Tag Archives: foxtion

Idea Soup, tD

24 Hours with the Fox Circus

Frozen-Elsa

The Fox Channel is a domain of superlatives; nowhere else in our global media landscape can you find — under one roof — such utter, dumbed-down nonsense; opinionated drivel served up as “news” or “fact”; medieval, Murdochian dogma; misogyny and racism; perversion of science; and sheer journalistic piffle. In the space of a recent 24 hours the channel went from broadcasting the unedited immolation of Jordanian pilot, Muadh al-Kasasbeh, which is nothing more than an act of “murder-porn” (gratuitous profiteering and complicity with the murderers), to the denunciation of the movie Frozen as anti-male propaganda. Oh Jon Stewart, you are such a lucky man to be a contemporary of this network — long may you both reign!

From the Guardian:

If you believe what you hear on Fox News, Disney’s Frozen is nothing but misandrist propaganda.

During Wednesday’s Fox & Friends – the crown jewel program at a network known for its loose interpretation of facts – host Steve Doocy raised awareness about Hollywood’s latest nefarious plot to undermine American masculinity. Doocy took issue with Disney’s Frozen, the wildly successful children’s film released more than a year ago, saying the movie empowers young girls by “turning our men into fools and villains” – an agenda they dubbed the “Frozen effect”.

Penny Young Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America – “the women’s group that loves men” – went on: “We want to empower women, but we don’t have to do it at the cost of tearing down men … Men are essential in our society.”

“It would be nice for Hollywood to have more male figures,” Doocy concluded, a wish at odds with nearly every metric for gender equality in Hollywood.

The sentiment has been almost universally condemned on social media.

“If I see one more thinkpiece about how Hollywood is too kind to women and not respectful enough to the male population I just don’t know what I’ll do,” Kevin Fallon wrote at the Daily Beast.

Frozen, which generated more than $1bn in global ticket sales and won the Golden Globe for best animated film, has been hailed as an unexpectedly feminist work from a company not exactly known for empowering depictions of women.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Elsa, Frozen. Courtesy of Disney.

Idea Soup

Facts, Fiction and Foxtion

Foxtion. fox·tion. noun \ fäks-sh?n \

New stories about people and events that are not real: literature that tells stories which are imagined by the writer and presenter, and presented earnestly and authoritatively by self-proclaimed experts, repeated over and over until audience accepts as written-in-stone truth. 

Fox News is the gift that just keeps on giving — to comedians, satirists, seekers of truth and, generally, people with reasonably intact grey matter. This time Fox has reconnected with so-called terrorism expert, Steven Emerson. Seems like a nice chap, but, as the British Prime Minister recently remarked, he’s “an idiot”.

From the Guardian:

Steven Emerson, a man whose job title of terrorism expert will henceforth always attract quotation marks, provoked a lot of mirth with his claim, made during a Fox News interview, that Birmingham was a Muslim-only city where “non-Muslims simply just don’t go in”. He was forced to apologise, and the prime minister called him an idiot, all within the space of 24 hours.

This was just one of the many deeply odd things Emerson said in the course of the interview, although it was perhaps the most instantly refutable: Birmingham census figures are easy to come by. His claim that London was full of “actual religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to religious Muslim attire” is harder to disprove; just because I live in London and I’ve never seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. But they’re not exactly thick on the ground. I blame the cuts.

Emerson also made reference to the “no-go zones” of France, where the government doesn’t “exercise any sovereignty”. “On the French official website it says there are,” he said. “It actually has a map of them.”

How could the French government make the basic blunder of publicising its inability to exercise sovereignty, and on the “French official website” of all places?

After a bit of Googling – which appears to be how Emerson gets his information – I think I know what he’s on about. He appears to be referring to The 751 No-Go Zones of France, the title of a widely disseminated, nine-year-old blogpost originating on the website of Daniel Pipes, another terrorism expert, or “anti-Arab propagandist”.

“They go by the euphemistic term Zones Urbaines Sensibles, or sensitive urban zones,” wrote Pipes, referring to them as “places in France that the French state does not fully control”. And it’s true: you can find them all listed on the French government’s website. Never mind that they were introduced in 1996, or that the ZUS distinction actually denotes an impoverished area targeted for economic and social intervention, not abandonment of sovereignty. For people like Emerson they are officially sanctioned caliphates, where cops and non-Muslims dare not tread.

Yet seven years after he first exposed the No-Go Zones of France, Pipes actually managed to visit several banlieues around Paris. In an update posted in 2013, his disappointment was palpable.

“For a visiting American, these areas are very mild, even dull,” he wrote. “We who know the Bronx and Detroit expect urban hell in Europe too, but there things look fine.

“I regret having called these areas no-go zones.”

Read the entire story here.