Golden O, Fox News is a primary (and in many cases, only) source of news and opinions for so many of us Americans. The knee-jerk liberals on here can't get away from their MSNBC, New York Times, and Washington Post long enough to listen to opinions and news that isn't biased against truth and our unwavering pride in real American values and our military. Please rank the shows you watch on Fox, based on how much time you spend watching them.
Jesus, you liberals think diversity is the answer to everything. The people you see on Fox News graduated from or briefly attended the best or very decent schools in the minds of some and are on Fox News because they are incredibly smart or opinionated and focused on providing Americans with as much truthful or righteous information as possible. Get it?
Blond is not the God-given hair color of Lebanese people. Next question.
wanna bet on how many dye jobs there are on Fox women? Only brunette I can recall (watch Fox at our club gym) is Gulifoyle (sp?) and most guys eyes probably never got as high as her hair.
How long has Fox News been going? I recall watching them 20-30 years ago and thinking they were fine.
But now, I f...king hate watching that channel. I do flip to it now and then just to try and round myself out. But it doesn't take long for me to grow weary of the nonsensical angles they take. They backslap the smallest victories, while ignoring really serious stuff that pusses me off. They excuse Trump's behavior. They dont touch issues that matter to me. They excoriate with negative labels issues that matter to me. It's a bunch of bs rubbish. I know many loved ones are brainwashed negatively by watching it exclusively.
I think what happens is you get used to particular tv personalities and then their viewpoints swap into your brain without you knowing it.
I think some of those hosts were once decent. Yet they've taken a sinister turn, perhaps not unlike how many Germans became Nazi murderers.
Watch Experimenter with Winona Rider, on Netflix. Obedience to Authority. Follow the Crowd behavior.
This clip relates to the experiment talked about in part II of chapter 3 in The Wisdom of Crowds. It discussed how people are willing to accept "social proof" of conventional wisdom and act on public knowledge rather than their own private knowledge.
To understand the experiment it's probably just enough to read this from The Wisdom of Crowds:
In 1968, the social psycologists Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz decided to cause a little trouble. First they put a single person on a street corner and had him look up at an empty sky for sixty seconds. A tiny fraction of the passing pedrestrians stopped to see what the guy was looking at, but most just walked past. Next time around, the psychologists put five skyward-looking men on the corner. This time, four times as many people stopped to gaze at the empty sky. When the psychologists put fifteen men on the corner, 45 percent of all passers by stopped, and inceasing the cohort of obervers yet again made more than 80 per cent of pedestrians tilt their heads and look up. This study appears at first glance, to be another demonstration of people's willingness to conform. But in fact it illustrated something different, namely the idea of "social proof", which is the tendency to assume that if lots of people are doing something or believe something, there must be a good reason why. This is different from conformity: people are not looking up at the sky because of peer pressure or a fear of being reprimanded. They're looking up at the sky because they assume - quite reasonably - that lots of people wouldn't be gazing upward if there weren't something to see. That's why the crowd becomes more influential as it becomes bigger: every additional person is proof that something important is happening. And the governing assumption seems to be that when things are uncertain, the best thing to do is just to follow along. This is actually not an unreasonable assumption. After all, if the group usually knows best (as I've argued it often does), the following the group is a sensible strategy. The catch is that if too many people adopt that strategy, it stops being sensible and the group stops being smart.
Thesis: FoxNews began as a nondescript news channel and built viewership numbers. Then they began to tilt radical right and the morph was non recognized- the way a frog doesn't know that the boiling pot of water has slowly increased in temperature (to its death). Now that they are widely accepted (mass viewership), people accept it as normal.
FoxNews is the boiling pot of water. We are the frogs. Well, some of us.
How long has Fox News been going? I recall watching them 20-30 years ago and thinking they were fine.
But now, I f...king hate watching that channel. I do flip to it now and then just to try and round myself out. But it doesn't take long for me to grow weary of the nonsensical angles they take. They backslap the smallest victories, while ignoring really serious stuff that pusses me off. They excuse Trump's behavior. They dont touch issues that matter to me. They excoriate with negative labels issues that matter to me. It's a bunch of bs rubbish. I know many loved ones are brainwashed negatively by watching it exclusively.
