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United States News Politics

'Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security' (wired.com) 772

The network's furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous. Garrett M. Graff, writing for Wired earlier this month: Monday's split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department's inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI's handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump's campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States. The facts of both dramas were clear to objective viewers: In the one instance, there's conclusive and surprisingly consistent evidence that President Trump pushed Ukraine to concoct dirt on a domestic political rival to affect the 2020 presidential election, and in the other, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI was proper to investigate Trump's dealings with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.

But that set of facts is not what anyone who was watching Fox News heard. Instead, Fox spent the night describing an upside-down world where the president's enemies had spun a web of lies about Trump and Ukraine, even as Horowitz blew open the base corruption that has driven every attack on the president since 2016. Sean Hannity, who had long trumpeted the forthcoming inspector general report and expected a thorough indictment of the behavior of former FBI director James Comey and other members of the "deep state," had a simple message for his viewers during Fox's Monday night prime time: "Everything we said, everything we reported, everything we told you was dead-on-center accurate," he said. "It is all there in black and white, it's all there." Except they weren't right and it wasn't there. But Fox News' viewers evidently were not to be told those hard truths -- they were to be kept thinking that everything in their self-selected filter bubble was just peachy keen.

Over on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs said the mere fact that the IG found no political bias in the FBI's investigation of Trump and Russia in 2016 was de facto proof of the power of the deep state. John Harwood, long one of Washington's most respected conservative voices in journalism, summed up Fox's approach Monday night simply: "Lunacy." It's worse than lunacy, though. Fox's bubble reality creates a situation where it's impossible to have the conversations and debate necessary to function as a democracy. Facts that are inconvenient to President Trump simply disappear down Fox News' "memory hole," as thoroughly as George Orwell could have imagined in 1984. The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia's Internet Research Agency or China's Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America's democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer. The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it's clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America's foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.

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'Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security'

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  • by Jerry ( 6400 )
    A 2003 graduate of Harvard, his first job was at FishBowlDC, a news and gossip site he started himself. It has a history of being nasty at people. The most famous case, and an example of the nastiness, is at:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

    He went on to edit or write for mainly Left Wing news sites, as he writes in his biography:

    "He taught at Georgetown University for seven years, including courses on journalism and technology, and his writing and commentary has appeared in publications like the Wa

    • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @12:32AM (#59557462)
      Let's not apply cancel culture here. Yeah, he's probably biased, but in this case he has a very valid point. Fox simply isn't a news source anymore. It's a place that people can go to listen to Ann Coulter rants dressed up as news reports. This is a problem. Right-wingers and conservatives NEED a high-quality source of information that they trust. At the moment, they simply don't have one. They may trust Fox, but what it delivers just isn't news. That's the threat.
      • Did you not see the Chris Wallace interview with James Comey?

        That was one of the better journalistic interviews Ive seen on TV in a long while.

        No softball questions.
        Calling out lies when told by the person interviewed.

        As the article, you need to make a difference between Fox News desk and the opinion shows like Hannity.

        CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc... are all just as guilty of highly partisan lies on their opinion shows.
        And all these organisations, including fox news are attacking independent news sources or comment

  • This only leads to the credibility being completely ruined for the general population, and giving anyone the power to make up "truths" on spot.
    This got to a point where the timecube website is as trustworthy as CNN or Fox News.

  • by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:08PM (#59557156) Homepage Journal

    one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security

    Ah, this takes me back!..

    Not only are Fox wrong — they are a dangerous enemy of the (Glorious) People!

  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:14PM (#59557184)
    Fox news used to adhere to journalistic news standards. They were a pretty high quality news source for quite some time, and they earned a strong reputation.

    The real problem is that they've largely abandoned journalistic standards, but their reputation is taking extra time to decay. Fox is bleeding reputable editors and reporters because the good ones can't stand what's going on inside the organization. What's left over probably doesn't meet the bar for high-quality journalistic news anymore. But, they still have the good reputation that they earned from years of doing a good job.

    So a large chunk of the US population still trusts them to provide good-quality info, but in reality they've degraded into a place that's fine if you want to listen to right-wing opinion pieces, but truth and facts are not required.

    This will fix itself over the long haul. In a decade or so, Fox will have burned off the residual good reputation and it'll be recognized as the mouthpiece of the republican party, which is really what it's become. At that point, even conservatives won't really trust them to be a news source. They will be the news equivalent of the NRA. Even right-wing gun owners mostly understand that the NRA doesn't represent their interests anymore. It's a dinosaur that hasn't figured out it's dead yet. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying conservatism is going away. It's just that conservatives need a high quality source of news, just like anyone else, but they haven't figured out that Fox has morphed into the equivalent of an Ann Coulter rant disguised as a news agency.
  • by banbeans ( 122547 ) on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:19PM (#59557202)

    I guess after all these years it may be time to leave.
    On what planet is some idiots partisan rant news for nerds or stuff that matters?
    I want the old /. back!!!

