Fox News is Attack on USA using Misinformation as Weapon (My LTE's 2014)

UPDATE: New Yorker confirms my theory that disinformation went on for decades through media sites such as Fox News*
The American political landscape also offered a particularly soft target for dezinformatsiya, false information intended to discredit the official version of events, or the very notion of reliable truth. Americans [in 2016] were more divided along ideological lines than at any point in two decades, according to the Pew Research Center. American trust in the mainstream media had fallen to a historic low. The fractured media environment seemed to spawn conspiracy theories about everything from Barack Obama’s place of birth (supposedly Kenya) to the origins of climate change (a Chinese hoax). Trump, in building his political identity, promoted such theories. “Free societies are often split because people have their own views, and that’s what former Soviet and current Russian intelligence tries to take advantage of,” Oleg Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general, who has lived in the United States since 1995, said. “The goal is to deepen the splits.”

By Kay Ebeling
I moved to Lancaster Calif in 2014 because I thought it would be easy to go back and forth from there to L.A. on the train. Soon after arriving I picked up the local daily paper and discovered a lively Letters page.  One after another readers from Mojave to Palmdale were repeating Fox News sound bites in different variations

As a Journalist who once wrote press releases for NASA and the U.S. Navy, I was already seeing the role false news was playing in American politics and becoming astonished. So I dived into the dialectic on the AV Press letters page, (Some letters copied below) trying to get them to see, the USA was under attack through misinformation. 

Donald Trump won the election two years later thanks to Faux news.

I think Fox News was an attack by a foreign agent against the United States.  It deposited anti-American news stories in the population, mesmerizing viewers with techniques such as camera shots up news anchors’ legs. Somehow Fox ended up on screens in small town cafes of rural USA, and in military base mess halls all over the world, dominating the news with an anti-American message wrapped in American flags so craftily that the people who believed it thought they were being patriotic.

Fox News viewers were reached through hate.  I was in the middle of it in Lancaster, and had to move away.  Because after a few of my letters were published in the Antelope Valley Press, my neighbors started doing … weird menacing things to me that made me feel threatened, so I moved to Tahoe. Where now I'm hiding.

Here is a sampling of letters I wrote in 2014 Trying To Point Out the use of misinformation as a military weapon going on at Fox News. (In these letters, I call the source "ISIS" but in 2017 we seem to be learning the real source of the propaganda was Russia.) 

09/15/14 at 5:42 AM

To the AV Press

Where is the economic collapse that was supposed to come now as a result of Obamacare?  I guess the right was wrong again.

09/16/14 at 6:46 AM

Why are we so amazed that ISIS uses social media as a weapon of war.  Look at the job the Saudis have done with Fox News, brainwashing a population right under our noses, now that's a military coup.

09/27/14 at 12:37 PM

To the Editor, AV Press

Islamic State warriors knew from the start that Americans cherish our First Amendment.  So they infiltrated using America’s own air waves, starting with Fox News, knowing we would not stop them because we believe in a Free Press.  Their message?  Hate your President, hate your government, take up arms against your own countrymen.  People who watch and believe Fox News today have been playing right along with the Islamic State attack on the USA.   Look at the source.  Change the station. 

09/29/14 at 7:40 PM

In a late September video, ISIS condemned Barack Obama for being weak and not sending ground troops into Iraq.  On that same day John McCain and Bill O’Reilly were both on Fox News condemning Obama for being weak and not sending ground troops into Iraq. 

10/17/14 at 6:26 AM

To the Editor, AV Press:

Obama Derangement Syndrome created by Saudis to attack us

The anti-government campaign that developed into Obama Derangement Syndrome began about ten years ago in this country, primarily through Fox News, which is owned in large part by a Saudi Arabian prince. 

 Now at a time of great crises, America finds itself with almost no government structure in place, which is exactly what our enemies want. 

On Nine-Eleven the Saudis attacked us by flying airplanes into high rise buildings, completely catching us off guard. 

Now they've used our First Amendment to attack us inside the United States through our air waves, through sources such as Fox News. 

After this very well funded anti-government information campaign has dominated life in the USA past decade, I wonder where they will attack us next.

10/24/14 at 11:42 AM

To the Editor, AV Press, good morning:

Saudi billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal admits to supporting ISIL terrorists in the recent past, in a CNN interview Oct. 20.   

