Much has been written and said over the years about Fox News
and its troubled relationship with the truth. Yet while it does continue to
dominate cable news (Ratings),
the average age of a Fox News viewer was recently reported as 68-years-old
(versus 60 for MSNBC and 62-64 for network news), white (only 1.5 percent
black) and conservative (Daily
Mail). And there has been a steady decline overall in those watching a
network where you are likely to hear the same general perspective every hour of
every day, only contrasting in the content. With Fox News, as Marshall McLuhan
once argued in a more general sense, the medium really is the message, and the daily
content irrelevant to the conservative worldview it consistently provides.
What occurred to me the other day, as I tried to give the
show The Following a chance was how
often the programming on the other networks of Fox serve a similar purpose to
the News stations, from a different vantage point. If Fox News trucks in
framing all news in a way that serves the conservative ideology, the rest of
the Fox family of stations sells another essential feature of Chomsky’s
Propaganda Model with even greater verve – distracting the masses toward early
onset dementia. We see it across their programming, from their addiction to
reality television that sells the American Dream and dour views of humanity to
the obsession with celebrity culture, the spectacle and, maybe most
importantly, naïve ignorance as the highest virtue a character can aspire
toward.
The Following was
a show that earned some early hype for its shocking violence and the slick
visual world it created. For many, including me, that surface appeal quickly
waned as one realized that there was little below the surface of a cat and
mouse game between a damaged detective and a deranged serial killer. If that
sounds familiar, well, of course … that is one of the key formulas for success
on television, as well as in non Super Hero films, in the
post-exhaustion-of-ideas world we live in today. The Following takes cliché to heretofore-unreached heights with an
endless procession of trite conversations, pathetic attempts at profundity, endless
chase scenes, narrow escapes and FBI agents being made to look like they must
have attended the Rosco P. Coltrane school of policing. There is also a surfeit
of flashbacks that sometimes seem to serve no purpose but to fill up time
before another shoot-out scene (generally with both knives and guns). The show
was cancelled after three seasons, but how it got that far and how some fans
and even critics could claim it as worthwhile, is truly hard to understand.
Shows like this test the viewers intelligence by forcing
them to assess how much stupidity in narrative structure and dialogue they can
take. For me it was 15 episodes, to be fair, but I had a nasty cold and was
doing other things as the show droned on in the background. Yet this attachment
to simplicity and the celebration of a particularly American form of naïve obliviousness
is really a staple of the Fox worldview. Take the popular shows that pushed the
network toward respectability – The
Simpsons and Married with Children. While
The Simpsons is a brilliant show
under the surface, its celebration of the virtue of ignorance is probably the
reason it has lasted so long and been so popular.
Looking at the lineup for this Fall on Fox and FX, we see that
dedication to ignorance as a lifestyle choice in clear focus. A representative
sample includes Are You Smarter than a 5th
Grader?, Family Guy, Bordertown, Bob’s Burger, Bullseye, Anger Management, The
League, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Mike and Molly among a host of others. This is coupled with reality
shows where simple narratives of good and evil – and talent – prevail and
celebrity news like TMZ fill in the spaces between. While there are a few shows
that do demand more of the audience, the general tendency is to play to our
basest instincts and celebrate ignorance and dude culture as if these are the
natural state of existence for all humans, at least of the male variety.
Ignorance might in fact be bliss, as Fox seems to often indirectly
aver, but it certainly does little to improve our material condition or quality
of life. When it comes to democracy, ignorance is the quickest route to its
destruction.
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