The real Fox News agenda
I don’t think it was an accident that, of the half dozen or so most popular ways in which the world can end, the creators of the film “Don’t Look Up” chose to showcase an impact event. After all, a comet striking the earth is one of the few planet-killing cataclysms for which human beings ought to receive no blame. While global warming, the threat of nuclear war and even the current pandemic can and should be traced to human stupidity, comets striking the earth are apolitical and random and something we should all agree about as being a bad thing.
But when it comes to finding ways to make anything political and turning a global tragedy into an opportunity to blame Democrats, Republicans just need somebody to hold their beer. With Swiftian irony the filmmakers brilliantly satirize Republican anti-science stupidity and hypocrisy.
It was a film somebody needed to make. It also received exactly the Rotten Tomatoes audience approval score one would expect — 78%. That 22% who didn’t like the film is probably mostly composed of Conservatives recognizing themselves and being furious about what they saw.
So it’s little wonder when Fox News gadfly Peter Doocy asked the long-suffering Presidential Press Secretary Jan Psaki a bad faith question about the rise in the murder rate in America, he clearly didn’t give a crap about the murder rate, he just wanted to pin the blame for it on Joe Biden. Doocy knows just as well as anyone else that Republicans don’t have solutions for anything. They need to distract from their lack of any real platform by blaming Biden and the Democrats for all the ills of the world, even the ills caused by Republicans.
Jen Psaki carefully (and with a grace that the likes of Sarah Huckabee Sanders et al couldn’t begin to approach) explained how Democrats are taking steps to reduce crime in America, and how Republicans are deliberately thwarting those steps. “I think we should be responsible in reporting to the public what the reasons are for the surge in crime,” Psaki told Doocy. “Gun violence is a huge reason for the surge in crime. Underfunding of some police departments and their need for additional resources, something the President has advocated for consistently through the course of his career, that’s something we know we need to take action on … that is something that should not be a political issue … [Biden has] offered unprecedented levels of funding for the rescue plan for cities and states to put more cops on the beat and invest in proven community anti-violence programs, something that Republicans voted against.”
The point to Doocy’s question is the question itself. Fox News is not a news organization, it’s a propaganda organization. If they broadcast any part of this exchange they will cut Psaki’s answer or simply show a still of her apparently looking baffled by the question.
The Republican agenda is not to reduce the murder rate. Far from it. They want all things bad to get worse so they can retake power. Once they do so they can go back to blaming the rise in the murder rate on statistics coming out of “Democrat cities.” Then they can get back to the true business at hand, making themselves and their rich, powerful friends all the richer and all the more powerful.
If you have been scratching your heads wondering why Peter Doocy seems hellbent on perennially playing straight man to Jen Psaki’s comedian, scratch no more. Fox News will use anything — even a planet killing comet should it ever come to that — to blame Democrats. Just as long as they can ask the damning questions, they don’t care what the answer is, and they make sure their low-information, low-IQ viewers never find out. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.