FOX AND NPR ARE A TEAM
AGAINST THE WORKING CLASS
by John Spritzler
May 6, 2023
The URL of this article for sharing it is https://www.pdrboston.org/fox-npr-are-a-team
FOX NEWS and NPR are a team against the working class. They are not in opposition to each other (as they pretend to be.) The notion that NPR might be bad but FOX NEWS is worse is wrong; it is as wrong as saying that for the victims of U.S. imperialism (the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Libyans, ...) the U.S. Army is bad but the U.S. Navy is worse. Let me explain why.
The United States billionaire ruling class controls both the liberal (NPR, etc.) media and the conservative (FOX, etc.) media. The ruling class uses its conservative media to manipulate its audience that is essentially white working class people, and it uses its liberal media to manipulate its audience that is essentially the non-white-working-class part of the population, which includes non-whites of all income levels and whites who identify as 'middle class' or 'professional,' and who mostly have college degrees. I will refer to these two audiences as "conservatives" and "liberals."
The Modern FOX-NPR Divide-and-Rule Teamwork
Before FOX NEWS was founded in 1996 the groundwork for establishing conservative mass media was built by the Nixon/Agnew administration much earlier. In fact, it began just after the government, in 1968, assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. (yes! It did, as shown here). The timing, as I will show, was not coincidental.
First, some conservative media history, as recounted in The Atlantic's article, "The Conservative War on Liberal Media Has a Long History" (you can skip this long excerpt if you're willing to take my word for it that conservative media got going right after the 1968 assassination of MLK, Jr.):
"The charges of media bias were picked up by the Nixon Administration in 1969, when Spiro Agnew skewered the “closed fraternity of privileged men” who ran television news. In choosing the stories and writing the commentary, he argued, these anchors, producers, and pundits served up not objective analysis but the liberal pap of the New York-Washington echo chamber. And every night, 40 million Americans tuned in, imbibing bias and mistaking it for neutrality.
"While Agnew made the charge, it was up to conservative media activists to make the case. The heavy lifting fell to Edith Efron, a writer for TV Guide. In 1968 Efron analyzed network coverage of the last several weeks of the 1968 election. Armed with thousands of hours of videotape and a grant from the Historical Research Fund (of which Buckley was the projects chair), she plucked out 100,000 words on Nixon and Humphrey from each of the Big Three’s nightly newscasts.
"Then Efron started counting.
"The White House instantly understood the importance of a book that broke down, to the tenth of a percentage point, the extent to which the media were biased against Nixon.
"For and against: tick, tick, tick, until she had tallied every favorable and unfavorable word spoken about the candidates. Crunching the numbers, she found about half of all words spoken about Humphrey were positive. For Nixon? A paltry 8.7 percent. Her book The News Twisters concluded network news followed “the elitist-liberal-left line in all controversies.”
"However slipshod Efron’s methodology (she was the sole arbiter of whether coverage was positive or negative), her findings had the veneer of science. It was a crucial addition to the bias argument. Hard numbers, rigorous tallying, percentages and tables and charts: How better to prove liberal bias was not a figment of the paranoid conservative mind but an irrefutable fact?
"The White House instantly understood the importance of a book that broke down, to the tenth of a percentage point, the extent to which the media were biased against the administration. So Nixon ordered Special Counsel Charles Colson to get the book on the New York Times bestsellers list. Colson ferreted out which stores’ sales were used to determine the list, and bought up every copy they had. And it worked: Efron’s book became an official New York Times bestseller. (For years, Nixon staffers stumbled upon boxes crammed full of The News Twisters.)
"The combined forces of the administration and its conservative media-research wing had an effect. By 1971 CBS Radio had launched Spectrum, a debate show featuring conservatives like Stan Evans, James Kilpatrick, and Phyllis Schlafly. That same year 60 Minutes pitted conservative Kilpatrick against liberal Nicholas von Hoffman in a regular segment called “Point/Counterpoint.” By then, even the publisher of Human Events, in the midst of selling his paper as an alternative to liberal media, had to admit that conservatives were popping up all over established media—even the editorial pages of “that holy house organ of Liberalism—the New York Times.”"
Why did the ruling class (using the Nixon administration) need a conservative media at this time, just after the government assassination of MLK, Jr? Here's why.
