Snowpocaliptic Snowpidity!

I guess I never really had an appreciation of how much contempt Fox News really held for its audience until this week, when personalities across its programming schedule began repeatedly citing this weeks eastern seaboard blizzard as proof that global warming isn't real.

Now, you've been able to find this nonsense on Fox for years, but it was usually relegated to its far right opinion shows like O'Rielly and Hannity. During the D.C. blizzard, however, there seems to have been a decision made high up in the chain of command to go all in, and Fox now seems to be deliberately trying to convince its audience of something that is demonstrably false;



What's so galling is that you'd think that even a child would be able to see how false this line of reasoning is, or at the very least be suspicious enough to seek another source of information on the subject. But it appears that Roger Ailes and his colleagues estimate that their viewers are so remarkably dense, or predisposed to accepting this claim, and are so intellectually isolated (getting all their information from conservative news sources), that they can push this one over the top.

Naturally, this all translates to more fodder for liberals to point and laugh at:

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Unusually Large Snowstorm
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
We're Off to See the Blizzard
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Skate Expectations

Now, all this is good fun, and hopefully anyone who happened to see any of these segments came away convinced of how stupid this all is. But Glenn Beck makes a valid point; ratings for Fox News are far higher than its main stream counterparts. And a large portion of its audience systematically shut themselves off from the main stream media, relying only on Fox and self-identified conservative publications and personalities for all of their information. What then is to stop these people, if they hear it enough times, from accepting this claim as fact?

Fox News is constantly running a gambit of exactly how much influence they can exert over their audience. They seem to honestly believe that objectivity is impossible, which gives them license to behave in anyway they see fit, just as long as it pays dividends on the bottom line. By working from a well documented, top-down command structure, Fox News spins nearly every story to the right so consistently, while simultaneously telling its audience all other news sources cannot be trusted, that it has carved out its own alternative reality for its viewers to live in.

Viewed as journalist, this is an abomination. Viewed as a product, however, Fox News is remarkably successful. And as its market share grows, so does its power, leading to bolder and bolder flauntings of reality. I think today we're seeing that dynamic in action.