You're not the caboose, sweetheart, you're the engine

(Nota bene: This post was written well before Election Night 2020, when evidently a switch was thrown at FNC HQ converting Fox News to CNN-3, with the consequent fall of Fox News and corresponding rise of Real America's Voice and One America News among an expanding universe of alternative conservative TV news.) 

  

...Or, an open letter to Fox News. The New York Times is not worthy of the name "newspaper", not in 2020, and The Washington Post is the property and pet of Jeff Bezos who's converted it from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism. The papers and ABC and NBC, CBS and PBS, and obviously CNN and MSNBC, not to forget NPR which is that much worse than its PBS companion in taxpayer-subsidized broadcasting, and not to mention the flotilla of second-hand news like "Newsy" that follows in the wake of the big press, are not "biased", not anymore: they're a party press as in a one-party state, propagators of official information and approved ideas as in an authoritarian or totalitarian system. For years by now they've devoted themselves to hoaxes and non-stories and half-stories, they've liberated themselves of their standards including especially on sourcing, and the best that may be had out of them is half the story. 

We are arrived at last at the worst of all worlds. In the 19th Century the press were partisan but they wore their partisanship on their sleeves, and both sides were well represented: Mudville, USA had a Mudville Democrat and a Mudville Republican, and the citizenry of Mudville were at liberty to read one or the other or both papers and judge for themselves. Then early in the 20th Century came the Progressives and their reduction of all pursuits to sciences, including in a new professional, impartial, and clinical press. But ours is not the 19th Century or even the 20th (more's the pity); it is of course that debased age called the 21st Century, and in our time the press combine the worst elements of the 19th Century and the 20th: the monopoly on information of an institutional press as in the 20th Century, with the partisanship of the 19th Century party papers -- and just the one party. 

And then came Big Tech. The internet which within my time online had been an alternative to the establishment press, was captured fully and finally by the establishment, when Google and Twitter and Facebook among others turned their monopolistic powers to partisanship, and partisanship for the party of the elite and the establishment, namely the Democrats. Burying or forbidding alternative sources, wiping posts and videos, suspending and purging accounts. The power of the internet and of monopolistic forces of exponential influence, now is harnessed to the party press and to The Party.

 

But not a perfect monopoly: there is of course Fox News. A relative few websites of relative obscurity produce news and analysis to counter the establishment press, and talk radio carries on in its good work, and more than that Trump himself, alone among Republicans since Reagan, smashes through the press blockade, but in the way of news institutions to speak of which are not captured by The Party, there is only FNC. Television and radio, print and online, the one great counter to the establishment in information today is Fox News Channel, on cable and streaming, on digital radio and online. 

And in the same way that the import of Britain in the Second World War was magnified by its standing alone against fascism, after the Fall of France and before Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, Fox News in this Cultural Revolution that is 2020 is amplified as the one indispensable force for truth and ideas. And Fox News today may amount to the most influential collection of reporters and analysts since electronic communication: the Republican Party is the winningest party in the greatest nation, and its leader at present is a force-of-nature president with an executive energy like no leader since the last man to get his face onto Mount Rushmore, and yet for news which is not a Democrat campaign to destroy them utterly, Trump and his Republican Party are left with little old Fox News and precious little else, so that Fox News fairly monopolizes the ear of the winningest party and its force-of-nature president. Within these two weeks, Trump ordered an end to the "anti-racism" training of the executive branch into prejudice against whites and whiteness, merest days after the outrage was broadcast on Tucker Carlson Tonight. 

 

The trouble is, Fox News doesn't know its own strength. Some figures at Fox News apprehend the singularity of their placement; the aforesaid Tucker Carlson who leads the Fox News primetime has carried the Right and the republic intellectually for some months since the first of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and riots in late May and early June, and his issues are just that, the issues he reckons to be worthy of his attention and his viewers'. But too many Fox Newsers seem to imagine it's their place and purpose to reproduce the front page of The New York Times; their issues are whatever it is the Democrats happen to be banging on about at any given moment, through their party press.  

And so it's my plea to Fox News first that they recognize the collapse of the establishment press around them; the establishment led by the Old Gray Lady are decayed and debased, and Fox News is not obliged for its direction to their front pages and needn't necessarily even acknowledge their half-stories and non-stories and hoaxes. And then I say it's past time Fox News felt its oats: FNC is at least as justified in driving the news as any decayed organ of the establishment. China for instance is objectively an issue, in the real world and to the real people in it, not least China's deliberate killing and sickening and terrorizing of the people of the world, and its crushing of the world's economies and bankrupting of the governments, by means of the Chinese invasion that is coronavirus, and yet the press have practically raised a blockade against information unhelpful to the Beijing regime; so smash the blockade, interview the whistleblowers and compile the facts and bang the drum. May it be that what is news, but shut out of the news, is Fox News.   

Get it through your pretty little heads that anymore you're not the caboose, sweetheart, you're the engine, and get to driving.