Alwaleed is also second largest stockholder of Fox News Corp, which since 2008 has put an antagonistic spin on every news story that breaks, and in so doing, turned Americans against each other.  We now find out Alwaleed and his monarchy fund groups such as ISIS, but “all this has been stopped completely,” he says to a TV audience.

The same nation that flew airplanes into our buildings on Nine-Eleven is now in an international coalition against ISIS, even though they've been supporting ISIS.  That nation also funds Fox News. 

We need to pay more attention to who we trust and the source of our information.

10/31/14 at 8:21 AM

To the Editor, AV Press, good morning: 

Wouldn't it be great if Americans bragged about how much taxes they paid because it's a sign of success and high income? Politicians could use that to get needed tax increases. You get a bumper sticker saying, I pay 70 percent, if you do pay 70 percent, and everyone who sees you drive by in your Jaguar would be so impressed. 

11/03/14 at 5:41 AM

The real voter fraud in the U.S. today is “dark money.” Millions pour into campaigns through PACs and 501(c)4 nonprofits, which means we don't know who the money is coming from, or even what country.

11/03/14 at 10:43 AM

To the Editor: 

You cannot watch Fox News for more than ten minutes without hearing something Anti-government, Anti-President, or Anti-"liberal" whatever that means.  How can so many people watch it and not hear the spin. It's So Obvious!  

Plus the stream of misinformation that comes from Fox News is preposterous: "ebola is now airborne" "soldiers will not be able to fight next to gays" "Romney will win by a landslide" "No one will pay their Obamacare premiums" "Colorado voters are printing their own ballots" "boobs on the ground" are just a few false facts we've gotten recently from Fox. 

If you watch Fox and can't recognize it as lies and anti-American propaganda, I'm sorry, you are lost inside the bubble. It's astounding that people who seem to otherwise be intelligent can fall for this extremely well and foreign funded information campaign.   

Fox Is Faux News and it is destroying the political fabric of the country.  Fox also keeps neighbors from being able to talk to each other, as so many people are full of false information, the conversation cannot progress.  

I feel like I live in the novel 1984, listening to the letter writers here call Fox genuine.  Fox is doublespeak.  Newspeak.  Not truth at all. 

11/03/14 at 4:17 PM

Ronald Reagan would be too liberal for today's Fox News hounds. 

11/03/14 at 6:43 PM

Gas prices are going down at the same time Islamic State ISIL militants have seized oil fields in Iraq and are selling the product to middlemen at half market price.  Isn't that interesting.  

11/05/14 at 2:55 AM

The entities that spent $4 billion on the Nov 4 election through PACS etc are the winners. Thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings on campaign spending, we don't know who paid for and won this election, or even what country they come from.    

11/05/14 at 4:33 AM

To the editors, good morning:

At some point you just gotta laugh

We now live in the United States of the Global Corporation and it's already too late to stop it, so may as well stop worrying and love the bomb, so to speak. Enjoy the new fashion of pock marked faces and mutation as pollution becomes the norm. A whole new category of class will be created from those who have it all, and the rest of us. As a visitor to this planet, I can only observe all this and think, no wonder Jesus didn't bother to come back here.

11/06/14 at 3:21 AM

To the Editors: 

FAUX News Waking Me Up in Middle of Night

U.S. mainstream media has not been "liberal" since CBS fired Dan Rather for his 2004 reports on candidate George W. Bush.  The same dark money that pours billions into our elections, from who knows where, is also feeding the salaries and sources of information that end up in the mainstream today.

As a result, broadcast news, an industry that used to show how well the free market works, has turned into an industry that rewards failure as long as the Owners' agenda is moved forward.  

Example: Rush Limbaugh gets $6 million a year salary no matter how bad his ratings are.  Radio used to run on a free market, you could charge more for ads if you had more listeners.  

Limbaugh’s show destroys the ratings on almost every station he’s on, yet Clear Channel, owned mainly by Romney's old Bain Capital, pays Limbaugh $6 million every year, no matter how many listeners he's chased away from radio never to come back again.

There is no mainstream liberal media to speak of in this country anymore.  Instead we have news anchors such as on Fox, sitting in short skirts on couches facing the camera, delivering prepared messages paid for by who knows what, through carefully glossed lips. 

Don't keep falling for it.  The Fox News misinformation machine is out to destroy America, using tactics that are a a lot like Tokyo Rose. 

