Fox News Hate-for-Profit Racket
Fox News is a ‘Hate-for-Profit Racket’ – Elizabeth Warren
“Fox News is a hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists—it’s designed to turn us against each other, risking life and death consequences, to provide cover for the corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class. Hate-for-profit works only if there’s profit, so Fox News balances a mix of bigotry, racism, and outright lies with enough legit journalism to make the claim to advertisers that it’s a reputable news outlet. It’s all about dragging in ad money—big ad money.” – Twitter
“Fox News uses ‘hate’ five times more often than competitors” – The Guardian
Antisemitic incidents in the US reached their highest level last year since the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a civil rights non-governmental organization, began recording them in 1979. The incidents including assault, vandalism and harassment increased by more than a third in just one year and reached nearly 3,700 cases in 2022, a new ADL report
What is the connection between a media outlet spreading hated and the surge in harassment, vandalism and violence? Decide for yourself with this map that includes over 9,000 incidents from 2022.
Stoking hate even against double-amputee veteran
The study found that when Fox News says “they hate”, it most often means “Democrats, liberals, political elites and the media”. “As for the object of all this hatred, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other Fox hosts most often name Trump. Anchors also identify their audience – ‘you’, ‘Christians’ and ‘us’ – as the target of animosity … these language patterns construct a coherent but potentially dangerous narrative about the world.”
In one famous example this summer, Carlson called Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois who lost her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, “a deeply silly and unimpressive person” and “a coward” who “hates the country”.
The study did not only consider uses of “hate” by Fox News hosts, citing remarks by House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to Hannity on 13 February: “Democrats … don’t just hate the president, they hate you, they hate me, they hate the viewers. They hate everything about us.” The authors pointed to Pew Research findings which say Republicans are likely to see Democrats as immoral or unpatriotic, and to trust Fox News more than other outlets.” – The Guardian
Weaponized language to stoke hate and sell ads
“Fox News and MSNBC are often perceived and depicted as highly partisan, we expected some degree of similarity along these basic measures of antipathy and negative sentiment. Our results painted a different picture: usage of these terms was 5 times higher on Fox News than on MSNBC. One term in particular stood out: “hate,” of which we found a total of 647 mentions on Fox, compared to MSNBC’s 118” – CDN
Check the Internet Archives for video clips. See how different media outlets cover the news and the words the use with GDELT.
Threat to our democracy
“While the American Jewish community is very aware of rising anti-Jewish sentiment, the general American public is not,” said Robert Williams, a historian and executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California, who was also not involved in the ADL report. “Non-Jewish populations in the United States haven’t quite come to that point of making the realization that they also need to stand up against antisemitism, that antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem, but it’s a collective problem – it’s a threat to national security, and it’s a threat to our democracy.” – CNN
Resources
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Tools to track hate
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TakeAway: Hold Fox News and its supporters accountable for spreading hate.
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Reposted from Democracy Labs with permission.
