What’s wrong with more opinions?

April 16, 2012

By John Seiler

I don’t get cable TV. No way I’m paying $40 a month. So I’m not a “Fox News,” watcher. I also remain mad at them for pushing the disastrous Iraq War to boost profits the way William Randolph Hearst pushed the Spanish-American War.

But it’s silly for critics to attack FoxNews for bringing viewers two sides of the global-warming debate, as Calbuzz has done:

Why Watching Fox News Will, In Fact, Rot Your Brain

Here’s an actual fact — borne out by at least seven different scientific studies — that will make certain people squawk: those who watch Fox News are the most consistently misinformed media viewers.

There are two reasons for this: Fox News actively and intentionally transmits false and misleading information, as exemplified in the 2009 internal staff memo from Fox Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, exposed by MediaMatters, ordering correspondents to:

. . . refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

But also because conservatives, and especially right-wing authoritarian personalities, are most likely to engage in “selective exposure” that University of Alabama psychologist William Hart explains “is the clearest way to look at how people create their own realities, based upon their views of the world.”

The driving force behind “selective exposure” is the desire to alleviate “cognitive dissonance” — the uncomfortable psychological state people experience when their core beliefs are in conflict with what they know to be true. Although liberals do it too, studies show that they are also more open to a variety of information sources.

What a gaggle of psychobabble. The whole “authoritarian personality” meme was cooked up 60 years ago by Theodor Adorno and other cultural Marxists. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he rewarded the returning, victorious U.S. troops that save Adorno and his associates from probable execution by Nazis by branding every G.I. as being a “potentially fascistic individual.” What an ingrate.

One of those G.I.’s was my late father, Capt. John C. Seiler, U.S. Army 1941-45. He defeated fascism.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has written of Adorno and his comrades, “These writers adopted what eventually became a favorite Soviet tactic against dissidents: anyone whose political views differed from theirs was insane.”

Hey, didn’t America win the Cold War? The Soviet Union dissolved 20 years ago. Yet this Adorno-Cultural-Marxist-Soviet attack on right wingers still is being used.

And get what CalBuzz is upset about: FoxNews insisted that its news readers provide two views on the global warming controversy. What’s wrong with having more opinons?

Doesn’t it display — dare I say it — and authoritarian personality for Calbuzz itself to want to deny people information, to provide only one side fo the story?

Sure, FoxNews itself does that in other areas. They sure did it on the Iraq War.

But in this case, FoxNews providing more information.

Unlike Calbuzz.