When MLK, Jr. was assassinated he had begun to explicitly explain to his increasingly large audience that the racist Jim Crow laws were not only meant to oppress blacks but also to oppress the poor whites, that these racist laws were used by the upper class to destroy the solidarity of the working class so as to be able to dominate and oppress ALL races of working class people. Please listen to, and read the text here, of MLK, Jr.'s famous 1965 Selma, Alabama speech, in which he explains this KEY point. King was trying to build a pro-working class movement that understood that systemic racial discrimination against non-whites harmed--not benefited!--white working class people, as further shown here.
MLK, Jr. was explicitly refuting the Big Lie that the ruling class more recently began promoting with the now-ubiquitous phrase "white privilege" [privilege by definition means a benefit] to persuade us that ordinary whites benefit from the systemic racial discrimination against non-whites. I show exactly why this is indeed a Big Lie in my article, "Is It a Privilege Not to be Discriminated Against."
Malcolm X also was moving in the same direction as MLK, Jr. in the months before the government assassinated him, as shown here. I was personally in the very large audience of Dartmouth College students in 1965 when, just months before his assassination, Malcolm X delivered a speech to a virtually all white (and not particularly liberal) audience and received a standing ovation because he addressed us respectfully (none of his earlier "white devil" rhetoric, which he dropped after going to Egypt and learning that Islam had nothing to do with race) and appealed to us to join him in fighting unjust racial discrimination.
The ruling class feared the emergence of a unified working class that understood that systemic racial discrimination harmed, not benefited, white working class people as well as non-whites. The basis of ruling class domination of the working class in the British American colonies and then the United States has, from the institution of race-based chattel slavery by British large landowners in the Virginia Colony in the 17th century (as discussed in some detail here), been the use of systemic racial discrimination coupled with--crucially!--the propaganda lie that it benefited white working class people.
As long as white working class people believed that the systemic racial discrimination against non-whites--slavery and then Jim Crow and more recently racist prison incarceration and other de facto discrimination (as discussed here and here)--benefited them, then there would be resentment and mutual mis-trust and even fear between whites and non-whites and their solidarity would be weakened so much as to no longer threaten the power of the ruling class.
But with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of MLK, Jr., and with even Malcolm X dropping his "white devil" rhetoric and gaining a following from whites as well as blacks, and with the possibility of future such leaders emerging, the ruling class knew it had a severe problem that it needed to deal with.
The solution the ruling class adopted was to use the Nixon administration to get the post-MLK, Jr. Civil Rights leaders to change the goal of the Movement from ending racial discrimination to the new goal of reverse-racial discrimination, A.K.A "Affirmative Action." As I explain in my article, "We Need THIS, Not Affirmative Action," Affirmative Action was intended to destroy the solidarity between white and non-white working class people that had developed during the Civil Rights Movement under MLK, Jr.'s leadership.
The key feature of Affirmative Action is that it was designed precisely to persuade working class whites that anti-racism was really code for anti-white. Part of the way Affirmative Action did this was by using conservative and liberal media this way: the conservative media made sure its white working class audience knew exactly how Affirmative Action discriminated against whites, while the liberal media made sure that its audience did NOT know this fact. (This is discussed in detail in my previously linked article here.)
Just recently, FOX NEWS and the entire liberal media worked together as a team to further destroy solidarity between white and non-white working class people, as I describe in detail in my article, "THE NEW LIBERAL-SPEARHEADED STRATEGY IN HEALTH CARE TO DIVIDE THE HAVE-NOTS ALONG RACE LINES, ALL IN THE NAME OF 'ANTI-RACISM.'" In this article I show what happened when some liberal doctors in a Boston hospital advocated, in the name of "anti-racism," the following (in their own exact words):
"Sensitive to these injustices, we have taken redress in our particular initiative to mean providing precisely what was denied for at least a decade: a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service...
"Offering preferential care based on race or ethnicity may elicit legal challenges from our system of colorblind law. But given the ample current evidence that our health, judicial, and other systems already unfairly preference people who are white, we believe—following the ethical framework of Zack and others—that our approach is corrective and therefore mandated." [this is from the doctors' own article at https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/michelle-morsebram-wispelwey-what-we-owe-patients-case-medical-reparations/ ]
FOX NEWS published the fact--truthfully!--that these doctors were advocating "preferential care based on race," but all of the liberal media told their audience that the doctors were NOT advocating "preferential care based on race" and were simply trying to end racial discrimination.
