters takes a look at how none of those dire predictions about
Obamacare came true (oops).
You can see how similar these are to the Ebola
frenzy. It’s like Faux News just has some sort of plug-n-play system
where they have headlines with handy blanks and they just fill those in
depending on the subject. They’re tried and true after all, and they’re
going with what clearly works. Can’t fault them for that, as far as
business models go, though you can certainly call them on their complete
lack of journalistic integrity and moral compass.
In that, this year just past has been no different
than any other year since 2009: endless lies and each worse than the
last. Worse, they are lies seemingly only an imbecile could believe. And
believe them they do. Which says far more about Faux News and its
audience than the people about whom those lies are told.
While Indian journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary
is saying
“Journalism has to become everyone’s business,” Faux News is
embracing the delusion that journalism is nobody’s business, including,
especially, their own.
by Tom McKay