I think what happens is you get used to particular tv personalities and then their viewpoints swap into your brain without you knowing it.
I think some of those hosts were once decent. Yet they've taken a sinister turn, perhaps not unlike how many Germans became Nazi murderers.
Watch Experimenter with Winona Rider, on Netflix. Obedience to Authority. Follow the Crowd behavior.
Fox News launched October 8, 1996
(Yes, I know that date off the top of my head. It's also a memorable day from my first semester at UC Berkeley.)
Golden, did you happen to see that clip of our guy Tucker taking it to that creepy porn lawyer last night? Avenatti got owned. There's something about Tucker -- he's pure class. He's a good host, but an even better man.
Yeah, Tucker is the best of that bunch, though that's not saying much.
It wasn't always the case, but the last few years the rest of the MSM has been nearly as bad as Fox News in terms of gaslighting its audiences. The social dynamics described by ConcordTom apply just as much to the left side of the establishment...
Fox is puny and of no consequence. The bigger threat to our democracy is Facebook. It controls and sells the information of millions is amoral, does its work in private, answers to no one and can easily be subverted- witness the Facebook employees being embedded in the Trump campaign to help then develop effective ads and the Russian ads. They'll do anything for a buck.
I'd also bet that more people get their news from FB than Fox and question it less
FB will die just like Yahoo! Not right away but within 10 years. Social media has taken a beating, youth have grown up and recently it's as reported a large defection or dropping of it, like 20% globally. This will only continue. But yes, you are correct FB has had a very negative effect on U.S. democracy.
Golden, did you happen to see that clip of our guy Tucker taking it to that creepy porn lawyer last night? Avenatti got owned. There's something about Tucker -- he's pure class. He's a good host, but an even better man.
In the hands of an intelligent and able debater, Tucker had a couple of points that could have been effectively made. Over time Avenatti has shown himself to be well short of True Believer status. Tucker basically learned from the teat of Bill O'Reilly that since it is your show you have the ability to shout over or change the subject when your opponent has you against the ropes. Guys like Joe Pyne and Morton Downey, Jr. invented the art form. It provides enormous entertainment to the ignorant fan base.
Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection
Send my credentials to the House of Detention
I got some friends inside
Small point, Morton Downey Jr. popularized that crap but the "inventor" was Wally George, a true right wing nut job and not an actor like Downey. But he was the father of actress Rebecca De Mornay. He was on low power TV in SoCal for three decades, starting in the 80s. He was born Oakland, grew up in San Mateo...a true California wing nut. They called him the father of "combat TV".
FB will die just like Yahoo! Not right away but within 10 years. Social media has taken a beating, youth have grown up and recently it's as reported a large defection or dropping of it, like 20% globally. This will only continue. But yes, you are correct FB has had a very negative effect on U.S. democracy.
FB is a lot more powerful than Yahoo and in fact the reason Yahoo will die is FB.
FB preys on human longings -wanting to belong, wanting to be noticed, wanting to be someone- and it's also addictive. The monetizing of human emotions has never been done on this scale before. It should be broken up by anti- trust but that would require that our politicians understood what was going on and that they weren't already bought.
Right now FB controls news globally- a billion things are posted daily on FB- things that are controlled only by....? Witness what is going on in Myanmar where FB posts are inflaming genocide.
No one thought Yahoo would or could die. Believe me FB will die. It might fight it awhile but it will die. Even Zuckerberg knows this..and that's why he bought Instagram. He might be a major arsehole but he's not dumb.
Otherwise it agree FB has fccked democracy and is a continual threat. I don't know if or when reform comes but I'm guessing there will be regulation in the future. It won't happen with the GOP in charge, and corporate Dems will likely suck up to the powers that be...but if people with common sense get in charge, there's hope.
I think the full exposure of the Russkies, the money laundering and all that crap will be shut things down...if someone takes the security threat seriously...and there are those people now, in place in government.
Remember when Yahoo wanted to buy FB for a $billion?
I don't share your optimism. The tech industry curries the favor of both parties and I have yet to see any movements-regulatory or political which would lay a hand on these guys- except for the Europeans. In fact the most promising is Republicans attacking them because they say "bad things" about conservatives. I applaud this effort and hope they hand Zuckerberg from a lamp post.
