There's an alarmingly high percentage of television viewers who believe that they will become better informed by watching TV news, more specifically, Fox 'News' Happening Now. The program pretends to be an up-to-the-minute information source that will keep viewers abreast of what's really going on. Fox is always careful to maintain their viewers' GOP-engineered, bubbly existence and their ignorance is Ailes' bliss.
Host Jon Scott suggests that the Twitterverse has been commandeered by unrestrained , malevolent and abusive instigators. Subsequently, social media acts as a catalyst to intensify racial animosity, and this animus culminated in the most heinous of retribution ending the lives of five Dallas LEOs. The panel was your standard-issue Fox-esque fair and balanced crew: the 'left' side represented Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun Times, and the right's contestant was First Amendment warrior and make-believe martyr of the Bush Crime Family, Judith Miller.
If you are accustomed to watching Fox, offensive and callous remarks about Black people don't seem odd, so Jon Scott's opening doesn't raise any eyebrows.
SCOTT: Judy, the events in Dallas *pause seem *pause to have been sparked by those two events of police-involved shootings of two BLACK men, one in Minnesota, one in Baton Rouge. Did those two events, because there was so much video footage, did they get too much coverage in some way?
Miller replies that she doesn't believe that the coverage of those (appallingly atrocious) events was too excessive, but the responsibility for the hostile climate lies very heavily on those social media outlets that permit the lies and hate that she's so against.
MILLER: These postings that we've been seeing on Twitter and Facebook, the outrage, the threats to police, the actual calls, in some cases for the killing of police, they are completely inappropriate, and they may be covered as legal in some cases.
SCOTT: (to Lynn Sweet) Why doesn't Twitter take down some of those messages?
The Washington Bureau Media Chief of the Sun Times had no idea about the legal minutiae of Twitter's rules and policies, as she's not a spokesman for the company. But she did impart some actual wisdom, likely to no avail on current company, that you cannot blame the toxic environment of what happened in Dallas on social media.
SWEET: Why don't we separate what happened in Dallas. We need to know a lot more about the killer. We don't know a lot about his motives, his mental state, his past. There's a lot of information that we don't know. And where I agree with Judy, in that social media is the bulletin board of our era, people could speak their minds.
And... It's still in a sense, while people have grown up with it, it is a bit in its infancy. in terms of how it could be used not for the better but for the worse. But I don't know if we're at a state where we can link terrible things on social media with a specific event as we saw in Dallas because we just don't know enough about the killer, what motivated him.
Of course the host reads a vehemently hateful tweet about murdering cops, so he once again asks if the social media outlets bear some responsibility for this horror. Judy agrees, with the histrionics of the host. Fortunately, for sanity's sake, Lynn sees how preposterous this entire conversation is.
In the Right Wing bubble, a tragic ambush of police officers likely happened because people have too much freedom of speech, or at least that's what they believe. Yeah, sure. The media certainly needs more oversight, you know, small government. Fox News is amazingly adept at convincing their faithful that the opposite of reality is truth.
It's a bit hard to swallow the outrage of Judith Miller feeling revulsion over lies and misinformation being fed to the public. The reporter's shameful history of collusion with the Bush Administration and her subsequent descent into the role of Fox News pundit is all the evidence needed to label this woman a flagrant hypocrite.
The Dallas tragedy was definitely not caused by anything that has been captured on video far too many times to cause people to lose control. There's no way that it would upset anyone that the cop who shot unarmed Laquan McDonald sixteen times hasn't been fired, but assigned to desk duty, no possible way! It couldn't be the fact that Dallas, and pretty much every other city, doesn't convict LEOs who murder Black suspects. Ever. That's not a cause for distress.
Obviously the retribution for the anger regarding police brutality was the worst possible way to make any progress in repairing our racial animosity and hate. Denying reality and labeling an incident where violence was the 'solution' should not malign an entire movement, like Black Lives Matter. This has set race relations back devastatingly, and worse yet, Fox News and the GOP only profit from these tragedies. It's pretty obvious that the culprit is hardly a bunch of ill-conceived, hate-filled Tweets created by those anonymous provocateurs spawned by the interwebs.
