Recently a Wyoming Tribune-Eagle letter-to-the-editor offered
advice. “If you don’t watch Fox News, you don’t know what’s going on in this
country.” (To find out what’s really going on, watch Fox News, May 10, 2019)
Did he write that with a straight face? The problem is you
can’t see the writer’s body language. Was he smiling, winking, or crossing his fingers
while writing? Neither do we know whether the writer is a real person or actually
a Russian BOT? After the Mueller report, it’s a question we should be asking.
Folks who watch Fox News are often misinformed by Wyoming
Senator John Barrasso and may not have heard of the Mueller Report except through
Trump Tweets and AG Bill Barr’s fictional summary of its contents. Mueller’s report
describes Russian interference with our 2016 election, what the Trump campaign
knew about Putin’s involvement, how the Trump campaign welcomed it, and how their
campaign benefited.
The report details evidence that would cause a thinking
person to believe President Trump obstructed justice. That is not what the
folks on Fox told you. Verily I say unto you, don’t take their word for it, nor
mine. Read the report. I know it’s long but patriotic Americans ought to be
willing to sacrifice a little for the truth.
It is hard to decipher because of the redactions of a
massive amount of evidence Trump’s personal lawyer, William Barr, didn’t want
you to see. There is enough left that you’ll find the Mueller investigation
teaches us to be wary of letters-to-the-editor such as the one I am referring
to. Russian BOTS reached more than 126 million Americans during and after the
2016 campaign. Russian controlled Twitter accounts reached 1.4 million.
That was done, Mueller found, for the express purposes of
“supporting the Trump campaign and disparaging candidate Hillary Clinton.” Much
of the false information Russians wanted voters to have was then retransmitted
by their comrades at Fox.
The Russian BOTs and Fox share much in common. They both
provided wildly false information for the purpose of benefitting Donald Trump, a
president who is a hands-on favorite for a first ballot selection to the Liars
Hall of Fame.
Just think, if not for Fox, we’d have never known about the
non-existent “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act, or that, as Tucker
Carlson misinformed viewers, “Far more children died last year drowning in
their bathtubs than were killed accidentally by guns.”
No one but Fox acolytes knew that Obama declared Mother’s
Day to be “National Abortion Freedom Day.” He didn’t.
But for Fox News, we’d still be thinking that Secondhand
Smoke killed people. It was on Fox News that Dana Perino taught us that the
insurance companies are mostly run by Democrats and Eric Bolling informed us there had not
been a single terrorist attack on the United States while George W. Bush was
president. None of that is true.
But for Fox, who’d have believed there were “19 paramilitary
training facilities in the United States, where radicalized Muslims were
learning how to kill Americans? Didn’t happen.
Without Fox, millions of Americans might have been forced
against their will to resort to actual science to understand climate change.
Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy kept them honest when, on the day of a massive
blizzard, he asked the question that answers itself. “How can there be global
warming if it’s snowing and bitterly cold?” On Fox, Glen Beck assured us the
polar ice cover is actually increasing. Alternative facts.
Since Fox started broadcasting, America redefined what is
“fair and balanced.” Facts are now relics of the past that no longer interfere
with what we want to know. Fox fills the vacuum.
If the Republic survives long enough for the history of these
times to be written, our grandchildren will know how much damage Fox News did
24 hours a day, seven days a week. The hole we are in was dug by faithful
viewers like the author of that letter to the editor.
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