cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42575196
Republicans, you don’t realize it, but, you’ve been abused.
Let me tell you the story of it.
First you have to know what a tabloid is and what usually befalls real news.
Real news has always been a difficult business. Because- it’s supposed to report what’s really going on in the world- and what’s really going in the world is often boring. That’s the biggest problem with it. In terms of making money off news, I mean. If you just report what’s really going in the world every day, that’s not necessarily gonna make your papers fly off the shelves, and if your papers don’t fly off the shelves, how are you gonna stay in business? Those papers cost money for you to print. If you don’t make the money back, you go out of business.
There’s another problem to talk about, which is that often real-world news is upsetting, and there’s no resolution to it. You are told about something you don’t like, and, there’s no antidote to it. It’s a story that tells you something upsetting and then just ends. Not necessarily fun.
So, it’s pretty hard actually to make money off real news- this has plagued anyone who’s ever tried. We’re in a capitalism and there’s no government-funded news at this time (England has the BBC to try to solve this problem- a real-news station with assured funding, so that it can give the news regardless of its profitability).
In the U.S., the best anyone can do to try to stay in business as a real-news station is to try to put out exceptionally high-quality news. However, even this can alienate people, because- most people aren’t exceptionally well-educated, and once you start using bigger words and telling longer stories, well, maybe the average audience member drops off.
Nonetheless, a few, just a few large stations found a balance or a way to decently stay in business.
Most of them though are at a disadvantage to the other force: the tabloid.
The tabloid is the poor antidote to the usual problems of selling real news.
A tabloid goes ahead and makes stuff up. Stuff that’s meant to excite, or often to enrage and excite, the person who is not the most-common news customer (cause these are few), but rather the person who is the most common customer period- the most average person- the person who wouldn’t normally watch or read the news, but who is willing to read a story about a gory car-wreck, or a scandal about a beautiful enviable celebrity, or something that tugs at their worst instincts, a story that inflames a latent racism or prejudice that they have.
The people who write the tabloids know exactly what they’re doing. They were people who tried making money at news at some point, couldn’t do it, and converted themselves into being tabloid writers, and found that they make much more money that way, and that it’s a lot easier to do that than to report on real news, and that, horribly, it even gives you real power when people fall for it excessively. It can put you directly into the business of controlling populaces, or even governments.
Let me tell you about the world’s most-famous, and most-successful, propagandist, in the form of being the world’s most-successful tabloidist.
The world has a most-successful tabloidist: Rupert Murdoch.
Let me introduce you to one of his tabloids: this is his Britain-ruling tabloid, the UK Sun. Take a good look at it first:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/
See it?
They specialize in:
Celebrity scandals first, and
Gory car-wrecks second, and
Football third, and
“Politics” fourth.
Guess what the “politics” are? All anti-crown. Because, they’re the dominant power, and if Rupert Murdoch makes his tabloid all about discrediting them, Rupert Murdoch has more power than them, and can in essence swing British politics. Or it’s about making fun of whoever’s in charge in terms of the current political party. It’s a power play, and it’s ruinous to British society on its own, without the BBC to counter-balance it. In fact this is what caused Princess Diana to get killed: it was people like Rupert Murdoch offering scumbag paparazzi $100,000 a photo to get these up-close intrusive photos of her; so you had people chasing her down on motorcycles or from other cars to get them.
Anyway that’s the UK Sun. Ever heard of it?
Guess what his American tabloids are? Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. They’re actually the same format as The Sun, with some clever twists.
Fox News is closest to The Sun; it’s basically just The Sun with some Americanizations- first of all, Fox News spends all its time arbitrarily making fun of the political party that usually has more power and tends to make up the intellectual circles and big-city audiences otherwise; the real-news watchers, the Democrats. So, first of all, taking the place of making fun of the crown or dominant party in Britain, Fox makes fun of the Democrats in America.
It also takes advantage of a uniquely American audience, the Southern Republicans. Southern Republicans are people who still have latent racism just beneath their surface, cause they tend to be poor descendants of the people who lost the civil war fighting for slavery, and theyve been left living meanwhile with the also-poor descendants of the people who were freed by the civil war.
So there’s a sort of ready-to-go racism in this audience, just below the surface, if you can just bring it out of them.
So what Rupert does with Fox is, he has Fox play, as often as possible, any video they can find of a lone black person robbing a liquor store or whatever, somewhere in a big “Democrat city”.
The message is; look- see how bad black people are? And violent? And see how, in a big “Democrat” city, apparently this is what goes on all the time? And, “apparently it’s because the Democrats want this, and insist on this”? This is the subliminal message, over and over again.
As a note on this issue, the audience is so brainwashed that other times I’ve tried discussing this I’ve literally gotten reams of Republican commenters saying “but they are especially violent!!! Look at the per capita arrest rate!!!” But, the per capita arrest rate has more to do with the fact that poor people do crime outdoors and rich people do crime indoors, and if a cop wants to end up as a detective someday they should go to a poor neighborhood and arrest as many of the people they can find doing crimes out in the open, whereas if a cop goes to a rich neighborhood, all they’re going to be able to do is give people minor traffic tickets, and they’ll be on their way to being a meter maid.
There really aren’t people who do different amounts of crime. It’s just not true. It’s a factor of circumstance, not genetics. Certainly if Fox wanted they could find a different video every night of a lone white guy robbing a liquor store in a red state. But Fox is not going to do that.
Fox even has one black reporter. Hey I guess they’re not racist! No it’s just to make it not-obvious. And there’s plenty of people willing to do things for money.
The Wall Street Journal is his counterpart tabloid in America, and it’s meant to look the most news-like and to attract “the smart side of the Republican crowd”, to the extent that that’s possible. It achieves this by making the entire front section run-of-the-mill business articles copied from or available from any other type of business news outlet; then the back sections are all Rupert Murdoch’s opinionated tabloids, again pushing his own agenda of trying to capture the minds and wallets basically of the half of the country that it’s easiest to do this on- I’m sorry but the patently less-educated half, some of whom have gotten quite rich anyway in business, who despite business success just don’t catch on about things like news integrity and social integrity.
Rupert Murdoch has raped your minds. He’s not even an American. He’s an Australian. He doesn’t give one fuck about America, about you, about us, about Trump, about the Republican party, any of it. He’s just out to make a dime and control you basically. He likes the feeling of power; he likes the idea that "he’s the true king of both Great Britain, and America, and as a foreigner Australian, just because he controls both their most popular tabloids.
You should be furious. Newsmax just copied him, and turned up the bullshit louder. You should be furious at them too.
I know that CNN and NBC and even BBC “look gay and liberal and inter-racial to you”. But fuck off; that’s good news you’re talking about, and you should learn to enjoy it. Join the real people. We’re sitting back, watching you, and wondering what to do with you. We’re not going to allow a propaganda brainwashing to continue, and not at the hands of foreigners.
#AmericanPride #MadeInAmerica #MadeInUSA