Who Decides

Who Decides?

(b/4 reading this please excuse my poor grammar)

I despise O’Reilly to the point that when I watch his show I feel the need to strangle him, and I have been watching Fox News’s claim of “we report you decide” for years and would like to finally put what I think about it in writing. Adding all this up I came to create my own mutant topic. The rhetoric and propaganda of Fox News displayed through Bill O’Reilly.
The famous slogan of Fox News is “we report you decide”. This in my opinion means that media should just state the facts and nothing else with them, after the people read the facts they should be able to come to sensible conclusion on their own. However, an objective form of media like this leaves too much up to the consumer and the consumer in general does not want to seek out an opinion, he/she would rather have the opinions told to them and then they could just choose one. In order for this form of media to be proper, both sides of the story would have to be said without any particular bias on either side.
According to Fox News this is how they run, they state both sides and then let you decide. However, they completely ignore the importance of stating both sides without bias towards either one, as it says to in the fairness doctrine. The fairness doctrine was created in 1949 by the FCC, it said that news corporation must devote a certain amount of time to public issues and must state contrasting views. Fox News has taken this doctrine and claim this is how they relay their news, unfortunately, they take this with a grain of salt. Fox News’ soul intention of giving the democratic view is to shoot it down and legitimize the republican view.
Rupert Murdoch is the owner of Fox News, why is this important? Rupert Murdoch is famously a strong right wing conservative Christian, who is very active in politics, and he also is very interested in profit. These two facts explain why Fox News gives us the news the way they do.
Fox News is famous for being absurdly bias to the current party that their shareholders request them to be, this is a result of its owner demanding that his company not say anything against the government. They also will do anything to gain viewers, this why you will see Fox News tend to stick to the cheap stories that give a kind of a gut check reaction rather then a well-researched objective story, which lets you come to your own conclusion. For example, they would give a story about the Jennifer Aniston break up over a government policy issue.
What does this make Fox News? A giant propagandist profit seeker, when one watches Fox News it is very rare they will see a negative story on Bush. Fox News will use its best efforts through rhetoric to bring up the republican party. For example, they will cut into a democrat’s speech, say “Breaking News”, and then show a speech by Bush.
This was showed best during Bush’s re-election campaign and the throughout the war on terror.
Fox would have a count down of the days until Bush was re-elected, this would have been a problem if they were saying “204 days until the election” but when a news corporation that’s slogan is “we report you decide” counts down the days till a partisan party is re-elected it looks like they have done the deciding for us. They would also constantly bash Bush’s opponent John Kerry. Fox News spent three weeks on his flip-flop ordeal; they made the fact that he threw out his Viet Nam medals away into a scandal. When Kerry went on a skiing vacation Fox made it seem as if he was having an affair, and they even said that Kerry looks French and someone who looks French should not be our president. During the election, Fox News gave people decisions before they could decide. Fox News became a source of attack politics, which I thought was a job that was only done by politicians.
Even worse then this was the creation of fear and creation of an enemy almost immediately after 9/11. Two things that stuck out in my head were the anthrax scare and the weapons of mass destruction/ Osama and Saddam connection.
The anthrax scare was a brilliant form of propaganda, four people in total were affected by it, but fox made it seem as a threat to all of America. Fox would have constant coverage of the anthrax scare that they created, and they would say the best advice we can give is to stay inside and do not check your mail or anything sent to you. This created a major fear for the people and who else can save them from this fear than the mighty government.
The next thing they did also a classic propaganda tactic (most famously used by Hitler) was the creation of an enemy, since Osama was no were to be found going after him was impossible, but not doing anything after a tragedy such as 9/11 is unacceptable thought Bush. This is how the Osama and Saddam connection was created, and when the weapons of mass destruction. Fox News led the coverage on this, they served as the puppet of Bush here, and Fox did not even entertain the idea of this connection or claim being false. The psychology that Fox created here went this, that if you are not supporting America your supporting terrorism, because this is in fact a war on terror and if your not for it you must be against it. This played a major role in America believing the false connection and claim that were the reasons why we needed to go to war with Iraq.
These are just some of the propaganda tactics that Fox uses on a daily basis to support their party; however, their biggest strength is their mass audience. Rupert Murdoch owns News Corporation, which owns many cable and satellite televisions, newspapers magazines, and internet companies ect. This mass audience equals up to an approximate 4 billion viewers. Rupert Murdoch gives every news outlet he owns talking points for the day, an example of this would be “Today Bush is having a debate with Kerry; a main topic will be abortion, so lets legitimize Bush’s views on abortion.” This conservative opinion is now brought to billions of viewers, which is a major display of a lack of deciding and in my opinion is very scary.
The biggest problem is the result of all this is a severe loss of democracy. In my opinion, one of the great things about our democracy is that it is a society in which people formulate their own opinions and this diversity of opinions should shape our government. Since we run under such an institution, we do not expect to be affected by political propaganda because it should not exist in our realm.
That is why Americans are blind sided everyday Fox News, their slogan says, “we report you decide” which gives you the impression that you are getting a clean story and to clean opinions that are equally covered. This is the expectation that the average American goes into before he reads the news, so when Fox News blatantly advocates for the republicans most people don’t think that’s what is happening because the expect to receive the news in the way that their slogan says its should be delivered.
Fox News’ goal is not that their viewer will be knowledgeable citizen rather their goal is that the citizen watching will become a supporter of the government. Their replacement of substance with advocacy is a major tragedy in journalism and in democracy. I hope that someday this news giant will fall and it will not take a discovered lie about the government to wake up the democracy.
A great example of Fox’s bias is the O’reilly factor. O’reilly has a show on Fox in which he represents his and fox’s strong righty pro-bush opinion against who ever he is interviewing. O’reilly has gained a reputation of being loud provocative and not afraid to say what is on his mind. This is what made him famous and he is become a public icon because of it. He is looked at as a very smart man because in most of his interviews he totally destroys his opponent.
However, his critics (such as myself) have different things to say about him. First of all the majority of “liberals” he goes against are either very week liberals who cant hold their argument well or are friendly “liberals” who agree with many things that Bush said and just argue on a couple of issues. Fox’s goal of any debate on their show is for the conservative to look good and the liberal to look bad. For example Hannity and Colmes, just their sheer appearance portray what Fox wants one to think of the two opinions, Hannity is the conservative who is relatively good looking and is a presence when he speaks is with a certain authority, Colmes is the liberal who is a smaller soft spoken guy and usually loses his arguments. This is form in which fox tries have for all their debates, especially with O’reilly.

