Fox News: the new snake oil peddlers (with a bit of history)
An OP here this morning about Laura Ingraham's tweet about Biden and Toronto got me thinking.
There's a fair amount of information online about snake oil and its salespeople back in the 1800s to early 1900s. Turns out that Chinese indentured immigrants who came over to work on the railroads brought some of their medicines with them, including a compound, made from water snake fat, that actually helped relieve pain.
An entrepreneur (so to speak) named Clark Stanley seized on the concept and began to produce his own liniment. This was tested and found to contain no water-snake oil (the snakes used by the Chinese weren't around in the U.S.), but to consist of "mineral oil, 1% fatty oil (assumed to be tallow), capsaicin from chili peppers, turpentine, and camphor." Yup, turpentine.
And here's where I think Fox News fits in.
The marketing plan (again, so to speak) for Stanley's product consisted of hawking it to people he considered too dumb to question it. With the frontier opening and people scattered all over (and no internet), he probably figured he could make a killing selling it at scattered locations and get away before someone realized the stuff was useless or even dangerous. Then, of course, Hollywood caught on to "snake oil salesmen" and the rest is history.
But for Fox News to push some of the stuff they push, and to expect that their viewers will accept it, tells me that they believe their viewers are too dumb to question their material, or to go elsewhere for other takes on the same stories, or to call B.S. They want to spew their spins and expect people to swallow them.
Granted, some Fox viewers may only watch Fox, and we at DU tend to believe that most of them are die-hard conservatives. But I've known a number of them over the years, and I can tell you they could smell bullshit a mile away, regardless of which side it was spewed by. I say again: regardless of which side it was spewed by.
So, for me, being expected to swallow bullshit by a "news" network without a second glance is just plain galaxy-class offensive. It gives me a hint as to what Fox thinks of their viewers. And I really want to believe that some Fox viewers do smell the bullshit.
