Recently I watched Fox News so you won’t have to.
Why? Because I was stuck in a Comfort Inn that had 57 cable channels but no sci fi channel. Where? In Canada’s most red neck province, Alberta, with an oil production like Texas (See Wikipedia) and a landscape the same (see True Grit).
Specifically, I live in Calgary, home of the Calgary Stampede (Yahoo!)
For major print media, we have two daily newspapers. The broadsheet is bigger, with a good business section for liberal and conservative capitalists. The thinner tabloid is, some would say, even more conservative, sans business section, but with more opinion columns: Maybe because tabloid readers, not reading magazines for business and news, won’t see the opinion pieces in such periodicals. If any paper in Canada should be Fox style it would be our tabloid, the Calgary Sun. Here’s what a Sun columnist said back in 2008, around when Obama was getting the Nobel Peace Prize:
QUOTE
:… Fox News executive Michael Clemente said, “The average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents.”
Only it’s not called Fox Opinion, it’s all called Fox News.
Lisa Van Dusen, Calgary Sun Washington Bureau, October 15, 2009
UNQUOTE
Many folks in the United States, aware that Fox is editorial, not news, are shortening the name to Fox. I can’t blame them for doing so, not after I watched that infamous Oval Office scene live. After it aired, I watched more Fox as person after person, journalists and guests, unanimously took the party line that Trump was right and that President Zelensky was disrespectful, insulting towards American, and so forth.
I was despairing, almost getting hypnotized, until I went over to the BBC and found a former US federal official who disagreed, saying President Zenlensky was “ambushed,” and then I went on the web and found a very lengthy list of foreign heads of state all supporting Zelensky. Even if I believed in “American exceptionalism,” that list is just too long to be mere coincidence. “Yes Virginia, we are the bad guys.”
The truth is that Fox “editorial” has a party line as surely as Russian State TV. This when even the Calgary Sun includes token non-rednecks.
Another way to put it: Everyone with a red MAGA hat (make America great again) watches only Fox.
Someone commented, distraughtly below a Youtube video, that her father has very strange ideas because he only watches Fox, for hours per day, saying he believes that all the other media can’t be trusted. Well. I guess if to “compare and contrast” was easy, then I wouldn’t have had to go to college to learn the phrase. The title of the Youtube is I Understand Now How Families Ended Up on Opposite Sides of the Civil War.
As for comparing to the Calgary Sun, I am looking a full page article from Saturday March 1, page 6, under a blue and yellow War in Ukraine banner, headlined U.S. Smackdown, subtitled Ukraine’s Zelensky gets hostile White House reception. From the associated press, the prose was objective, not like Fox.
Numbers don’t lie. Finally, assuming that at long last I would finally get some science, some sanity, I watched Fox bring in an “economist.” A young blond with straight hair. Did she echo what economists from Harvard and Yale were saying? Was she even from a university? Doubtful, as she kept guessing “what Trump thinks,” and guessing “what Trump intends”…
I know it’s hard to be objective. That’s why a doctor doesn’t treat himself; that’s why “a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.” And that’s why someone who doesn’t read any newspaper, nor watch anything other than Fox, is like a certain lawyer’s client.
… …
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Sean Crawford
Calgary
March
2025
Footnote:
There is now a website, with personal testimonies, for those who are leaving the cult of MAGA. From them I see that yes it is a cult, and yes it is hard to leave.
“I thought those angry white people were acting in good faith,” testifies James Hicks of Texas.
Now I know: They weren’t, and neither was the president and vice president on that day in the Oval Office.
Great post Sean. I went into the personal testimonies site. Wow! I hope the site grows with more people leaving MAGA.
Ya, me too.
As for Americans, I am reminded of Mark Twain, in the days of unfortunate illiteracy, saying something like, “A person who won’t read has no advantage over a person who can’t read.”