11/11/14 at 8:03 AM

[On another note:] To the Editor: 

“Every time you fill up your tank, you may be helping to finance a mosque in America that preaches hard-line, anti-Western Wahhabism, the official religion of Saudi Arabia.  Some of the largest mosques and Islamic centers in America are funded by the Saudi royal government, which gets most of its revenues from oil exports.  And America is its biggest consumer." 

Not the words of a radical anti-oil environmentalist but of Paul Sperry, a Hoover Institute scholar and regular “conservative” spokesman in media, in his book “Infiltration.” 

It's not just left wing “whackos” who say we have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and develop alternative energy as a matter of national security.   

11/12/14 at 3:00 AM

to the editor:

So $4 billion in dark money was spent on the Nov 4 election, and the result will be a stalled U.S. government and a President / Commander in Chief with no clout at a time of war.  Wonder whose money that was. 

11/13/14 at 7:34 AM

To the Editor: 

The Misinformation Campaign is so well funded and loud it seems to be erasing Americans’ knowledge of history.  So pundits on Fox can say a czar appointment by Obama is somehow next to tyranny, when there have been dozens of presidential appointments with the title of czar going back as far as FDR.  

Nixon and Reagan loved to call an appointment “czar” as it represented America’s improved relations with Russia.  How vulnerable we are becoming as we let these loud voices on cable news rewrite history.

11/15/14 at 8:17 AM

Good morning editors, AV Press:

The misinformation campaign is designed to turn us against each other, keep the left and right blaming each other, and distract us while the Global Corporation drains wealth and resources out of our country. 

They know just what kind of stories to release and when, and they own almost all the media now.  So the Corporation message gets out every day, then repeated over and over again, on every channel, all to keep us angry at each other so we won't notice all the outright corruption that has become their daily norm. 

Hate campaigns- against immigrants, the homeless, working poor, disabled, the aged, unemployed – release of each day’s sound bite creates something very similar to the hate rallies in the novel and films 1984.  Eerily, the message even comes through video screens that are everywhere.  So we all get distracted by hatred of the current selected target, while the real criminals are thieving the country blind. 

George Orwell is not rolling over, but sitting up in his grave saying, hmm, there's definitely another story to write here. 

11/26/14 at 6:07 AM

To the Editor:

It's a month after the election and there never was an ebola crisis after all. Hmm. 

12/01/14 at 8:34 AM

To the Editor: 

The people did not vote, they went shopping

Twice as many persons shopped on Black Friday as voted in the 2014 elections. More than 160 million Americans bought things, 76.9 million voted, the lowest turnout since WW2. So please stop saying in editorials here that the people have spoken. The people went shopping. 

Twice as many persons shopped on Black Friday as voted in the 2014 elections. More than 160 million Americans bought things, 76.9 million voted, the lowest turnout since WW2. So please stop saying the people have spoken. The people went shopping.  

12/11/14 at 9:34 AM

to the editor av press;

Is This How Low We Will Let Fox Take Us?

“Releasing this report will endanger American lives,” was, predictably, the reaction by the Fox-fueled right to the results of the Senate Intelligence Committee six-year investigation on torture, released December 9.  

Since Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi started ISIS after being released from Camp Bucca in 2009, after reading the report, I bet torture of Iraqi prisoners is already what motivates thousands to join his militia, where they behead and torture anyone they find who’s ever had anything to do with America.

 I have a feeling it's the torture itself that has endangered American lives, not reporting on it. 

 Torture is a war crime famously prosecuted by the USA.  Are we now letting a billion-dollar misinformation campaign on Fox rewrite history?  We hanged Japanese soldiers after convicting them of water boarding in World War Two.  Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the very dangers we face today as he left office January 1961:

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

After release of the report, an anchorette on Fox News said torture is fine because America is “awesome.”  We are living with the results of a dumbed down America ignoring Eisenhower’s and just about every other warning. 

12/14/14 at 6:29 AM

To the Editor, AV Press:

You can almost see the PR machines in motion behind the scenes as one “news event” after another arouses our anger and suspicion of each other. 

 Now people in the tea party and people on the left can barely make eye contact, when in the end what we all want is the same thing, to get back control of our government, for politicians to respond to human beings not corporate entities.

 On one hand we rant about illegal aliens with ebola stealing our welfare, and on the other hand we take to the streets enraged at our own police forces who work for us.  Instead of us coming together, the misinformation machine keeps us continuously distracted, all while global oligarchs find new ways to funnel billions in wealth out of America. 

