Fox News: Elon Musk is a superhero while President Biden is Goebbels, Stalin and Hitler.
A condensed overview of 15 hours of Fox News for the week ending 5/1/22
Viewers of Fox News last week might think that Elon Musk is the greatest human alive today, Joe Biden was somehow both a Nazi and a communist and we are all about to face starvation due to the influx of migrants at our Southern border and a secret attack on food processing plants.
Last week looked as if it would just be a festival devoted to the love and worship of the billionaire Elon Musk and his takeover of the social media platform Twitter.
Things changed abruptly though on Thursday when the Department of Homeland Security announced a new Disinformation Governance Board. Fox News personalities predictably predicted a dystopian future filled with jack booted free speech enforcers.
Clip of the Week.
Another lighting rod for the Fox News personalities was the appointment of Nina Jankowicz, a researcher, author, and commentator, as the executive director of the new department.
Jankowicz has degrees from Bryn Mawr college and a Master in Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She was also a Fulbright fellow in Kyiv, working with the foreign minister in Ukraine and served as a disinformation fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Despite her background and credentials Tucker Carlson went on a 17-minute tirade about her in which he personally insulted her multiple times,
“This is somebody was so few useful skills that she describes herself in the first words of her own bio as a quote, internationally recognized expert on disinformation is if that's a job of some sort, imagine if one of your kids grew up to be an internationally recognized expert in disinformation, the shame you would feel the pain of knowing that truly and unequivocally you had failed as a parent,” said Tucker Carlson.
Even though Fox and other right wing media outlets went into a full-sped panic Tsunami regarding this new agency there are few details on what the board will actually do.
One of the only specifics given by the head of DHS, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, is a plan to target misinformation disseminated to Spanish speakers. He also mentioned briefly that the agency will part of the effort to combat Russian misinformation.
The Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) is a continuation of the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency which was started in 2018 during the Trump administration.
There is no evidence that certain types of speech would be criminalized. Any law that targeted certain types of speech would be unconstitutional as the first amendment provides broad and sweeping protections for both speech and expression.
Most critics of the newly formed agency predicted it will just be another ineffective government program that won’t accomplish much of anything. Even Mayorkas has called it a “small working group” with “ no operational authority or capability” that it will be focused on foreign threats, not domestic ones.
Most of what I found about the DGB were highly partisan editorials that I wouldn’t recommend.
I couldn’t find a primary source on this yet. Normally there is a government website set up for every department and program but I was unable to find untying for the DGB. The Washington Post was one of the few non-Murdoch owned publications that had extensive reporting on this.
Sources
The Tempest over the DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board - Washington Post
DHS tries to right controversial rollout of its ‘disinformation governance board’ - Washington Post
Opinion - The Disinformation Governance Board is a bad name and a sillier idea - Washington Post
Tucker defends a left wing propagandist
The political horseshoe is real. In this clip Tucker slams a news rating agency for “censoring” The Grayzone, a far left wing propaganda website. The problem with Carlson’s claim is that the website wasn’t censored, shutdown or altered in anyway. The website owners weren’t sanctioned, arrested or fined.
The ratings agency rated the website as misinformation. The editor in chief of that website flipped out and wrote an angry tirade back. That’s it.
Interestingly enough the propagandist site pushes some of the same Russian disinformation that Tucker promotes on his show. Both the Grayzone and Tucker have made Nazi references towards Ukrainians as well as defending or obscuring the actions of Russia.
Elon Musk is Iron Man
Brian Hegseth really wants viewers to believe that he spontaneously came up with the idea that Elon Musk is a real life Tony Stark aka the comic book superhero known as Iron Man. Hegseth seems to forget he did an extended monologue where he made the same comparison two weeks ago while subbing for Jesse Watters on Jesse Watters Primetime.
Tucker Carlson claims White Supremacy was invented by Occupy Wall Street
Carlson’s extended monologue on Friday was filled with so many paranoid theories and misinformation I could have done an entire newsletter dedicated to it. In this clip Carlson implies that the fear white supremacy began being used as a political device by the left during the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Carlson seems to forget that both the head of the FBI and DHS under the Trump administration both stated that white supremacy was a growing domestic terrorism threat.
We are Being Invaded at our Southern Border - Tucker Carlson
Carlson has been comparing the war in Ukraine with migrants entering the U.S. Southern border now since the war began in late February.
In another clip that I posted on Twitter but don’t have space to include here, Carlson implies that we could be headed for mass food shortages and a political revolution if something isn’t done quickly to curb the flood of migrants.