Both FOX and the liberal media reported--truthfully--the fact that some neo-Nazis demonstrated against the policy advocated by these doctors. The FOX audience learned that the complaint of the neo-Nazis was that the doctors were advocating discrimination against white patients. The liberal media audience, however, was told--falsely!--that the only complaint of the neo-Nazis was that the doctors were trying to end racial discrimination.
The effect of this combination of FOX and liberal media reporting was a) to persuade FOX's white working class audience that anti-racism was indeed code for anti-white (and that their only defenders are the neo-Nazis); and b) to persuade the liberal media audience (non-whites and middle class professional whites) that white working class people who are angry at the doctors' proposal are simply racists.
Clearly FOX and the liberal media were operating as a TEAM here to pit their respective audiences against each other, for divide-and-rule of the working class.
Note that in this particular case it was FOX NEWS that reported the truth and the liberal media that lied. These media have no policy of lying or telling the truth; they do whatever is necessary in the particular situation to promote the ruling class's divide-and-rule strategy. FOX and NPR (etc.) are, thus, a team. Neither one works against the goal of the other because they both have the SAME goal: divide-and-rule.
FOX & NPR BOTH ARE WARMONGERS
When it comes to the warmongering of the U.S. ruling class, both the conservative and liberal media support it 100%. NPR gushes in support of the U.S. warmongering in Ukraine, telling nothing but lies about the war, lies I refute in my "Ukraine and Egalitarianism." FOX used Tucker Carlson* to channel the inevitable popular opposition to the Ukraine war into a safe channel for the ruling class, namely one that said the Ukraine war was a problem because it weakened us for the war against the REAL enemy, China. The ruling class needs to channel popular discontent this way, and the fact that it uses FOX for this purpose doesn't make FOX better than NPR.
Furthermore, the fact that the warmongering is all about controlling us by making us fear a bogeyman enemy (as I show here) is never even hinted at by any liberal or conservative media; they are equally bad.
FOX might even in the future respond to a U.S. war with China the way liberals such as Senators George McGovern and Gene McCarthy responded to the War in Vietnam when that war became quite unpopular: they said that the war was un-winnable or a mistake, but never said the truth about how it was a war against a bogeyman enemy to control us, nor ever mentioned that the U.S. armed the Soviet Union during the Vietnam War to help it in turn arm North Vietnam even while American GIs were sent to die fighting North Vietnam, which is what a ruling class does when it wages a war against a bogeyman enemy to control one's own people.
Regarding China, all we ever hear from FOX and NPR is that it's an evil government because it is not democratic (as if the United States were!) and it commits genocide against Uyghurs (for which there is no evidence). But when it comes to the actual atrocities of the Chinese government--its oppression of the Chinese have-nots, which I discuss here--NPR and FOX are equally silent, because the U.S. government oppresses the American have-nots too, and waging an actual campaign against the American billionaire plutocracy for its oppression of the American have-nots (as I discuss here) is the LAST thing that either NPR or FOX wants to do.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
Here's how FOX and NPR work as a team to divide-and-rule us with the illegal immigration issue. As I show here, the U.S. ruling class for decades (both parties) has deliberately made life oppressive south of the border in order to force people there to illegally immigrate to the United States just to survive. These illegal immigrants are used by the ruling class in two ways: 1. they lower the wages and working conditions in construction and agriculture and other jobs because they fear deportation if they organize to fight for improvements; and 2. they are used as a scape goat to direct American citizen working class anger against them instead of against the U.S. ruling class.
Enter NPR and FOX.
FOX reports truthfully that illegal immigrants lower wages and working conditions of citizen workers, but never reports the KEY fact that the U.S. ruling class deliberately forces these people to illegally immigrate just to survive.
NPR also hides the truth about the U.S. ruling class forcing the illegal immigrants to immigrate, but says that anybody who doesn't support their right to immigrate is a bad, racist, person.
The result, of course, is that the respective audiences of FOX and NPR are pitted against each other, made to view the other as their enemy or bad people. There is nothing "better" about either FOX or NPR in this teamwork to divide-and-rule us.
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* For a good time read this about the bitter mutual hostility between Tucker Carlson and Hunter Biden, and then do a Google search for: Tucker Carlson Buckley Hunter . One result is here and another one is here. There are lots more. It’s all a show!