A Glance at Fox

August 22, 2006

We are unusually disconnected from the world right now.. waiting for phone service and the DSL connection that comes with it. Our subscription to the local Appleton newspaper has not started up yet. We have no television connection (but that has been our habit for the past couple of years). Yet I have been storing up some comments on Fox News, which we watched for a few minutes while eating a continental breakfast in a motel in Rockford, Illinois.

It was a random portion of the news, but I was struck by how misleading it was. Right off the bat we got a report about the arrests of men of Middle Eastern descent caught trafficking in cell phones. The unavoidable context of the report was the recently revealed terrorist plot to blow up planes crossing the Atlantic from London. A brief statement came with the cell phone story, about how there was no known connection of these people to terrorism.. but truth seemed beside the point. The goal was suggestion: men of Middle Eastern descent are plotting. In reality I am sure that every immigrant group has its share of cell phone schemers.. yet Hispanic or Russian petty crimes are not full of implied threat.

Shortly came another report about Iran's announced intention to respond in late August to the offer put forward by Europe and the United States with respect to its nuclear program. Some "expert" mentioned that Bernard Lewis had called attention to the importance of that August date for Shi'as.. and then with dark reference to Iran's intent to "wipe Israel off the map" the "expert" inferred that Iran was perhaps planning a cataclysm on that August date. So what did the viewer take away from that report? Iran is a present danger, perhaps waiting to surprise us with a bloodbath. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Somewhere in the midst of these reports there was mention of the Democratic response to Republican statements about terror, and the blond woman in the morning group commented on the news: "I don't mind them criticizing policies, but I just wish they would put forward their own constructive ideas too.." (or something like that). That kind of off-hand un-marked commentary is perhaps the most insidious kind of influence.. because it takes for granted a criticism: Democrats/liberals have no real ideas about the fighting terror. Artfully (as I do believe this is a conscious trick) she has settled a criticism in the minds of viewers.

Here is one liberal proposal for the struggle against terrorism: let's call things by their real names. We have been immeasurably hurt by a bizarre refusal to call events by their real names. Rumsfeld resisted the word "insurgents" for a long time.. just as he now refuses to label events playing out in Iraq a civil war. The result has been that we have been fighting the wrong war, with the wrong tactics. Recent events in Lebanon have called forth the same tendency for the self-serving misnomer: Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. What? Maybe a guerilla army, but hardly an advocate of Bin Laden-like tactics. The result is again that Americans perceive events through a falsifying lens. The struggle against terrorism confronts America with a complex challenge, and it is a shame.. a terrible and grievous shame.. that we have leaders and news organizations that refuse to present the situation in its complexity, preferring instead to imply falsities, to scare, and to mislabel the players.