You might be familar with an Aesop’s Fable called The Fox Who Lost His Tail. If not, here it is:
A FOX caught in a trap escaped, but in so doing lost his tail.
Thereafter, feeling his life a burden from the shame and ridicule to which he was exposed, he schemed to convince all the other Foxes that being tailless was much more attractive, thus making up for his own deprivation.
He assembled a good many Foxes and publicly advised them to cut off their tails, saying that they would not only look much better without them, but that they would get rid of the weight of the brush, which was a very great inconvenience.
One of them interrupting him said, "If you had not yourself lost your tail, my friend, you would not thus counsel us."
What is the moral of this story?
When one of the foxes says: “If you had not yourself lost your tail, my friend, you would not thus counsel us” they give us all the info we need. Advice prompted by selfishness should not be heeded.
Now, I am going to ask you to keep that last bolded sentence in mind when I explain just how incredibly problematic the medical opinions people are getting from Fox News has become.
When it comes to Covid 19, people like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have been relentlessly questioning the vaccines and the mask mandates. They keep screaming at their audience that the feds are taking away their liberties in the name of science.
The reality is that a chief OWNER of Fox News (Rupert Murdoch has a 39.6% share) has received his vaccine shots. The people who WORK for Fox also have to be part of a vaccinated program called Clear Pass.
Don’t even get me started on the promotion of the rigged election and replacement theory. Fox News is the number one cable news show and its affect on the USA has been tremendous. The first 25 years of Fox have been alarming enough, but I sense the next 25 months are going to be absolutely crazy as we head into the 2022 midterms and then to 2024.
Brian Stelter just released an updated edition of his book Hoax. Here’s just a brief excerpt:
I had a staffer who said, “It’s really emotionally taxing to do this job. We denied the pandemic, and now we’re denying the election outcome.” Those people who were in on it, so to speak, who saw the denialism for what it was, who were uncomfortable with being a part of it—they exist. But they’re not on the air very often. And they’re drowned out by the overriding agenda of the network.
The people who are getting booked are true believers. The true believers tell themselves a story that a lot of Republicans tell themselves: “Our cause is just. Our cause is right. Trump is an imperfect vessel, but the real threats are from China and antifa and socialists.” They tell themselves they are part of a cause that is much bigger than on their hour of Fox.
The Fox of 2021 is different even than the Fox of 2019. That’s where Foxologists—either people who appreciate the network or who want to vanquish it—need to recognize how it’s changed and how it’s different. The number of news hours has gone down. The number of liberal guests has gone down. I had a commentator say to me, “Fox is a really different place than it was preelection.” This person has seen changes even in the last six months, in terms of how radical, how extreme the content is.
If you head on over to Mother Jones you will see a pretty damning piece on Fox News and what it has done to the USA. If you don’t feel like reading the massive piece, I’ll let you in on the secret: Fox News. Fox is the reason the author says Americans are so anrgy at each other.
I realize that there will be some who view this as “left wing trash not worthy of my time” but, take a moment to have a peek.
Fox makes a TON of money. They make it from cable subscriptions and advertising. I get the feeling that if their audiences gets sick or dies as a result of disinformation on the Coronavirus, it’s really just collateral damage. I mean, what’s one less tail, really?