Congress’s latest performance in budget talks proves to me that the U.S. government has been taken over by something that is not American.  It was no accident that a provision that makes U.S. taxpayers protect billions for Wall Street, i.e. global investment firms, was added at the eleventh hour.

Most Americans did not even notice this last round of robbery, they were too distracted by “riots.”  I'm afraid the oligarchs are laughing at us from their caves. 

12/15/14 at 3:24 AM

Since August, the word “thug” has been used to describe Michael Brown at least seven times in letters here about Ferguson, all by individuals who live in the AV and have no direct experience of the case other than what they see in the news.  

Isn't it peculiar that seven different persons came up with that same word “thug” to describe an eighteen year old who was dead in the street two thousand miles away.  How did you all come up with that word? Do you really know the situation well enough to describe the man that way? 

Or did some media entity just keep repeating the word “thug” so often that you became certain the man was a thug?  

Also, saying “blacks kill blacks too" in response to the Ferguson protests in a non sequitur.  People are taking to the streets over ill-trained police killing unarmed individuals, not in protest over criminals killing each other, which is a completely different issue.

“Blacks kill blacks too” is another sound bite generated by the misinformation machine. 

From my observation, anyway who uses the word “thug” to describe Brown, and responds with “blacks kill blacks too” to the Ferguson situation, is using Fox News Misinformation Machine Generated Sound Bites instead of using your own brain to think the issue through.  

Not a healthy habit for any of us.

12/15/14 at 5:33 AM

Saying “blacks kill blacks too" in response to the Ferguson protests is a non sequitur. 

12/16/14 at 8:51 AM

Short To the AV Press

Now that the extreme right says it's okay for the U.S. to conduct torture because our enemies do it, when do we start beheading guys on YouTube? 

12/19/14 at 10:29 AM

To the editor AV Press:

It's been amazing past weeks to watch right wing America cut programs to the needy and sick, defend torture, then claim someone else is conducting a war on Christmas. 

12/21/14 at 3:00 AM

to the AV press lettters;

My Democratic friends now quote Nixon, Reagan, and Goldwater, trying to talk sense with today’s Zombie Republicans, usually to no avail.

To

12/22/14 at 9:41 AM

To av press re cuba editorial:

Obama’s new diplomacy in Cuba was not a “poke in the eye at Americans” as editors of the AV Press wrote on the Dec 19 Opinion page. If you have ocular soreness, it is more likely a repetitive motion injury, from your knee jerking so many times in reaction to the President that your leg keeps banging up against your face.   

I've seen this phenomenon in a lot of my ultra conservative friends lately.  Determined to have a negative reaction to everything President Obama does no matter what, the Zombie Republicans in 2014 found themselves:

- Raging over the release of our last POW,

- Claiming Putin is a better President than Obama, 

- And defending torture as if Geneva never happened.

Now those same knees have jerked up again and poked AV Press editors in the eye as a result of Obama opening doors to Havana. 

Come on.  Republicans have wanted to bring Capitalism back to Cuba since my dad used to wave at Dick Nixon from his San Clemente porch, even longer.  But in 2014, since it was Obama who solved the problem, the knee-jerk right has to find ways to be against the solution, including editors at the AV Press.  

So they dig, and then argue that the President should have consulted Congress about Cuba first.  Right.  So Lindsey Graham could go on CNN and have palpitations, ruining any negotiations midstream?  I mean, Congress has been so cooperative up until now.

For once, can you guys just admit that the President of the United States accomplished something great, once, just once?  

I bet Obama resorts to Executive Orders these days on purpose, so he can watch faces on the right get all red in their predictable reactions, and laugh. 

12/26/14 at 8:51 AM

To the Editors: AV Press:

If a news story appears only on Fox and not on ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CBS or any other venue, it is likely because the story is false, not because Fox knows something no one else knows as several writers infer in the AV Press letters Dec. 26. 

There are entire journalism theses being written in graduate schools today on the mesmerizing effect of Fox and the network’s unusual and, frankly, frightening ability to convince its viewers that things are true when they are not.  

The list of stories that were started and perpetuated on Fox and then turned out to be false is long: scandals that aren't scandals re the IRS, Benghazi, and gays destroying the military. We were supposed to see unemployment numbers rise, jack-booted thugs come to take our guns, and the economy crash due to the Affordable Care Act.  Illegal aliens with ebola were coming across the border and since the "architect" of Obamacare says voters are stupid, then Obama thinks voters are stupid.  None of these stories ended up being true. 

