From RefuseFascism.org
100 Hours of NO!
In the Name of Humanity,
We Indict FOX FASCIST NEWS
July 12, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
While masquerading as “fair and balanced”, Fox News serves as a vehicle for stirring up racism, xenophobia and irrational fear of other peoples and countries among its overwhelmingly white audience. Fox has worked to turn millions into easy prey for leaders like Trump—who has had virtually unlimited access to airtime there—and to cohere them into a fanatical fascist movement.
Fox helped whip up war fever and mass hysteria over nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It provided a platform for Trump and others to attack Obama as a “secret Muslim,” and “not an American,” as if being a Muslim was itself a crime, and being Black was somehow “un-American.” It feeds fear of “Muslim terrorism” and casts suspicion on Muslim communities, women in Muslim garb, Muslim places of worship.
In the name of free speech, its hosts complained bitterly about being the victims of persecution as they whip up hatred for women, LGBTQ people and any person who is not white and Christian. FOX regurgitates Trump’s lying portrayal of immigrants as dangerous criminals and a threat to “white womanhood.” It exaggerates and spreads fear of rampant crime even as crime rates drop, implying if not outright saying that people of color are the cause of crime. It celebrates police even as they kill hundreds of Black and Latino people annually; then shamelessly defames the victims as criminal scum who got what they were asking for. Its hosts have defended the “right” of businesses to refuse service to gay people. It has saturated the airwaves with pseudo-experts who attack the scientific understanding of the danger of human-caused climate change, and who fundamentally attack science and critical thinking itself.
And on and on … Fox has proven to be an open sewer of misinformation, disinformation and outright lies, hour after hour.
Here are just some of the flood of lies and reactionary garbage that comes out of Fox “Fascist News Network”:
- At least 28 times before courageous abortion doctor George Tiller was assassinated by an anti-abortion killer in 2009, Bill O’Reilly and others on Fox News repeatedly called Dr. Tiller “baby killer” and spewed other incendiary lies and attacks, and whipped up murderous hatred against Dr. Tiller.
- In a two-month period in 2013, 69% of Fox News guests talking about climate change and 75% of references to the subject cast doubt on the scientific reality of climate change—in contrast to 97% of the world’s experts who hold the consensus view based on scientific evidence about the danger of climate change.
- Donald Trump avidly follows the “Fox & Friends” morning show, tweets out lies straight out of Fox broadcasts, and regularly tells his millions of Twitter followers to watch Fox.
- In one of many lies in service of spreading anti-immigrant hatred, Jillian Mele of “Fox & Friends” falsely claimed that 21 sanctuary cities across the U.S. are “teaming up” with an immigrant rights group to “rush the process for illegals pouring over our borders.”
- Trump advocated the U.S. use of torture during his campaign, and in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity after his election, Trump renewed his support for waterboarding.
- After a cop in suburban St. Paul murdered Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man, Fox News hosts Hannity and Kelly criticized Castile’s girlfriend who was in the car with her 4-year-old daughter, for not doing more to help; a contributor used the occasion to attack Obama for violent attacks on police; and a guest, an NRA board member, used the killing to accuse Obama of trying to start a race war.
- Anti-abortionist Lila Rose appeared on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show on May 31 to promote the deceptive video footage that had been used by an anti-abortion group in a smear campaign against Planned Parenthood—after a federal judge had barred the release of the footage and ordered that all copies of it be removed from the Internet.
- Top Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly was let go after many women came forward to testify about being sexually harassed by him, as top management continued to back him—so far Fox News has paid $13 million to settle sexual harassment claims against O’Reilly. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the whole misogynist, ultra-patriarchal culture at, and viewpoint consistently blasted out by, Fox News.
- After a white supremacist murdered two men who tried to stop him from harassing a young woman wearing a hijab and her Black friend on a Portland, Oregon train, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson downplayed his known history of neo-Nazi activity and claimed he was just an “unstable maniac,” whose actions were “hardly the behavior of a coherent white supremacist,” and “this guy wasn’t a right-winger.”
- Fox News anchors and commentators have consistently downplayed the implications and evidence of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia to affect the elections—host Gregg Jarrett said, for example, in late May, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Collusion is not a Only in antitrust law. You can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election. There’s no such statute.”
- As part of the Trump-Republican assaults on health care, Fox News spreads thinly disguised racist lies about Medicaid, such as: Medicaid “was going to people who didn’t need it” (Ainsley Earhardt); Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion included “a lot of people who are not, by previous standards, considered poor” (Brit Hume); Medicaid expansion gave care to “a population who maybe could have gotten a job” (Marc Siegel).
- Fox News hosts and commentators have added to the dangerous Trump/Pence war threats around North Korea—including the host of “The Fox News Specialists” who said in June that if North Korea goes further with their missile development, “It may be time for a preemptive ”
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