    • by mishehu ( 712452 )
      The /. you know and love went on a honeymoon with the goatse guy and tubgirl and never came back.
    • by blahplusplus ( 757119 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @12:47AM (#59557492)

      I guess after all these years it may be time to leave.
      On what planet is some idiots partisan rant news for nerds or stuff that matters?
      I want the old /. back!!!

      Slashdot has been on the decline since the rise of the new post 2000 generation of kids, going from anti-drm, software freedom days, to sucking steam and valves dick, the theft of PC games and the rise of authoritarian spyware and drm in the operating system where the OS is taken hostage in windows 10 requiring a permanent connection monitoring you, and many slashdotters these days are convinced these are good things, not a sign that America is a lawless out of control oligarchy stealing human culture and hacking our machines and software via games, apps and the OS. And everyone bends over and licks the nuts of the corporate CEO's can't wait for that authoritarian capitalism with keyboard jockeys commanded by rich CEO's to brick our machins by re-writing the rules of our software against our interests and nobody bats and eye, and just rolls over, joyous in their "MMO's" (stolen rpg's that kicked off steam).

      The modern slashdot population is too stupid and irrational to know information from disinformation.

      • by mce ( 509 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @07:02AM (#59558016) Homepage Journal

        You mean like the modern Slashdot population is a fan of Fox News?

        It's true that /. has been declining - which is why I rarely ever post anymore and only visit every few days, as opposed to quasi permanently like I used to. I also absolutely agree that this particular article has no reason whatsoever for being on this forum. And I think and will state on record that calling Fox a threat to national security is overblown. A few decades ago, the concept of national security actually involved "security of the nation". Nowadays, it just means "anything that the author does not like, but does not know how to defeat with logic so let's make it sound big, threatening, and preferably secret and far too complex for Jane Doe to understand anyway". You know, like that time when Trump took economic measures against Canada claiming "national security" reasons.

        However, all that doesn't change the fact that Fox "reporting" is utter crap. All news agencies are somehow biased, but Fox is the absolute champion of fake news & disinformation. They are a galactic disgrace to the intelligence of people they try to defend.

    • When a president attacks both science (the whole basis of nerd-dom) and truth.
  • by beheaderaswp ( 549877 ) * on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:33PM (#59557244)

    It's become obvious that the signal to noise ratio is so bad that even a smart guy like me can't decode a semblance of the truth no matter the source.

    Maybe that's what they want. We've already stopped talking to each other. There's no empathy for others. It's like a dry pile of wood soaked with gasoline.

    But I can promise you that, when the neighbor on neighbor shooting starts, smart folks will just get out of the way. Better to let morons self-select out of the populace.

    Picking up a gun against an invader is understandable. Picking up a gun against your fellow countrymen is karma level stupidity.

  • by shubus ( 1382007 ) on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:36PM (#59557254)
    This crap has no business being on Slashdot. Whoever approved this should be BANNED.
  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:45PM (#59557290)

    There are actually several "news" outlets that are sources of disinformation.

    Instead of targeting the particular source of your ire, we should instead be agreeing to making it illegal for people and/or corporations to paid to promote information they know is misleading or incorrect. This way, you can still promote anything but if you profit from it (directly or indirectly) then those involved in the production of your message have to agree it's not misleading and is accurate. Wack-ados can still publish their crazy stuff (so long as everyone involved in the production is onboard with the crazy) and if you/the corporation cannot agree then you can't publish it (which would radically reduce the number of bullshit sources of information).

    With these restrictions there is not legal body is required to determine what the truth is but it does mean that corporations are then permanently branded with the message they push. Should they self-contradict or flip-flop then that could land them in court and people under oath explaining what then mean and what caused them to change.

  • by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @10:58PM (#59557316)
    The point of democracy isn't to choose a good government but to be able to remove a bad one. The most powerful group in the US government is their congress. This group makes decisions by a sort of favour trading system. The fact that most of the members of congress are in safe seats effectively means that Americans can never vote this group out. It is the same group of people always making the rules. No new parties have formed and come to power in the USA since the American civil war. In almost every state you can't vote a Republican out without voting a Democrat in and vice versa. In almost all measures of being able to vote majority of congressmen out the USA should be counted a very weak democracy. In some ways Trump is a fluke. His election was the first time in 150 years that Americans could vote for someone who wasn't a Republican or Democrat. Further while most of the world's media thinks Trump is an idiot, he is more than likely going to win the next presidency. Think about that. No Democrat or Republican is popular enough to beat him. It means that neither party is that popular at all. They are just voted in as the lesser of two evils by their rival tribes.

