Fox News: Woke is the Word! The Mask Mandates are Dead but We’re Still Mad!
A condensed overview of 15 hours of Fox News for week ending 4-24-22
A typical Fox viewer last week would believe the country is going down the toilet due to the woke mob, that mask mandates were the greatest threat to civil liberty in the history of humanity and if something terrible happened anywhere in the world Joe Biden did it.
Fox viewers were also inundated with the same recycled images of migrants crossing the U.S. Southern border and warned that the country is about to be overrun with undocumented immigrants, illegal drugs and crime.
Xenophobic rants have been a staple of Fox News for a while now which is why I’m not focusing on them for this newsletter.
The word of the week was woke. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary woke means aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).
For whatever reason Fox News decided the phrase - politically correct, and the words - progressive and liberal were no longer acceptable. Anything slightly left of center is now woke.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a word or phrase repeated throughout the Fox News universe. Repetition is commonly used in propaganda. It streamlines the message and clarifies the target. Any variation of phrases will muddle the message.
Clip of the Week
Although bail and police reform were also lumped into the rallying cries against wokeness Fox’s biggest grievance was with the woke Disney Corporation.
When the Parental Rights in Education Bill HB 1557 was signed into law in Florida last month The Disney Corporation vowed to help do what it could to help repeal it.
The movement behind the legislation started due to fears of Critical Race Theory being integrated into grade school level classes but then expanded to include objectionable books and instruction covering sexual orientation and gender identification.
The Florida law states that lessons about sexual orientation are banned completely in kindergarten through third grade. It also prohibits lessons in other grades unless they are ‘age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate.”
It also gives parents the right to sue the school district over any instruction they don’t agree with which obviously sets up all types of scenarios that could be quite problematic for educators and schools.
The last major provision of the law requires schools to tell parents when their child receives mental health services. This might seem reasonable at first glance but for a child struggling with their gender identification or sexual orientation it could be disastrous if the child doesn’t have supportive parents.
Supporters of HB 1557 say it strengthens the rights of parents and prevents an activist teacher from promoting a LGBTQ agenda.
Detractors of the law labeled it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill before it was even voted on. They’ve also called the law unnecessary as sex education is already banned for Florida students until the 5th grade.
Teachers have always been in a legal gray area when it comes to free speech as they are ultimately beholden to the standards and guidelines of the school districts they work for.
The Constitutional challenge may come on the part of students. A child who has gay parents might want to discuss their family as part of an assignment only to be shutdown by a teacher due to the law.
In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines School District that students of every age have First Amendment rights.
On April 21, 2022, in direct retaliation to Disney’s opposition to HB 1557 the Florida legislature passed a law that stripped the corporation of its special tax status which the company has enjoyed for the past 50 years.
Where this issue really gets sinister is how Fox News covered it. Instead of looking at this as a debate about what is or isn’t appropriate for young children, Fox News has gone full pedophile panic mode.
Laura Ingraham and other hosts have used the term “grooming” to infer that the real motivation behind teaching about sexual orientation is to somehow indoctrinate young children into the LGBTQ lifestyle or even to make it easier for adult teachers to sexually molest children.
Tucker Carlson has gone on several anti-trans rants for months now as he openly mocked U.S. public health official Dr. Rachel Levine misgendering her 8 times in two minutes.
The following video is from last month week ending March 27th, 2022.
Another disturbing layer to this whole debate is how Fox’s messaging of grooming and sexual predators plays into the QAnon conspiracy theory regarding child sacrifice and child trafficking.
Fox News regularly instills fears of puberty blockers and sexual reassignment surgery for children. Parents need not worry as the average age of gender re-assignment surgery is 29.5 years according to ‘Trends in Gender-affirming Surgery in Insured Patients in the United States” published April 16, 2018 at International Open Access Journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
The average age some children receive puberty blocking medication is 14.
The anchors on Fox also never explain how a minor aged child could get any extensive medical treatment without their parent’s knowledge. I’m not sure when kids were able to purchase their own health insurance or somehow secretly visit doctors who worked free of charge and with no paper trail.
