Ana Marie Cox: The only thing crazier than the shutdown is Fox News' coverage of it

[Redfairen]

Here's a piece of absurdism you can appreciate right now: the image of a janus-faced conservative media talking head, with one mouth defiantly denouncing the impact of the government shutdown, and the other wailing at the costs of keeping government going. Sean Hannity, no great advocate of consistency anyway, has sputtered these two thoughts within minutes of each other. "The government is not totally shut down! Seventeen percent is it!" he told listeners Monday, before confiding that he believes the GOP will prevail, since "the public will side with the group that's willing to talk".
Laura Ingraham told her listeners that she was "beginning to enjoy" the shutdown; she also tweeted out her apparently earnest concern that the closure of a parking lot on federal land meant that "ppl risk their lives pulling off the GW Pkwy".

Fox News has been a funhouse of these distorted twin thoughts, not surprisingly, with guest after guest mocking the seriousness of the shutdown; in a particularly Orwellian stroke, someone at the network even did a search-and-replace on AP stories run on the site, replacing "shutdown" with "slimdown". At the same time, they've given breathless coverage to a highly-selective pool of "slimdown" victims: first, the second world war veterans who faced some inconvenience at the war's memorial, and, more recently privately-funded parks and – incorrectly – the nation's missing-child "Amber Alert" system.

Let's unpack this rhetoric, since it's wholly representative of the coverage that conservative media has given the shutdown. With one side of your head, you need to remember that government is bad, and that the less of it there is, the better. Supporting that thought is the belief that a government "slimdown" won't disrupt any of the government's more important functions.

With the other side of your head, you need to dredge up righteous indignation at the loss of some government functions. It almost doesn't matter which ones, though it's helpful if they are services that strike a sympathetic chord without being, you know, necessary. The right-wing Washington Examiner has some examples to get you started, including "Lake Mead, NV property owners" and "tourists".



http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/government-shutdown-fox-news-coverage

[C_U_L8R]

1. They're not too bright over there at Fox News

And did you see those dumbass oversized monitors they bought that have less resolution than an iPad. What an idiotic purchase. Each behemo-screen on fits about 4 tweets or one browser window. Totally unusable not to mention hard on the eyes. The same dopes that approved those silly monitors also set the agenda over there at Fox. Geesh. Lame brains.

[gopiscrap]

2. How right she is!!

[kimbutgar]

3. If the Goptea gets it way all those old white people will lose their social security and medicare

Of course Foxnoise won't tell those gullible fools they want to remake this country into a tea party utopia of poor people fighting over the scraps and the rich laughing at the peasants. People dying in the streets, children going to bed hungry at night in the streets and war war and more wars.