    Two last points about Trump. He gets two things that the mainstream media doesn't want to admit.
    1) Americans are anti immigration / fearful that the amount of immigration has changed the "look" of their country.
    2) Americans have become sticky in where they live. As a result opportunities for Americans particularly white males who don't want to move are very limited. The American Dream for them is only a dream. Trump might be incorrectly blaming China for taking away the manufacturing jobs but he is the only candidate speaking directly to this group about their fears. Right now these people don't care if they are lied to they just care that someone is listening to them.
  • by Harvey Manfrenjenson ( 1610637 ) on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @11:19PM (#59557358)

    I mean, he's not *wrong*. There is a problem in this country both with journalistic standards, and with the quality of political debate, and Fox News has contributed to this problem. But there are several problems with what he has written:

    1) There is an implicit assumption that Fox is the *only* news outlet that ignores journalistic standards and engages in "overheated and bombastic rhetoric". I disagree, and I think some of the left wing news outlets are just as guilty of these offenses.
    2) The major question about the news industry is not "Is it doing a good job?" We already know it's not. We already know that there are deep, deep problems with the state of the news industry. (Ask any journalist.) The major question is-- what can we do to change the situation?

    And the author's answer to *that* one is-- let's get Fox News officially designated as a "threat to national security!" I don't know what the author has in mind exactly, but I do know what generally happens to "threats to national security", in this country or any other-- they are shut down by guys carrying rifles, and the perpetrators are put in jail. So, congratulations on your proposed solution, there. The cure you propose is a thousand times worse than the disease.

  • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @12:00AM (#59557406)

    Both the Democrat & Republican parties & their corresponding supporting media organisations are doing a pretty good job of allowing a tiny minority of people get extremely rich, powerful, & unaccountable. What we're seeing in all the main media outlets is the result of this: completely polarised rhetoric over mostly non-issues. The investigation into the Trump administration's relationship with the Kremlin is a good example of this. The focus was entirely on finding evidence of collusion & even though it found many instances of impropriety & misconduct, they were ignored. Collusion of this kind is close to impossible to find conviction-worthy evidence for, whether it happened or not. Plus, the Kremlin had no need to collude with members of the Trump administration & doing so would've been more of a liability since Trump seems to be incapable of being discreet, i.e. colluding.

    That US politics is so polarised & divisive, & the accompanying disregard for factual truths, is cause for concern in itself for both the Democrats & Republicans. Disregarding, misrepresenting, & actively undermining factual information leaves US politics extremely vulnerable, not to just the billionaire oligarchs seeking commercial & political advantages, but also to competitive & hostile foreign powers.

    Reading between the lines, what I'm saying is the power that the US oligarchs are being allowed to wield can also be wielded by foreign oligarchs & governments. If US democratic institutions can't reign this in, the status of the union & the US empire will decline rapidly. At the moment, it looks like successive US administrations & political parties & their corresponding media organisations are handing over commercial & political strategic advantages to China & other foreign powers on a silver platter.

  • by Hentai007 ( 188457 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @02:01AM (#59557600)

    Trump, Brexit, etc, etc, etc... all these things were far-right fringe subjects a short time ago, and unthinkable a decade or more ago.

    Rupert Murdock has done more damage to Western Civilization than any other enemy could even dream of.

  • by LordWabbit2 ( 2440804 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @02:11AM (#59557614)
    So much for "News for Nerds".
    This may interest the nerds in the US to some degree, but I doubt enough for it to be posted here.
    For the rest of us...
  • by melted ( 227442 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @02:17AM (#59557626) Homepage

    Sorry liberals, contrarian points of view are, at best, a threat to your _propaganda_ not "our democracy". Deal with it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by OrangeTide ( 124937 )

      Not exactly. Our democracy is failing, it's not that FOX cause it or is a threat to it. It's a symptom of our failure. We live in a world where people accept garbage into their brains, and no amount of rational discussion can get people to change their mind.

      Our culture has survived huge technological and social changes over the centuries. There is no guarantee that we can survive every future change with our democracy and liberty intact. Widely available internet, and micro publishing (often called social m

  • by zioncat ( 632849 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @07:38AM (#59558078)
    I typed "slashdot.org" in to URL bar but I seemed to have ended up in Democratic Underground.
  • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Thursday December 26, 2019 @09:06AM (#59558240) Journal

    Merry Christmas, everyone!

Seen on a button at an SF Convention: Veteran of the Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force. 1990-1951.

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