The longshoreman turned homespun philosopher Eric Hoffer is semi-forgotten today. But his book The True Believer (1951) is full of pertinent aperçus. One that has recurred to me often of late is the observation that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
I cannot quite say why, but Hoffer’s tart mot comes back to me, especially when I have pondered the recent fate of Fox News. I should begin by acknowledging that I do not regularly watch any television news, including Fox. Indeed, I do not regularly watch any television. Whenever I stumble over the offerings by the so-called “mainstream” outlets – CNN, MSNBC, CBS, etc. – I vacillate between being appalled by their glitzy vacuousness and outraged by their shrill, almost hysterical (I do not mean funny) partisanship.
I used to enjoy watching Tucker Carlson, which I discovered one could get in segments gratis after the show aired. I thought it the single most intelligent and most independent-minded commentary on television. It was also supremely entertaining. But then Fox infamously jettisoned Carlson, their most popular host, for reasons that, to me at least, remain somewhat obscure. Some people say it has something to do with the $787 million libel judgment rendered against Fox in its fight with the Dominion voting machine company. Maybe so.
In any event, like many people, I thought that the change I sensed happening at Fox accelerated markedly after Carlson was pushed out. The truth is, however, that the change has been happening since 2016 when Roger Ailes, who started Fox in 1996 and built it into a $20 billion per year business, was pushed out by Rupert Murdoch. The whole Ailes story is ably told in a documentary called, in homage to Teddy Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena.
Curiously, Fox, the dispenser of news, is now the object of news itself with the revelation that it has been enabling charitable contributions to such dubious organizations as the Satanic Temple, the Trevor Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Planned Parenthood, dear to the hearts and wombs of feminists, is another leftwing recipient of Fox’s largess.
This weekend, Newsmax and Blaze Media aired an extraordinary exposé of the scheme. Under the guise of corporate charitable giving, Fox is matching contributions of up to $1,000 per employee to various tax-exempt entities that meet its criteria. Amazingly, entities like Satanic Temple and the LGBTQ Trevor Group qualify for the dough.
The write-up from The Blaze minces no words in describing these radical groups. “The Satanic Temple,” we read, is an atheistic leftist organization that has distributed satanic literature to children; publicly performed “unbaptisms”; sought to ensure that women can legally have their unborn children killed by way of their “religious abortion ritual” and erected statues of Baphomet [an occult Satanic deity] on government property.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a leftist grievance organization that tends to characterize conservatives, parental rights groups, constitutionalists and those critical of big government as extremists and bigots. For instance, last month, the SPLC deemed Moms for Liberty an “anti-government extremist group.” Fox, which the SPLC previously called a “megaphone” for far-right extremist groups, has even written up some of the SPLC’s various scandals in the past, including the 2012 incident when a gunman attacked the Family Research Council, which he noted he had seen on the SPLC’s “hate map.”
The Trevor Project is an activist group that purportedly seeks to “end suicide among LGBTQ young people” but actively promotes gender ideology and woke propaganda. The group claims that “gender is a social construct” and holds fast to the notion that sex-change mutilations and cross-sex hormone therapies can be meaningful remedies for at-risk teens.
Hitherto, Fox has been regarded as a conservative voice in a landscape overwhelmingly dominated by “progressive,” which is to say, increasingly woke and activist voices.
The Blaze quotes a current Fox employee who said, “Fox pretends to care about Christians, but some of the stuff they push internally suggests otherwise. Glory holes, trans surgeries for kids, and potential donations to Satan are a huge slap in the face to every Christian at the company, and we resent it.”
The story of Fox’s errant charitable giving probably would have passed under the radar absent the organization dedicated to promulgating the philosophy of Satan, i.e., the philosophy of evil. But Satan was a step too far. As Roger Ailes’s widow Beth memorably put it, what we see on view here is “industrialized devil worship.” You’re not supposed to say such things, of course, but Mrs. Ailes is right. At some point, Fox News took a wrong turn. Now it appears to have driven off a cliff. No amount of woke, virtucratic flag-waving can save them. What they need is a new moral compass and a recommitment to delivering a “fair and balanced” news product. Will that happen? The jury is still out on that one.
I quit watching Fox News after the November 2020 election, with one exception–Tucker Carlson. So when Fox canned Tucker, I dumped Fox entirely.
There is a whole universe of online news outlets where one can get accurate, factual updates on the news. For instance, instead of the traitorous Drudge Report, I go to the Bongino Report as a reliable news aggregator.
Bongino Report
Another excellent news aggregator is News Ammo.
https://newsammo.com/
And of course, sites like American Greatness, American Thinker and similar sites provide in depth articles on a variety of subjects that would never be covered by Fox or the Enemedia.
I would add Citizen Free Press to your list of news aggregators. And I consider Zero Hedge a pretty good source for world wide economic news.
I think Tucker’s ouster from Fox has been a freeing event for him. Now he can go deeper into issues in freeform—not being limited to 8 minute segments on a particular issue. His latest dive has been on world wide energy issues and ends with about 15 minutes of clips on the coming of CBDC’s and their implication of financial controls. I got this from a Wendell Malone Substack link
I never much cared for American Thinker. It seems 1-2 times a year it puts out a gem but the remaining articles are poorly edited, filled with inaccuracies and/or just too over the top.
Agree on the inaccuracies and poor editing, but I would respectfully disagree on the content. Although I would agree that most articles on a daily basis offer nothing worthwhile, there is at least one article–or blog–that is either beneficial or exceptionally informative.
In light of recent news about Fox’s matching “charitable contributions”
for their employees, if Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, Watters, Gutfeld, Pirro , and any other “on air talent “ who bill themselves as “conservative “ don’t resign en masse in protest, they will forever be remembered, by at least, “yours truly “ as total hypocrites much more interested in maintaining their huge paychecks than retaining any semblance of integrity and honesty.