
The Daily Show With John Stewart has, obviously enough, a Fox New fixation. Or foxation, if you prefer. One of the common segments involves showing the inconsistency of the fine folks at Fox by juxtaposing segments. For example, when discussing the $4 billion in federal largess for oil companies, the Fox view was that $4 billion is a drop in the bucket. However, when discussing the $3 billion for food stamps, the same Fox fellow suddenly regarded $3 billion as a huge amount of money. Since 4 is greater than 3, this seems to be an inconsistency. Or perhaps it is a Foxconsistency. As another example, the folks at Fox routinely rail against Obama being a tyrant, a king and a dictator. The same folks then claim he is weak and engage in a rather bizarre tyrant-crush over Putin-a person who actually does the things that they claim to hate about Obama. That is, being a tyrant and a dictator. As a third example, when the fine Fox folks were discussing the wealthy, they regarded a $250,000 income as seemingly barely enough to get by on. However, when going after the “fat cat” teachers, their pay (about $70,000) was seen as exorbitant. I could go on with example–but I would suggest watching the Daily Show clips laying out example after example of Foxconsistency.
After seeing a multitude of clips like this, I had a small revelation in regards to my dislike of Fox. While I tend to disagree with their political views (which seem to boil down to “rich=good” and “poor=bad”), one of my main issues is with their inconsistency. That is, they do not hold to a consistent set of standards and principles when assessing matters. As in the example given above, $4 billion in largess to oil companies is a tiny thing, but $3 billion in food stamps is massive. However, whether a sum is large or small should be largely a matter of the size of the numbers. Naturally, it does make sense to regard something as costing too much-but the point made by the fine Fox fellow was that the $3 billion was a huge amount. It was not that the food stamps were more expensive relative to a modestly priced largess for the oil companies.
This Foxconsistency serves to rob Fox of a rational foundation for assessment. That is, they are not consistently applying a set of standards and principles and justly finding things to be good or bad. Rather, they judge something to be good or bad and shift their standards and principles as needed to fit that judgement. So, for example, in Foxconsitency a CEO who is making millions earns that money because people deserve to get paid what they are worth…while a minimum wage worker should not be paid what she is worth because it would be bad for business. However, as suggested above, Fox does seem to have at least a few core principles. One of these seems to be that the rich are good and the poor are bad.
One rather obvious reply is to throw out a red herring or an appeal to common practice by claiming that the liberals or MSNBC folks do the same thing. Or that everyone is inconsistent. While this might be true, it is also irrelevant to the issue at hand. Another obvious reply is to engage in various ad hominems against me. This would, obviously, not provide a rational or effective response to the point made here. What would needed would be a clear argument that Fox operates on consistent principles and that the multitude of clips showing such Foxconsistency are in error.
I realized that I haven’t tossed out any red meat for a while-hence this post.