Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spent three days immersed in Fox News in order to better understand Donald Trump. Here's what he concluded.
Abdul-Jabbar decided to spend so much time watching Fox because, as he put it in a Hollywood Reporter column, in Trump's case, "media maketh the man" and the media that makes Trump is Fox News.
Abdul-Jabbar noted the distortions, bias and outright inaccuracies blithely promoted on Fox. They are all bad enough but their significance is magnified in the age of Trump.
If you are what you eat and President Trump is being fed a steady diet of "alternate reality" by a popular mainstream news outlet, then that explains why he thinks he can get away with constantly broadcasting his own lies. More frightening, does he even know the difference? Which makes the Trump presidency less a variation of the Kingsmen and more like The Truman Show, the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey as a man who doesn't realize that he’s being raised by a corporation entirely inside a television show. In The Trumpman Show, Fox gives Trump misinformation that makes him think his world is real: that he won the popular vote, that people don’t think he's a racist, misogynist, xenophobe. It's been reported that twice a day Trump is given a folder of only good news about himself, which some in the White House refer to as "the propaganda document." When those folders aren’t enough, he can tune into Fox and Friends, where he can hear this comment about the growing number of athletes joining Colin Kaepernick's sitting out the national anthem in protest over racism: "It puts us in a position of weakness to the outward world. People look at us and say, wow, they're divisive already." Trump can then believe that it’s a football player causing all that divisiveness, not his tacit endorsement of white supremacists in Charlottesville.
The Trumpman Show is one show that needs to be canceled.
To be clear, I do not advocate the shutting down of Fox News, nor do I think that is what Abdul-Jabbar is saying. But its dishonesty and poisonous propaganda should be.
Originally published at Newshounds.us
