FOX news produces pro or anti-government propaganda and protests (depending on who is in power) the way William Randolph Hearst produced the Spanish American war. When artist Frederick Remington famously wired Hearst, by whom he had been employed to go cover war breaking out in Cuba, that there was no war, he received the reply: “You furnish the pictures; I’ll furnish the war.”
And he did furnish the war. By starting out with a desired result and then finding evidence to make it happen, Hearst became a master of yellow journalism as well as a connoisseur of rosebud. In a state of emotional turmoil, people tend to just fall in line behind a leader until the threat subsides. It’s dangerous to even question motives or the rightness of what the leader is doing when the public is emotionally aroused. It’s a mob mentality, like at Ox Bow.
The Mexican American War was started deliberately when Polk sent American troops into Mexican territory to ride around until they were attacked as foreign troops, which they were. The news was put out that they were attacked on American soil without provocation, which provided an excuse for expanding American territory in line with the newly minted theory of Manifest Destiny.
The methods of shaping public policy through yellow journalism and by creating news and then reporting on it is well known, but it was corrected to some extent through the Fairness Doctrine, which was instituted in 1949, but abolished by the FCC in 1987, the year after FOX Broadcasting Company was launched. The destruction of any regulation of broadcasting under Reagan appointee Mark Fowler had similar results to the destruction of regulation of the financial industry. It took the referees out of the game.
Because a major U.S. news network was now under foreign ownership (Newscorp) it was investigated in 1995 by the FCC as against American law, but the commission ruled that Murdoch’s ownership was in America’s best interest. Keep in mind that these were public airwaves leased out with a requirement of providing news in the public interest, not for broadcasters to use as a profit stream. The following year, Fox News Channel, the 24 hour cable news channel, was launched. Newscorp later bought Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Newscorp executives can now drive political debate in a manner reminiscent of when Dick Cheney planted a story in the Times which he then used as a source on the Sunday morning talk shows.
FOX is not gathering the facts and from them distilling a fair and balanced analysis. The Fair and Balanced slogan is classically Orwellian. FOX is beginning with an ideological position, and then gathering evidence which supports it. Or, it is instigating a riot, and then covering it as news. And behind it there is an old man who, like Hearst, can furnish the war, be it foreign or domestic.