When I watch O’reilly I usually tear my hair out for several reasons, two of the many reasons are his rhetoric and his and Fox’s g-d like perception of Bush (its amazing how everyday they find new ways to glorify him). The reason why these two bother me is because he always uses the rhetoric to help bush come out on top, and many of his arguments are won because he creates facts or cuts off his opponent in the middle of a statement. Another major tactics he uses is emotion, which is a major player in rhetoric; he says an outlandish thing when he is losing an argument to distract his opponent. The most famous from of rhetoric he uses is his shut up tactic (very professional), when he does not like what he is being said he tell the guest to shut up.
In short, when you are a liberal going against O’Reilly usually you will endure a lot of yelling, abuse, and a lack of opportunity to make your point. Even if you do make your point after you leave the show he will make his point at the end of the show so it will be the last thing the viewer hears
Here are some classic examples of the typical O’Reilly factor and what happens when its not the typical O’Reilly Factor
The first one is the story of Jeremy Glick. Jeremy Glick’s father died on 9/11, but he took a different approach to his loss rather then participates in this blind blame game created by our fine government. Instead, he participated in the signing of an anti-war petition, which was put in as a full-page ad in the New York Times; in this ad, they compared innocent deaths in 9/11 with the innocent deaths in Viet Nam, Baghdad, and Panama City.

This was obviously a shock to O’Reilly since a family who lost a member was not pro-war. The first point he made was a guess which if was right he would have treated like a fact. He said to Glick “I'm surprised you signed this. You were the only one of all of the families who signed”, this was a guess and nothing else, and many times O’reilly will make something up and use it for his argument, luckily here that did not work. Glick said in response to this that here were many families of the 9/11 victims who signed this advertisement. The part that really started the heavy battle was when Glick rightfully accused O’reilly; “You evoke 9-11 to rationalize everything from domestic plunder to imperialist aggression worldwide.” This was the main issue he wanted to bring up on the show and he succeeded in getting his point across which most O’Reilly guests do not, so it became very interesting to see the rhetoric O’Reilly used while he was under attack.
Then his response to this was “I support the 9/11 families!” and “That’s a bunch of crap!” (very professional). Then when Glick tried to explain himself by making a parallel to an experience of September 14, unfortunately this parallel was never heard because O’Reilly used his famous cut off tactic. First O’Reilly said, “I’m not going to debate this with you”, which is very interesting because that is the whole point of his show, to debate!
He then tried changing the topic by saying “For the Record” “You didn't support the action against Afghanistan to remove the Taliban. You were against it, OK.” Glick said in response to this “Why would I want to brutalize and further punish the people in Afghanistan”

