Is FOX News a “Criminal Enterprise”?

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Related subjects: Denver Lessing, Ethics, Media, Opinion, Press Freedom, Transparency Yield, U.S. Elections, U.S. Politics Comments (1)

16 September 2009 :: Denver Lessing

FOX News has relentlessly smeared and defamed the umbrella organization for volunteer community groups, ACORN, openly participating in a concerted nationwide effort to promote false charges of illegal activity and force the group to stop all involvement in efforts to bring urban and minority voters to the polls.

In its latest broadside against the group, FOX News has spent two months consistently parroting charges made by Republican members of Congress, who say ACORN is a “criminal enterprise”, apparently due to those Congressmen’s misunderstanding of criminal law and alleging sweeping responsibility for the actions of people who actually defrauded ACORN itself. Essentially, ACORN is being accused of fraud because it was the victim of fraud.

This is like elected officials, whose job is to adhere to the highest standards of public service, telling people victimized by identity theft or credit card fraud that they, as victims, are in fact the fraudsters. Or worse, it would be like law enforcement telling accusing someone who is violently assaulted through no fault of their own that they are the assailant and should serve jail time as a result.

What’s worse, in the case of the accusations against ACORN, is that this is not just a misallocation of blame or an unfair slander; this is part of a prolonged, coordinated effort to derail effective public service activities aimed at extending the right to vote to more Americans. Millions of Americans cannot vote because they are not registered, or because they don’t know where to register or that they need to.

The current controversy regarding ACORN has to do with the unsubstantiated accusation that its voter outreach efforts are “voter fraud”. The false charges tie in to the scandal over the politically motivated firing of 9 US attorneys by then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. One of those federal prosecutors came forward to testify that he had been dismissed because he refused to initiate federal prosecutions for the very accusation being leveled again now, because there was no evidence.

Multiple judges have already ruled that ACORN had no responsibility for the alleged fraud, and that ACORN was in fact the victim of the fraud, who brought the fraud to light and sought legal retribution for those individuals who violated both their contracts with ACORN and the law. No court of law and no federal prosecutor found any evidence that ACORN sought to inflate voter-registration numbers in order to then permit anyone to vote more than once.

ACORN is being accused of the crime committed in a situation in which ACORN was actually the victim. FOX News takes this perversion of basic reasoning, and then broadcasts the headline time and again throughout the summer that ACORN is “a criminal enterprise”. Is not FOX News, by this same standard, a criminal enterprise? Taking money from groups whose agenda is to “rig” elections, spreading lies that favor those groups, and doing material harm to not just ACORN but hundreds of community organizations that depend on it.

FOX News, which refused to run ads previewing Michael Moore’s film Sicko, documenting the systemic failure of healthcare in the United States, is now running ads by a shadowy front group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights —known to be affiliated with the team behind the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth smear campaign—, whose specific goal is to derail Pres. Obama’s healthcare reform plan.

Immediately before that ad ran, anchors read a FOX News headline “Pres. Obama’s healthcare plan scarier than cancer; meet the woman who fears for her life” and after the ad, a preview of Sean Hannity’s slam campaign against “government-run healthcare”, which, by the way, is not actually on the table in the current healthcare debate.

These facts clearly demonstrate not just a political leaning, but a willingness to refuse specific information to the public and to present false information, distortions and even outright lies, in order to push a specific political agenda. The FOX News headline “Pres. Obama’s healthcare plan scarier than cancer; meet the woman who fears for her life” may refer to a woman who is “afraid” and who may tragically be suffering from cancer, but it overtly lies about Pres. Obama’s reform plans.

The reform as written —in line with the framework laid out by Pres. Obama for health reform, and as he repeated time and again in speeches, not just this year, but going back to before he announced his campaign for the presidency— is designed to guarantee that no one would be denied treatment for pre-existing or costly conditions. The woman with cancer need not fear; she would be more likely to have her care fully covered under proposed reforms than she is now.

But FOX News chooses to exploit her, to use her sad situation to spread terror among the American public. Is this done in order to hurt Pres. Obama politically? Is it done to help specific monied interests? Is it done to serve the interest health insurance companies have in prolonging a status quo in which the market for health treatment is rigged to favor their profits over positive health outcomes or cost-effectiveness?

Or is it all part of a blanket assault on the rights of Americans to know the truth about the world, as told by a free and independent media, not bound by the influence motive either of government or of private power brokers? Is it of a kind with the ACORN story? A crude attempt to kill off a network of community-level non-profits whose aim is to lift up the voiceless and defend the rights of those who can’t defend themselves?

What motivates FOX News to so persistently use terror as a storytelling mechanism, even when the facts have nothing to do with the version of events FOX News staff report? What motivates this cable network to use its media influence to knowingly repeat lies as if they were facts and to smear public servants, community groups, its own critics, and anyone who strays from the Republican party line, as enemies of the nation?

Maybe it doesn’t matter what the underlying reason for the lies and the bias and the promotion of terror in the minds of its viewers might be… maybe in the end, it only matters that FOX News has taken upon itself the goal of undermining anything and anyone who works against the political leadership of the Republican party, and the often deranged worldview it projects, are all symptoms of the same illness: a pathological incapacity to see and to relay evidence or truth.

To study the reporting of FOX News from one day to the next, from one week to the next, from one year to the next, is to witness a range of ongoing, deep-seated pathologies, an almost obsessive allegiance to certain themes, even to the passion for delivering certain claims as fact, despite the lack of evidence to support those claims.

This if FOX News, but is it really, in any traditional sense of the word, a news organization? Or is it just a 24-hour-a-day 7-days-a-week always-on campaign advertisement for one political party? And if that’s what indeed it is, should its funding and its ability to profit from its activities, its ability to broadcast in the weeks before an election, be curtailed under campaign finance laws?

FOX News is accusing ACORN of running afoul of electoral laws, without evidence, while every day we see evidence that FOX News is a Republican ad campaign masquerading as something else. Does that make it criminal? Does that mean its lies are strategic? Does that make it responsible for deaths that might result from the lies it has told about healthcare reform, if its efforts to kill the reform are successful?

One could imagine a campaign where activists who oppose the message and the methods of FOX News were to request that all federal tax breaks (federal funding, in another form) be barred from going to any of FOX News’ owners or directors, until there is a thorough and complete investigation of the organization and the manner in which it crafts a pre-packaged political message to be conveyed through its distortions of the news of the day.

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