4,000 Dead -- Fox News Empowering War And Making Us Dumber (Murdoch and His Vengeful Fools)

Fox News more than any other single group in America is responsible for bringing us eight disastrous years of Bush, a war based on lies, 4000 American dead, over 30,000 wounded and an economy sliding into the toilet flushed away by a war debt exacerbated by tax cuts. I got to know the folks at Fox uncomfortably well...

My Marine son John and I were lucky. Our first stop on our book tour -- for our co-authored book, Keeping Faith-A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps -- was Nightline. Ted Koppel was prepared when he interviewed us in 2002. Soon after that Jim Lehrer asked me to do a commentary. His crew was kind and painstaking. (Lehrer is a former Marine and his take on our book was especially sympathetic.) The folks at 20/20 were great too.

Then John and I appeared on Fox News.

After the interview my normally laid back and completely apolitical son said, "I'd rather get shot at in Afghanistan than ever talk to those people again. They have to be the stupidest people I've ever met. Honestly, I'd prefer combat."

I guess John meant it, as he subsequently volunteered for several deployments. Our book tour continued with me going solo while John went to war.

My publisher's publicist kept putting me on Fox. The Fox people consistently stood out as the worst prepared, shockingly dumb "TV hairdos" (as John called them) I've ever encountered. Note to authors: When on Fox make sure you use the precious seconds between being ushered into the studio and air time. Prep your interviewers but prepare to more or less interview yourself. Try to distract them from their last minute makeup touchups. Try to get them to focus -- even briefly -- on what you've come to talk about so that their dumbest remarks are off air.

Fox hairdo: "We'll be on in one minute."

Me: "Got it."

Fox hairdos fooling with a mirror: "So, is this about your service in Vietnam?"

Me: "No, I never served."

Fox hairdo glances at note card someone just handed her, while she's checking to make sure she has no lipstick on her teeth.

"Uh, so it's about how you coped with losing your son? When was he killed?"

"No," me talking fast, "my son is fine. Remember we were both here a few weeks ago. We wrote Keeping Faith together about his boot camp experiences and how I changed my mind about his service. I was so snobbish and against his joining the military, but now I feel more connected to my country than ever before and I'm very proud of him. When we're on, you should ask me, 'why are you more connected to your country?'"

"We're on in ten seconds!"

Lucky for me Fox doesn't do their homework. Obviously no one at Fox had actually ever read any of my books about the military family experience, let alone my novels. Had they read them they would have known that I wasn't their type. They tend to think in black and white. The idea that anyone besides far right Republicans could be pro-military never seems to have crossed their minds.

My military related books aren't jingoistic and the ones I wrote after 9/11 include my doubts about Bush's war in Iraq and comments about the class divide between who serves and who doesn't, something that cuts right as well as left, since both wealthy Republicans and upscale Democrats don't let their kids volunteer these days. And in my novels I'd been writing about how strange and funny (to me anyway) I find the fundamentalist/evangelical subculture I grew up in. And since that subculture makes up most of Fox's audience ....

Going on Fox is like going on pretend TV, but the problem is that Fox viewers seem to mistake Fox News for reality. This wouldn't matter, except for the fact that Fox News and their cohorts on right wing talk radio and blogs manage to set the agenda for the rest of the news media. For instance, borrowing "facts" direct from the a right wing hate blog, Fox commentator William Kristol goofed in his NY Times column about Obama attending the infamous Rev. Wright church service -- Obama had told the truth, he hadn't been there -- then Kristol had to take it all back when corrected by actual real live journalists. But of course by that time the lie had done the rounds and become another "fact."

There is a lot of these Fox facts going around. On 1/19/08 Fox News featured a segment saying Obama attended a "madrassa." Host Steve Doocy noted that madrassas are "financed by Saudis" and "teach this Wahhabism which pretty much hates us," then said, "The big question is: was that on the curriculum back then?" A caller to the show questioned if that means that "maybe Obama doesn't consider terrorists the enemy." Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade responded, "Well, we'll see about that."

Hannity & Colmes spent their 3/21/08 show attacking Obama. Hannity was trying to make Obama out to be a racist because of his pastor's remarks. McCain spokesman Jack Kemp (on the show) wound up defending Obama.

Even Chris Wallace, on Fox and Friends (3/21/08) to promote Sunday's Fox News Sunday, took the "Friends" to task over what he saw as unbalanced coverage of Obama's remarks about his grandmother being a "typical white person..." etc., etc...

It goes beyond these and many more "errors" (outright lies) and smears. The right wing media's mantra of willful ignorance is devastating. It facilitates bad judgment about things that literally get Americans killed, for instance in the Iraq war that Fox has pushed as cheerfully as a Dick Cheney "they volunteered" favored vacation destination.

Speaking as someone who has been a political and social conservative my whole life, to me Rupert Murdoch is a genuine anti-conservative villain. Murdoch is responsible for Fox News, which follows the pattern he established years ago with newspapers that spread his version of a "conservative" message at the same time that his papers dumbed it down. Murdoch, is the so-called conservative who franchises stupidity, ignorance and prejudice. (Try to imagine the late Bill Buckley's informed, intelligent and fair Firing Line as a Fox show!)

Murdoch has denied every basic moral tenet of conservatism (not to mention traditional religion) having become the purveyor of low IQ sleaze to the world. He combines his role as a successful soft-core pornographer -- check out his tabloid newspaper's centerfolds and Fox TV entertainment values -- with the scorched earth politics of the vengeful wing of the right wing. (Given the fact Murdock is a sleaze seller worldwide, how strange that a fair number of Church Lady American evangelical Christians look to Fox for their "news.")

Murdoch's fake conservatism isn't about principle. It's about power. It's about voting for Bush and his war, while watching TV shows exalting mindless prurience that would have made Nero blush and/or fall on his sword out of boredom. So perhaps it's no accident that Murdoch's presenters at FOX News are the dumbest of the dumb. Murdoch is no fool, so he uses fools to catch fools.

I emailed this to John to ask him if it was okay to talk about him herein. My Marine emailed back seconds later: "Fine with me. Fox really do remain the stupidest people I've ever met that weren't actually institutionalized at the time."

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back