Good point about the Europeans,. They are regulating google and will regulat FB. I think it will catch on, if/when the whole Russkie mess breaks open, and if Dems get in power and progressive Dems push the agenda., I sure hope so.
Is there a more insufferable person on the face of the earth than Sheryl Sandberg? Do you think that on matters outside her area of expertise she thinks her opinion counts more than anyone else's in the room? I would love to have her hooked up to a lie detector during all televised legislative hearings. Tim Cook would have been a great capo for Jim Jones convincing people to drink the Kool Aid.
Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection
Send my credentials to the House of Detention
I got some friends inside
Small point, Morton Downey Jr. popularized that crap but the "inventor" was Wally George, a true right wing nut job and not an actor like Downey. But he was the father of actress Rebecca De Mornay. He was on low power TV in SoCal for three decades, starting in the 80s. He was born Oakland, grew up in San Mateo...a true California wing nut. They called him the father of "combat TV".
Noooo...I think Wally George was more like Tucker Carlson.
I didn't have cable growing up in L.A., so I'd watch Orange County's KDOC, Channel 56, which had music videos (Request Video!) and the TV version of Loveline* (which I'll get to below).
And they had Wally George.
He was more Trump-esque...as in being a conservative blowhard but not really practicing it in his private life...and taking advantage of conservative fears....homosexuality, Satanists, etc.
I think Wally George, though, wasn't full-blown crazy. Not Alex Jones crazy. Maybe 50%. His show felt more like WWE. A lot of kayfabe.
He'd bash female mud wrestlers...then join them in the mud wrestling ring.
"I'm doing this strictly for research."
*Here's the TV version of Loveline...not actually Loveline. KROQ DJ the Poorman created Loveline in 1983 and discovered/tapped Dr. Drew to be his co-host. In 1992, Loveline went 5 nights a week. In 1993, The Poorman was fired from the show (to be replaced by Rikki Rachtman, then Adam Carolla).
In the summer of 1994, The Poorman created a live TV version of Loveline on KDOC called The Love Channel paying for it out of his own pockets. He had a hot female doctor, Dr. Danielle, who would go on to marry David Zucker, the director of Airplane! and The Naked Gun. The Poorman was losing so much money that after a few months, The Poorman decided to pull out his ***** on live TV.
Fox is puny and of no consequence. The bigger threat to our democracy is Facebook. It controls and sells the information of millions is amoral, does its work in private, answers to no one and can easily be subverted- witness the Facebook employees being embedded in the Trump campaign to help then develop effective ads and the Russian ads. They'll do anything for a buck.
I'd also bet that more people get their news from FB than Fox and question it less
The bad content that gets shared on Facebook is like a super-charged version of Fox News' fearmongering junk, though. I think Fox deserves a good share of the blame here, at least for providing the template.
I agree Wally sort of winked at the camera with his stunts and the whole show was a little corny. Had very low production values, looked like a cable access show (that might be how he started). None the less, Downey copied the format and simply made it meaner with nastier politics and weirder paranoid stuff. Remember his stunt where he claimed to be attacked by Nazis (?) and beat up...but it was faked? I think Downey took the premise of Wally George's show (right wing political outrage, often faked or hammed up) and added Jerry Springe and paranoia. Still Wally George started it. He might not have been full out nasty but he set up the format.
On a personal note, my Wally George story has an odd but goofy twist. It was the early 90s and I was visiting my mom in the OC. Being home with nothing to do I was up late, like 2 a.m. flipping the channels when Wally George came on, so I stopped to look. Then Wally does a direct/live TV pitch ad..."Have DUI troubles, call BFD, 800-555-5555, etc.". And a graphic went up.
I just started laughing because I knew "BFD", a friend I went to school with through HS. He became a lawyer and served the drunk driving community in the beach towns. Sort of a natural extension of youth although not a drunk...just a lawyer. Ha!
Any way, I called the 800 number and left a message like W.T.F. Two months later I get a call when back in the Bay Area...that I thought was a prank, someone just screaming like crazy. Then I realized he was screaming surfer dude lingo...and it was BFD. So we caught up and in process he said advertising on Wally George was simply cheap target marketing. Looking at his old show, he was spot on. He had plenty of drunk frat boy clients, like the ones on tape above, some celebs too.