“Oh, a food shortage. Many revolutions have been spurred by food shortages, most of them and the food that is available is quickly becoming hard to afford for people. But the Biden administration barely acknowledges this. Their solution flood the country with 2 million new people. They might all be good people doesn't matter. The volume is what matters. More people, fewer resources. What does that look like? More shortages,” said Tucker - April 29th, 2022
The Food Processing plan conspiracy theory
This theory has already spread like wildfire through far-right extremist circles. Carlson might have gone further with this last week if not for the Disinformation Governance Board rollout.
I suspect this is story will develop into something much more extreme.
How if Free Speech Racist?
The Five didn’t have much going on this week. Most of what the hosts had to say was the usual trashing of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. In this clip though Geraldo Rivera and Jesse Watters both give their opinion on racism and free speech.
Bogus Expert of the Week
It’s not a clip this week because there’s not much here except to point out that Tucker Carlson thought it was a good idea to have a comedian, Jimmy Failla, on as an expert to discuss Vice President Harris’s recent COVID-19 diagnosis.
Failla went on a three and a half minute extended joke about how the vaccine didn’t work while Carlson’s cackled. There is overwhelming evidence that the vaccine lessens the severity of the disease and has greatly lowered death rates but of course neither one of them mentioned that.
Stories that Fox News Ignored
Trump found in contempt of court - Trump has refused to turn over documents in the criminal case against his company. Trump is fined $10,000 every day he withholds the documents.
Stay of execution for Melissa Lucio in Texas - Lucio is a mother who was convicted of murdering her infant daughter. A lot of evidence is pointing towards her innocence.
Anti-Defamation League cites a steep rise in antisemitism The ADL cites a 53% increase in cases of antisemitism around the country, the largest increase since the ADL was formed.
The 30th anniversary of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. On April 29, 1992 a jury announced that four Los Angeles police officers had been acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon in the beating of an unarmed Black man named Rodney King. The verdict was seen as shocking at the time. In Los Angeles, the news sparked a five-day rebellion.
Fox also spent quite a bit of time on the accidental shooting on the set of the movie “Rust.” Most news outlets ignored the latest development or gave it scant coverage. It’s a relatively old story and not much has changed. No one involved in the production has been criminally charged. The civil lawsuit has just started making its way through the court system.
Things have shifted in regards to the war in Ukraine. The only news program that regularly discusses is is “Fox & Friends” the topic is completely ignored on “The Five” and Tucker Carlson only referenced it in a couple of odd references to swatstikas on Ukrainian soldiers.
By the Numbers
So far Hillary Clinton and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez always make this list. While a guest on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Dana Perino made the bold prediction that Clinton was planning another presidential run despite any evidence.
Twitter and Elon Musk dominated every single program until DHS announcement regarding the new Disinformation Governance Board.
Tucker Carlson and the New York Times
Tucker Carlson also got called out in the New York Times in a multipart series that included an incredible interactive section. The New York Times used a small army of of researchers, graphic designers, motion graphic animators, and web developers to make this comprehensive analysis.
The interactive portion includes audio and visuals from over 1150 hours of Tucker Carlson Tonight. The credits for the interactive portion of the series included 14 names that covered five years worth of programming.
In contrast I’ve watched and analyzed just shy of 100 hours of Tucker Carlson Tonight between this and a previous project.
The New York Times did a great job distilling Carlson’s rhetoric to “they-you” which he aggressively pushes in every single episode. Who is they? Tucker never specifies. “They” is the unseen powerful enemy that is secretly plotting against “you” and that’s all that matters.
The Times researchers also nailed Carlson’s use of “The Replacement Theory”, a racist conspiracy theory that started in France that pushes the idea that people in power want to change the demographics of the West (Europe and North America) in order to manipulate the population for their own gain.
The theory has deep-seated antisemitic roots as most conspiracy theories ultimately blame Jewish people for nearly every major problem in the world. None of this is new of course as antisemitism has been a problem for hundreds of years.
Pat Buchanan also promoted similar ideas of the white population dying out due to lower birth rates while stoking fears of a changing demographic in his book “The Death of the West,” a popular tome among white nationalist and extremist circles.
The New York Times also explores the many white nationalists who have openly supported Tucker Carlson and sing his praises. I’ve found the exact same pattern in my work, yet Carlson himself mocks the idea of white nationalism and claims it doesn’t exist or isn’t much of a problem.
I could write much more about this enormous exploration of Tucker Carlson and his show. I would recommend every reader of this newsletter to check it out.
How Tucker Carlson Stocked White Fear to Conquer Cable
How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News - and Became Trump’s Heir
The interactive version of The NY Times Series
For next week I’m going to cover Tucker Carlson Tonight again as I expect some type of reaction to the NYTimes piece.