Former Drug Cop: "I cried for a year once I found out what I'd been involved in"

[Peace Patriot]

28. Barry Cooper is quite wonderful in this so-called interview...

...but I think we need to pay attention, also, not just to the content of Fox's idiot bobble-head front people and their chattering 'experts' but also to the FORMAT of incoherent, alleged 'debate.'

Imagine how Edward R. Murrow would have handled this guest, or Walter Cronkite, or any of the old time serious people we had on news shows, or, more lately, people like Rachel Maddow, or Thom Hartmann, or Paul Jay of Real News, or even Ophra Winfrey. One interviewer. One guest. Serious, thoughtful questions, to lay the matter before the public for serious discussion and policy-making. The interviewer might play 'devil's advocate' and take the other side (say, drug Prohibition) but not rancorously, rather to investigate the issue and let the guest have his say, so that the PUBLIC and its elected representatives can decide whether or not what he has to say is reliable, thought-provoking and useful.

Fox's very FORMAT prohibits thought. Cooper mentions this, at one point ("if you would let me speak&quot . The main bobblehead keeps interrupting him, cutting off his sentences, contradicting him before he has a chance to present a coherent argument. And then that chorus of screeching interrupters, all talking over each other and over their 'guest', chimes in, and all thoughtful debate is foreclosed--except for Cooper himself, who mounts a truly admirable struggle for rational discussion.

The presence of so many women in this screeching chorus is also disturbing, and I can't help but think it is a deliberate debasement of women. You might say that the women are willing collaborators in destroying thoughtful discussion, and they are, surely, but Fox grooms these individuals to become screechers and entices them into these disgraceful mockeries of 'journalism' with the baubles of career, money, power, fame and topnotch hairdressers, clothiers, make-up artists and coaches, and pits them against each other (and their male counterparts) in vicious competition.

There are male corollaries to the pert female screecher, pom-pom girl and "alpha girl" news person, requiring different debasements (use of schoolyard bully types, for instance; O'Reilly, et al--narrowly focused, thuggish minds) but I think it is a similar process of grooming and enticement. The female 'program' stands out in this instance, cuz most of those attacking Cooper in this show are women, and gang up on him (or try to) in a sort of harpie attack.

I felt...shamed by them, some pity, some contempt, but mostly shame for my sex--for those of my sex who have squandered their newfound opportunities--earned by the relentless struggle of earlier generations of courageous women--on trashing journalism, trashing thought itself and no doubt preening themselves as "self-made women."

What a spectacle they present of brainwashed egotism!