After this, O’Reilly used the misconnection of every person in Afghanistan to the Taliban for the famous propaganda tactic of creating the enemy. If your not with us your with them. When this came up O’Reilly said that the Afghan people killed Glick’s father, and that it was horrible that O’Reilly cared more about this than his own son. Glick quickly answered back that Al Qaeda killed his father not Afghanistan, and that there is no reason to kill everyone there for an act of a group.
Then Glick Tried to state what he said at the very beginning of the interview that Bush Sr. with the CIA and the trained hundred thousand radical Mujahadeen trainees, to combat and to overthrow the democratic government in Afghanistan, and how this can be equated with his father’s death.
However, O’Reilly was quick to shoot this down; his response to this was “I hope your mother is not watching this because you — that's it. I'm not going to say anymore”, after this anything else Glick tried to say O’Reilly said his favorite 5 words “Shut Up” Cut The Mike”. O’reilly said that out of respect for Glick’s father he is not going to “dress you down anymore”.
O’Reilly here showed a serious lack of professionalism, a complete mental breakdown, and his classic uses of rhetoric. The bottom line is that he did not actually expect Glick to be the opponent he was, since O’Reilly cant be the weaker one he had to cajole himself out of this situation. Therefore he first yelled which form my experience is the first sign that one is wrong because whenever someone is right they don’t need to prove their point by yelling shut up, it is common knowledge in psychology that when someone yells in a argument they are angry because they don’t have a point.
The lowest point of this argument was when O’Reilly started using Glick’s dead father to defend himself; it was completely insensitive and really served no purpose in the argument. It makes you think that if O’Reilly claims that he has helped the 9/11 victims’ families so much than wouldn’t he understand that bringing in Glick’s dead father to the argument for no real reason other than to change the topic is a little insensitive?
What bothered me more than anything was what O’Reilly said after the interview. He said, "Jeremy Glick came on this program and accused the president of the United States of orchestrating 9-11.” He completely distorted what Glick said, in fact Glick wanted to sue but he looked into it and his legal advisor told him that since O’Reilly lies so much he can be declared a pathological liar, and he doesn’t know when he is lying therefore he wouldn’t be responsible.
The slogan says “we report you decide” then it should be applied to interviews too. If you at the end of debate you, say which side is right and wrong then the whole purpose of it is defeated. The point of a debate on a news channel should be to show the two sides of an argument and let the viewer decide which one he/she likes. When O’Reilly talks about the interview afterwards and says he is right then the whole point of the debate was pointless! However, this is something I have become accustomed to when I watch Fox News, which is that they report and tell you what to decide.
The next two examples are just one of the many examples of O’reilly using senseless equations, absurd rhetoric, and false facts to prove his point .O’Reilly said during a gay marriage dispute that he couldn’t care less what gay’s do and if they want to get married they should head up to Canada were it is legal. The gay rights person he was interviewing said that homosexual love is just as meaningful as heterosexual love, and if a gay couple wants to get married, the court should allow it. Although O’Reilly said he did not care about the issue, he said that if the courts let gay marriage happen then what stop someone form polygamy or “marrying a duck”.
What O’Reilly did here was very interesting, he said he did not care but then he said the courts should not allow it. Why did he do this? First, you can never be pro gay anything on the Fox Network. Since Fox is controlled by Rupert Murdoch who is a devout Christian and major Bush supporter, so being pro gay anything aside for there banishment from America would go against the views of the owner, and if you want to keep your job you better watch what you say on a Christian network. Secondly, Fox is constantly accused with good reason of being conservative, so when O’Reilly said he is could not care less what gays do it was the closest thing to a Fox anchor having a liberal view.
I also found the wording O’Reilly used to be very interesting, He said if gays could legally get married then what has to stop someone from polygamy or marrying a duck. Now why did he say polygamy or marry a duck, since he said polygamy he should have said bestiality to be consistent. This answer is very simple; rhetoric is the ability to use language effectively and is often used in propaganda. When O’Reilly says polygamy it doesn’t really stick in person’s head because most people don’t know what it means and its not looked at as such bad thing in country that has many people having affairs. However, when he said duck what was the first reaction someone has to that? I would assume nausea that is why it sticks in the viewers head after the debate. Now every time they see a duck they will think about how absurd it would be to marry it, and then they will think that gay marriage shares the same absurdity.