The trans gender community is also quite small as according to the same article “Trends in Gender-affirming Surgery in Insured Patients in the United States”,
An estimated 0.6% of the U.S. population identifies as transgender and an increasing number of patients are presenting for gender-related medical and surgical services.
Florida is just the start as similar bills are being introduced in at least 20 states.
Fox News never addresses what a child with two same sex parents is supposed to navigate these rules or how a child who might be struggling with accepting their own sexual orientation in the LGBTQ spectrum.
Sources
“Understanding Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill” - Findlaw.com
Florida’s law limiting LGBTQ discussion in schools explained - Washington Post
Puberty blockers for transgender and gender-diverse youth - Mayo Clinic
Trends in Gender-affirming Surgery in Insured Patients in the United States - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Don’t Say Gay bills aren’t new. They’ve just been revived - 19thnews.org
Mask are Dead! Long Live the Masks!
You’d think the end of the mask mandates on airplanes would be a cause for celebration but it only seemed to confuse and enrage the anchors at Fox.
Clutch Your Pearls
Hannity is outraged over White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s coarse language.
Yet again Fox News seems to forget how outrageous former President Donald J. Trump was towards the press.
Bernie running for President
Fox News anchors can hardly hold in their excitement about another Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. To be fair they act the same way when they have promoted the idea that Hillary Clinton could run for president again, despite no evidence that she’s planning such a move.
Bogus Expert of the Week
I'm not sure if this was an intentional move to confuse viewers or just sloppy research.
Fox News legal analyst and commentator quotes safety regulations from Actors Equity Association (AEA) while discussing the accidental shooting on the set of "Rust." Actors Equity is the union that covers stage actors in the U.S. The union that covers stage actors has no jurisdiction over film and television.
The union for film and television actors is Screeen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA).
An actor is NEVER expected to be an expert on firearms, how to load them or what ammunition is real or fake. A weapons expert (Armorer) is the person in charge of all prop guns on set.
Baldwin might be found liable for the accident in a civil lawsuit as he was one of the producers of the film, but if anyone would be found criminally responsible it would be the person who was in charge of the weapons, not an actor who was handed a loaded gun. There is never a reason to have live ammo on a film set.
Tulsi – Anti-trans rant
I’m not sure why former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard still identifies as a Democrat. In this clip she declares the anti-LGBTQ bill doesn’t go far enough then has a wild chuckle with Sean Hannity. Fox loves to showcase Gabbard as a “liberal” but I’m not sure she meets the criteria of even someone mildly left of center.
Greg Gutfeld – Bad soup joke
I am including this clip because Greg Gutfeld himself retweeted it himself! He called yours truly a dolt. I’m sure his decision to retweet an account with roughly 2300 followers that is only two and a half months old might have something to do with the tweet I posted in the week prior that got over 1 million views.
I personally found the this joke in poor taste and not remotely funny but comedy is subjective. I’ve never actually found Gutfeld funny for what it’s worth.
Stories that Fox News Ignored
Biden opens up some federal land for oil drilling - The Biden administration opened up a small amount of land over nine states for drilling while sharply increasing the royalty payments oil companies must pay the government for the privilege. Biden was widely criticized for environmental groups for doing so. Fox didn’t mention it.
A recent study by the University of Michigan published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed the gun deaths were the leading cause of death among children and teens in the U.S.
Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney phone conversation leaked to the press - In the conversation it’s revealed that McCarthy wasn’t nearly as supportive of then President Donald J. Trump during the Capitol riots on Jan. 6th.Earth Day speech given by President Biden - Fox reported on this but complained that Biden should have spoken about the border crisis instead of discussing the environment on Earth Day. They even complained that the setting for the speech, a National Forest in Washington State, was too boring.
By the numbers
Fox News and PBS NewsHour had very different approaches to the news last week.
There might be a week when Fox doesn’t mention Hillary Clinton or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but I’ve yet to see it. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy is again hardly mentioned but Hunter Biden got 18 mentions as Sen. Bernie Sanders was mentioned 21 times.
Although the riots at the capitol on Jan. 6th were one of the main topics discussed on PBS NewsHour it wasn’t mentioned at all on Fox News.
For next week I’m going back into the belly of the beast that is Tucker Carlson in addition to my usual coverage of “The Five” and the first hour of “Fox & Friends”