I'm serious, folks. Murdoch is in some heavy shit across the pond and looking like the US is coming down the pike after him for hacking into 9/11 victim cell phones (despite his "Oh my, what's going on? Where's my pickles?" bullshit feigning senility).
Now I'm hearing some clamoring from the left: make Fox old news, knock down Fox, bring it to an end. Like hyenas circling the wounded zebra, some of us smell blood - we note the chink in Achilles' heel and feel the need to strike, to kill the stinking, hulking monstrosity while we are able to.
M'f'ing Shadow of the Colossus style!No.
Stop.
I'm goddamned serious.
Success?IF there is a groundswell grassroots push to knock down Fox, to take out the network, that would be a bad thing. Please: follow every legal outlet to investigate and prosecute to the fullest of the law should wrongdoing be found. But if there is a serious rising of liberals with online petitions and firey blog posts decrying Fox as an attachment to Murdoch and a call to tear down the beast, all we will garner is ridicule. With good reason. We will truly be hypocrites.
What is Fox?Fox is a tool (in both senses), something that Sean Hannity this week referred to as a "weapon" of conservatives. It is right-wing machinations donning a mask of "news." This is a heavily-weighted propaganda machine that uses "Fair and Balanced" as their primary slogan.
But because of all that, Fox is a joke. Fox is a news station that exemplifies conservatives in humor by launching and immediately killing their answer to The Daily Show (they don't get humor). Fox is conservatism manifest, an aggregator in that Rush Limbaugh today said Heat Index was invented by the government and has never been passed off as a real temperature and Fox stressed the heat index (for rational, safety reasons), and tomorrow, somewhere, Fox will show duress over this clash. Manifest in the multiple personality hydra it sometimes seems to be in attempting to cater to conservatives and tea party and Republicans and RINOs with a reach-around for the Libertarians.
So What Do We Lose?Fox is our beacon, our early warning sign for the pulse of stupid, our klaxon, our open playbook. Fox is a tool in a third way: our periscope.
If this goes away, we'll still have some spastic jolts of conservative reality in AM radio with the classic nutters like Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, and that asshat they call the Great One, but nothing like the heart monitor we have now.
It's the monster we know, the nooks and crannies we're accustomed to, the madness we've accepted. And what do we lose? Exactly that. And Murdoch will get over his temporary insanity and bring something to life even more malicious. The devil you know and all that?
Right now we have a speaking template of how stupid the right can be. It's been limbering around since the Tea Party popped their heads out from another universe, but they're trying. And this Murdoch horror has brought red, steaming blood to the party.
Ignore the blood.
Let it stand, let it stumble, let it rant, let it mumble.
You can both be not a hypocrite and help the liberal cause. Woohoo!
Leave Fox alone.
Srsly.
Ignore it.