He then said this in a gay parenting dispute. The woman he was interviewing said that statistics show that a gay couple can parent a child just as well as a heterosexual couple; she had her proof on paper right in front of O’Reilly. However, O’Reilly had a better proof (that was sarcastic): Mother Nature. He said that it is not natural for a child not to have a male parent and a female parent; it is not what mother nature intended for the world. He said that the first two parents were a man and a woman, and that was to be parent mold forever. It is not the norm of society to no not have a male and female figure in their life, therefore this must mean that gays would be worst parents then heterosexuals

This made no sense at all, but it does again show how Fox News is a blatant Christian news network. Now let us look into what he said. He says that it is not what Mother Nature intended, and it is not the norm of society. Well lets first acknowledge the brilliant conclusion and reasoning he brought up, according to him that since something that was not done at the beginning of time isn’t what mother nature intended for.
The conclusion he drew form this was that since the first parents were man and a woman all must be man and woman otherwise they would not be good parents. I found this very hard to understand because there are millions of single parents and millions of what O’Reilly would call “normal parents” who are terrible parents. O’Reilly did not seem to address this whatsoever, but then again when you make up a fact its little hard to prove it. The thing that bothered me most was what I said at the beginning of this paragraph. Who are O’Reilly and Fox News to declare what the normative mold of parenting should be? If they read the bible that is fine but it should not be brought to define what is normal for society. America is a diversified country in their religious beliefs, this is why we have separation of church and state, because it s not fair that a country should decide for its people what their belief in g-d should be. The wonderful results in this are that there is no religious persecution; a person cannot be punished if he goes against his fellow Americans religion, and my favorite is that that our country is run as a secular society. When Fox News or O’Reilly declares a norm of society from the bible, it kills one of the great benefits of the separation of church and state. If the world was, a place was everyone would despise his fellow because his fellow goes against his religious beliefs we would not have a functionally democracy or society. However this is not the concern of the Fox News network, they go by their Christian theory of we are right you are wrong and nothing else, they are slowly killing what was once a fine democracy and it is a horrible thing to watch.
My last example is of when O’Reilly interviewed Michael Moore who was the producer of the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, among many things in the documentary Michael Moore said that called Bush a lair because there were no weapons of mass destructions found in Iraq. When Moore went on the show the first question O’reilly asked him was that, “You in your movie call Bush a lair, do you think you owe our president an apology?” Moore’s obvious response to this partisan questions was no. He said that Bush said that there were weapons of mass destruction and there no weapons of weapons mass destruction, so we see that bush said something was true and turned out to be untrue, this is a lie.
O’reilly however had a different view on the situation he said that Bush was misinformed so that is not a lie, he then said that since bush didn’t know he was lying it is not a lie, which in Moore responded to as pathological. Then Moore asked O’Reilly his question which was what would you answer to the parents who had their children killed in this war of a lie? O’Reilly said that he would tell them that they died bringing down a dictatorship, but Moore says that is not why we went to war this went back and forth for a while. The last thing they argued about was when Moore asked him if he O’Reilly would sacrifice his children to America for this war, he responded in saying I would sacrifice myself, Moore kept on asking of he would sacrifice his children and O’Reilly said he would sacrifice himself. O’Reilly ended the interview by saying this just shows you that there are two sides to every story, I have my side, you have your side, and we leave it up to the viewers to decide.
Although many things in this interview bothered me such as the evasive answering O’Reilly did and his suggestion that Moore should apologize to the president, one thing particularly wanted me to go to the Fox News station and tell O’Reilly in his famous words to “Shut Up!”
At the end of the interview, he says, “this just shows you that I see the world my way and your see the world your way and we let the audience decide, and that’s the fair way to do it. This as I said earlier is a great way to end it and this is a model in which I think the media should run by, however O’Reilly severely tarnished the deciding part when he commented on the interview.
He said that no matter how good the evidence was that Bush did not lie Moore failed to acknowledge it. He said Moore is a “Bush Hater” and you can never get a “Bush Hater” to admit that Bush did not lie; he says that that is “blind ideology” and blind ideology is never good on either side.

What O’Reilly does here is equal to punching a blind person in the face (good rhetoric? See I did gain form O’Reilly). O’Reilly continued an argument when his opposition was not there, this is completely unfair to his opposition because he cant defend his view if he is not there and it is even more unfair to the viewers of Fox News who’s ability to decide was revoked once O’Reilly re-stated his argument after his opponent was gone.
As O’Reilly said “this just shows you that I see the world my way and your see the world your way and we let the audience decide, and that’s the fair way to do it” When one side is missing and the other side is still said the ability to decide is gone, because you are only being told one thing. Again, this has become the norm of Fox News; they tell you the news and then tell you what they think about it, leaving you with only with their opinion after the broadcast.
Through four examples I gave on the O’Reilly show we can see the failure of Fox News to deliver their slogan and their failure as journalists. Fox News is an advocate of the Republican Party and will use as much propaganda and rhetoric as possible to shape the opinions of their viewers. They pull you in with the cheap gossip stories and then will give you a breaking news story about a Bush speech. As a result of their profit, they cause other networks to imitate their cheap news. Fox News is slowly killing democracy and journalism as we know it and if nothing is done soon by the citizens this problem will grow into one that will not be fixed.