General Discussion
Showing Original Post only (View all)Your Opinion, Please (H2O Man Survey #24) [View all]
Question: Do you think that the people on Fox News actually believe the things they say?
Context: Last night, I was hoping to catch up on the weekends news. MSNBC had on re-runs of shows about incarceration; CNN was running a program on Whitney Houston. I hesitated, but then clicked on Fox News. Yikes!
The host of the program was Lauren Green. For the approximate three minutes that I watched her show, I noted that she spoke in a manner intended to de-humanize the population in Iraq and Syria that is known as ISIS. To be clear, I find the beliefs of that group offensive, and their behaviors to be horrifying. I do not pretend to know the answer to how to stop the gross violence in their territory, or the rest of the Middle East. Yet, I question the benefits accrued in identifying any population as less than human.
Because I watch Fox News less than a half-hour per year, I am not familiar with many of that networks hosts. In fact, my impression tends to be that the network is the host, and that individuals like Bill OReilly and Sean Hannity are (human) parasites that feed upon its audiences ignorance and fears. The networks ratings serve as an imperfect measure of our social pathology.
However, even after turning the television off, something about the vacant look in Ms. Greens eyes had caught my attention. Then I remembered seeing a clip of her interviewing Reza Aslan on his book Zealot. Non-Fox news sources had played clips of her 2013 attempt to attack Aslan, and exposing her own utter ignorance on the topics at hand.
Its interesting -- to me, anyhow -- that if it were in the context of an American courtroom, Aslan would be qualified to express an opinion about the topic of his book, but Green would not be. Indeed, her beliefs would be deemed a bias, rather than an opinion. Yet, in the American media, which often presents as the witness stand in the court of public opinion, she is able to channel her bias to a segment of the public that believes her position reflects some type of expertise. (To be fair, she could qualify as an expert witness on piano, while Aslan could not.)
Yet, Ms. Green believed that, despite his advanced degrees in religious studies, Aslan was disqualified from expressing his thoughts on the historic figure Jesus, because he is Islamic. I suspect that narrow thinking influences her beliefs on everything else going on in the Middle East. Thus, I think she is sincere in her ignorance, fears, and hatred.