No-bola

Lately more and more I have been ignoring popular videos I see linked on facebook. Part of my morning routine for way too long now has been to browse the social media site while coming out of my nightly coma. Most of the stuff I ignore usually follows the same headline structure. If it says anything about a post being “…amazing” or “…you won’t believe what happens!” I scroll on by. Louis C.K. has a great joke about how we go straight to the top shelf with our words today. I’m completely guilty of this, (my default word being “awesome”, which I use to often fill the odd, yet natural voids of conversation). Eddie Izzard has a similar joke about that exact word, awesome. Like a hot dog, I digress.

The latest post I chose to ignore I saw beginning yesterday from Fox News. Normally this would be reason enough for me to move along, and I did. I had all but forgotten about it when this morning I saw it re-posted by a place I consider to be a very trustworthy source, the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. The post is a clip of the Fox News anchor Shep Smith. He is addressing the viewers directly about the recent reporting on Ebola. To be fair the clip is quite good with decent information that the public needs to hear. The media reporting on the issue has not been great, yet has been par for the course in my opinion. I worked at a TV station for over 7 years and have seen my share of sensationalized stories, (practically ALL of them).

Shep Smith seemingly goes out of his way to tell the viewers that the recent Ebola cases are no cause for alarm. He reassures us that there is no outbreak. He says we have zero chance of contracting the illness. I believe these statements, just as I believed them beforehand. The ironic thing here is Fox News is just as culpable as any other news organization for the public’s impression of the Ebola situation. A clip that made the internet rounds a week or two ago was from the show Fox and Friends, where the hosts effectively spread the exact opposite impression. The question that immediately popped in my head was why the change of strategy? Why was Fox News, (who has as their core business strategy the spin of big stories in order to blame the left), suddenly righting their ship? Well, I heard an unstated premise in Shep’s Ebola monologue that may or may not explain, (it totally does).

So I’ll preface this next section by saying that I don’t religiously follow the ups and downs of the financial market. Outside of large news stories, I follow one stock on a pseudo regular basis. The only reason I’ve heard that “all the markets are down” is because a close personal friend has told me this a few times lately. He told me that everyone has a theory as to why the market is down, but mentioned nothing nefarious. Then I heard Shep say it. At around 3:17 in the video he references the “…panic that has tanked the stock market… .” I often try to ask myself about who stands to benefit from a given situation. It’s never the obvious answer. Here, Fox News used to benefit by telling their enraged base that the President or democrats were somehow complicit in the Ebola spread. It seems that now their irresponsible reporting has negatively effected the stock market. They’ve contributed to a mild state of panic that is apparently affecting consumer confidence resulting in the downturn of the market.

To me, this isn’t as depressing as it should be. I’d love nothing more than to believe the simple explanation that Fox News’ moral compass actually kicked into gear and they did some responsible reporting for once. I suppose it’s not that depressing to me because I couldn’t give two shits what Fox News reports. I recognize, though, that many people do. To me, the tragedy that is Fox News, (and many news outlets for that matter), is that they have such a great opportunity to disseminate real news to people but choose to waste that opportunity on fear-mongering and bullshit. Oh well, what else is new.

Again, I could be completely wrong. I listen to Penn Jillette’s podcast, Penn’s Sunday School, and he prefaces practically everything he says with how pretty much everything you hear on his podcast is probably wrong. I won’t go quite that far. What I may do is spend the day walking around public places randomly sneezing and cough in people’s mouths.

TL;DR version: I don’t believe for a second that Fox News suddenly developed a conscious regarding the Ebola coverage. What they did realize is their idiotic reporting has negatively effected the stock market and is losing their owners money.

S(still)TL;DR version: Fox News is the discarded foreskin of the news industry.

IHTASOAN; DR (I have the attention span of a nat; didn’t read) version: Fox News BURP, VOMIT.

(see link below… until I figure out how to embed)
http://youtu.be/Z2KBfynW09I?t=3m17s