Most Fox-fueled scandals prove to be false, no matter how many times their words are flashed on screen across Heather Childers' thigh.  . 

I'm not “insulting” people who watch Fox, just asking you to please go to more than one source for your information, and if it's only being reported by one group with one agenda, then the story is not likely to be true.

01/01/15 at 7:32 AM

To the editors, happy new year and: 

The U.S. economy added 241,000 Jobs a Month last year, fastest growth since 1999.  Gas is approaching two dollars a gallon, and we are streamlining the military to get better results with less waste.  So again, why is Obama a bad President?  

01/01/15 at 8:27 AM

To the Editors: 

To all those who cheered Cliven Bundy and events at his ranch then a few months later condemned protests in Ferguson, do you see any contradiction there?

01/07/15 at 12:58 PM

Why is Congress in such a rush to pass Keystone, where they can use eminent domain to seize farmland from American families and give it to a foreign oil corporation?  

01/08/15 at 5:46 PM

Maybe the Powers That Be produce conflicting news stories on purpose, then run them in competing media to pit us against each other. So today Americans rage against our neighbors who believe the other news source, Fox vs MSNBC, and while our attention is diverted, global corporate thugs are robbing the country blind.

01/13/15 at 9:01 AM

Good morning editors:

Can you imagine the reaction on the right if Obama had gone all the way to France for the Unity March and a photo op?  To stand around awhile in front of cameras with the same world leaders who inspired American Fries in restaurants just a few years back?

01/17/15 at 7:49 AM

To the Editor AV Press:

To get an update on Paris a week after the attack, I clicked on France 24-English streaming live on YouTube, and found reporters sitting at a table making jokes about Fox News.  

On the claim that Birmingham, England, has become a Muslim-only city where non-Muslims won't go, a British reporter at the table called it “ignorance,” and then with a quizzical expression said, “and this is a Fox News ‘terrorism expert’ saying it.”

Then, as in the USA, the pundits all talked over each other, but I was able to jot down these quotes. 

“Another expert on Fox says the center of Paris, the most elegant boulevards, have so many Muslim no-go zones, it reminds him of Afghanistan.”

That really got the pundits talking all at once and rolling their eyes laughing, giving me the impression they joke about Fox News a lot during these lighter segments on France 24. 

They then showed clips from a French comedy / news show that interviewed people on the street in downtown Paris, to ask if the city now reminds them of Afghanistan.  “What a stupid question,” answered a very cosmopolitan looking woman.

 Thanks to Fox News, the current image we have overseas is no longer “The Ugly American,” it's now “The Ignorant American.”

01/21/15 at 5:47 AM

American kids may not go to college, but they've got Smart Phones.

  

01/21/15 at 7:03 AM

Most of the jobs we'll get from the Keystone Pipeline will be in environmental cleanup.

01/23/15 at 8:19 AM

Please stop repeating the lie that President Obama ran up the deficit as soon as he took office.  Up until 2009 Congress passed “supplementals” to pay for military actions. Barack Obama did NOT quadruple the deficit, he put the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the books so we could start paying for them.  Get real.

01/26/15 at 7:56 AM

It's tax evaders who get a free ride in the USA, not the poor.  People who avoid paying their fair share of taxes cannot call themselves patriotic.

01/29/15 at 8:50 AM

When in history did Congress countermand foreign policy the way John Boehner did by going behind the back of the President and inviting Netanyahu to speak before Congress?  Enough! This unbending refusal on the right to respect the Commander in Chief borders on treason

02/03/15 at 4:38 PM

Lori Dougherty uses Fox News misinformation to argue there is no Fox News misinformation (Letters Feb 2).  There is no way to respond to that.

02/10/15 at 9:31 AM

The ones who benefit most from govt cutbacks are the dishonest. 

01/23/15 at 8:19 AM

Please stop repeating the lie that President Obama ran up the deficit as soon as he took office.  Up until 2009 Congress passed “supplementals” to pay for military actions. Barack Obama did NOT quadruple the deficit, he put the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the books so we could start paying for them.  Get real.

02/13/15 at 9:05 AM

The Smart Phone culture, where humans misspell words on overpriced devices.

And then I moved away.

Posted by Kay Ebeling
luxuriating in the extreme heat and cold of city of angels

* New Yorker Link
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war

-ke