By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, December 12, 2019
Garrett Graff of CNN insists that Fox News is a
“dangerous threat to the national security of the United States.” Not only a
threat, but a dangerous threat — as opposed to all those . . . non-dangerous
. . . threats we are used to.
A whole lot of what goes on at Fox News is hot garbage
piled high, but from here on out I’ll thank CNN and the rest of our progressive
friends to spare us their ceremonial indignation about the assault on American
journalism and its institutions. Most of what people watch on Fox News is
opinion programming presented as such. Many of those opinions are bananas and
ill-informed. Lot of that going around these days.
It also is the case that the New York Times won a
Pulitzer prize for publishing lightly edited Soviet propaganda (on this we have
the good word of the New
York Times itself) which raises the question of exactly which
institutions we might entrust with the power to distinguish real journalism
from crap journalism from a “dangerous threat to the national security of the
United States.” Because a “dangerous threat to the national security of the
United States” is something we should do something about, no? Graff, of
course, won’t say what.
Every sin that you can lay at the feet of Fox News —
Graff dwells on the network’s repetition of talking points preferred by U.S.
adversaries abroad when they coincide with domestic political interests as
though that hadn’t been practically the whole of the media campaign against
George W. Bush — is found to a greater or lesser extent in practically every
other media outlet of any consequence. Sean Hannity lives in a fantasyland, to
be sure. You can read all about it in between the horoscopes in the Washington
Post and the New York Times’s advertorials
for pseudoscience. Or public radio’s breathless reports on imaginary
exploding bullets, Rachel Maddow’s conspiracy theory du jour, Rolling
Stone’s very
moving account of a horrible crime that never happened, the New York
Times’s equally
fictitious reporting on tax policy, etc.
Graff should be both more worried and less worried than
he is. He overestimates the problem of Fox News specifically. He underestimates
the problem of the way in which cable-news programming as a whole functions as
an echo-chamber and amplifier for a relatively small but politically
significant demographic of Americans who are old and stupid and credulous. Both
Fox News and MSNBC have a median viewer age of 65, and oldsters are by far the
most enthusiastic consumers of television across-the-board.
People who rely on television for their news are dumb.
Dumb as rocks. Dumber than nine chickens. Everybody knows this, but some people
have professional reasons for declining to say so.
Graff predictably lacks the courage of his convictions.
What do we do about threats to national security — dangerous
threats to national security — Mr. Graff? Do tell.
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