It’s amazing! There’s been ‘Good News’ in the headlines lately.
Okay, ‘Good’ might be a bit of a stretch, and some of it is not exactly ‘new’, but I’ll take it. It’s a lot of Schadenfreude and a large measure of ‘I was right all along’ but I’ll take what I can get these days.
First, there’s the Fox vs Dominion lawsuit, which FOX LOST. I mean, it never went to trial, so technically they didn’t lose, they settled. However, Fox is now required to pay Dominion $787.5 million, nearly half their annual profits. And so much evidence had already been disclosed in discovery, their (already shoddy) reputation was truly in tatters. A trial would have been fun; it would have been amusing to watch the Propogandists at Fox squirm as their words (on air and in text messages) were played back to them and they had to account for the open contradictions. It would have been fun to watch Rupert Murdoch’s Palace of Right-wing ideology crumble around him. Still, he has to pay Dominion a painful amount of money, and there still the Smartmatic lawsuit to come. Perhaps more damaging secrets are yet to be revealed.
Second happy news: Tucker Carlson has been fired from Fox News! It’s a victory for the causes of common sense and reality in general. For years he’s stirred up nonsense with his “I’m just a guy asking questions” approach to Broadcasting. I cannot in any way describe what he does as Journalism, since the role of the Journalist is to ask RELEVANT questions of people who KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT and to GET ANSWERS. Carlson just likes to ask stupid questions.
“Is Covid actually a left-wing hoax designed to tarnish the Trump administration?”
“Are Covid Vaccines actually a form of Human Experimentation?”
Is the Biden Administration importing Immigrants to replace white voters?”
A general rule of thumb for interpreting headlines: If the headline is in the form of a question, the answer is No. If they could prove the statement, they wouldn’t put the question mark.
I also can’t consider him a serious journalist because of who he chooses as enemies of the people. He attacked Elmo from Sesame Street (yes, the little, furry, red Muppet) when the show acknowledged the issues of racism in the US. He attacked M&M when they got rid of the Green M&M’s high heels. These attacks weren’t light hearted, “and finally” end of a show jokes. He put time and vitriol into them. He had a very weird fetish about the Green M&M that has left me very averse to eating them.
On the Bright side, he’s out. He’s already been fired from CNN and MSNBC, so in broadcasting terms he can only go further to the right, to OAN and Newsmax, who frankly can’t afford him. For years, the Republicans have cowered before him because of his viewers. Now that he doesn’t have viewers, he’ll soon discover that he doesn’t have friends, either.
For years, the man has been an affront to journalism and an obstacle to a well-informed electorate, so I’m taking great satisfaction in his incipient obscurity.
On this side of the Atlantic, I have my ‘I told you so’ moments. Parliament, in response to a public petition, finally debated the benefits of Brexit. Consensus? There are not benefits to Brexit. Any purported benefits were dismissed as fantasy. The only argument the Brexiteers could muster was that “British Sovereignty has been re-established.” They couldn’t specify how that benefited the British people, but they were very smug about it. The Anti-Brexit argument cited the destruction to the economy, cost of living, standard of living, trade, agriculture. But hey, Sovereignty, great. The country is becoming a pile of rubble, but at least it’s OUR pile of rubble.
In related news, there’s a new Biography of Boris Johnson, revealing his reaction to the Brexit vote. I have always maintained that BoJo never wanted Brexit. He wanted to be Prime Minister, he needed to raise his profile nationally, so he took up the Brexit cause. He NEVER expected or wanted it to pass. His response to the Brexit Campaign ‘Victory’ was “We’ve got no plan. What will we do?”
I totally called it. I get to say “I told you so.” It’s a cold comfort, but what with the Brexit induced (or at least, Brexit exasperated) energy crisis, we can’t afford warm comfort, and I’ll take what I can get.
If you have enjoyed this rant, check out my collected works. So, That Happened by Sheila Power. available from AMAZON in paperback and digital format.
So That Happened 