How did Fox News run a totally bogus Ferguson story? Welcome to the truly slimy side of the right-wing hit machine
Creating dubious sources and then citing them is a hallmark of these media terrorists. Remember when Cheney anonymously leaked info about WMD to the Times, then cited the Times article as evidence of WMD? Who wouldn't believe the liberal paper, right? Diabolical. Brilliant.
That's the issue, isn't it. Corporations don't exist to make cars, provide mortgages, or report news. Corporations exist to make money, and making cars or providing mortgages are simply ancillary to that goal. News is supposed to be different. ABC, NBC, et al get to use our airwaves at a discount so long as they provide the 'public service' of new broadcasting. That was the deal. Unfortunately they never made it a non-commercial operation, and news became very entrepreneurial. Fox's and MSNBC's goal is to get eyes on the screen. There aren't any consequences for being wrong. Journalistic ethics are all that separate us from fantasy at this point, but it seems like Fox is pushing the envelope there more and more every year. MSNBC will follow, because they're followers of Fox's lead. Pretty soon if nothing changes we'll be in a world where the facts aren't just presented differently with different editorials on the stations, but rather where each can just make up what they think might have happened and report that. Why not? Entrepreneurship is the American Dream, no? What easier product to peddle than fantasy?
> Corporations don't exist to make cars, provide mortgages, or report news. Corporations exist to make money, and making cars or providing mortgages are simply ancillary to that goal. I honestly believe that making money should always be ancillary to the primary function purpose of a corporation, whether it be making cars, providing mortgages, or reporting the news. Any corporation that puts making money first is doomed to either fail or become corrupt, as we've seen here.
There is an excellent story in the book Angler (the biography of Cheney) that talks about how he duped the then top ranking Republican Dick Army into supporting the Iraq invasion. The entire things was utterly fabricated. And He was not pleased when he found out.
George Friedman (Stratfor) presented the idea in 2005ish that the WMD lie, while a lie, was done for valid reasons (essentially as an excuse to send troops to destabilize governments that might later have provided legitimacy/money/sanctuary to al Qaeda; and further to warn other governments in the area that to shelter al Qaeda would be a very bad idea). Obvious problems with that aside (the irony of Pakistan, for example), I think it's the kindest excuse anyone has ever offered for the invasion of Iraq. I wonder if anyone (Hillary, Dick Army, whoever) saw through the lies but accepted the side-premise that an invasion might nonetheless help for other reasons, and then after the fact when it was a catastrophe just pretended they bought the lies to save face.
There isn't a person in the world who was paying close attention who didn't know they were lying. The real question marks were to what extent they were lying and what their actual policy objectives were. The answers seemed obvious to most of us liberal minded folks at the time: A LOT and OIL. Turns out we were right, which was sad given that their policy objective failed so miserably that the reason for us being there became obscured in favor of something like "providing security for Iraq," a self-made problem. The real irony here is that Al Qaeda wasn't there until we invited them in.