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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

'Stupid Sons of Bitches'

Biden's response to a notably dumb question from Fox raises the
question of which Foxites are idiots and which just play them on TV

I imagine most people thought it was pretty funny when Joe Biden,
perhaps accidentally, perhaps on purpose, reacted thus on a hot mic to
Fox's Peter Doocy's question about whether inflation was a good or a
bad thing. I see that John McCain apparently shared a similar opinion
of
Doocy's "journalism." Doocy may or may not be a jerk in reality,
but like everyone else on Fox, he plays one on TV. And therefore, it's
a good thing Biden said it out loud. He needs to keep it up.

Altercation readers do not need a rehearsal of all the ways Fox, and its
imitators, are helping to destroy American democracy, the planet, and
the meaning of both journalism and truth itself. Actual, professional
journalists made a terrible mistake when they welcomed Fox into their
fraternity and treated its lying propagandists as colleagues. True, Fox
was nowhere near as bad in 1996, when it began, as it is today. But
neither were Republicans, and while coincidence is not causation, this
time it damn well certainly is. The Obama administration tried to
isolate Fox early in its first term by refusing to send its
representatives on its programs, a policy that mainstream media
responded to with hissy fit after hissy fit. (I wrote about some of
these recently here
,
and as you can see, quite a few times before that.) What it should have
done, and what Biden has done, is to treat Fox as ridiculous; to make
jokes about how "stupid" its questions, programs, and people are.

Of course, only some Fox people are actually stupid. Many are just
cynical and pretend to be stupid, because that's what its stupid
viewers want. But the Biden treatment is a way forward. Let the Jake
Tappers of the world whine
;
they are only insulting themselves by referring to Doocy and the rest of
the Fox liars and racists as "journalists." Who really wants to be
on the side of someone like Republican Jim Banks, who says "No
President 'Has Attacked a Free Press' More Than Biden in Bonkers
Tweet "? Well,
maybe a few comedians ...

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Speaking of the poison spewing from Fox News, Media Matters alerts us to
the fact that "Tucker Carlson's 'Hungary vs. Soros' Is
Ham-Handed Propaganda Straight out of the Authoritarian Playbook
."

Here, from Media Matters, are just a few details of the programming from
Tucker and all the "journalists" at Fox:
Conspiracy theories about Soros

are a staple

on the extremist right, echoing long-standing antisemitic myths about
the amount of power in the hands of prominent Jews. And these conspiracy
theories have already motivated antisemitic violence in the U.S. Robert
Bowers, the man who killed 11 Jewish worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree
of Life synagogue in 2018, regularlyposted conspiracy theories

about Soros. Cesar Sayoc, the man who sent pipebombs to prominent
Democrats and CNN, had sent the first of his bombs

to be found to Soros' home.

Fox's fearmongering about Soros is not limited to Carlson or his Fox
Nation show. From January 1, 2021, through January 25, 2022, Fox News
has mentioned "Soros" a total of 379 times, according to Media
Matters' transcript analysis of the Kinetiq video database. This
coverage ramped up in the past three months, with at least 90 references
to Soros on Fox so far in January. While Tucker Carlson Tonight had the
most mentions by far, he's not alone; Fox & Friends had the second
most, and The Five came in third. Fox's adoption of Soros as a
civilizational boogeyman reflects the network's steady integration

of extremist ideology into its core programming.

Oh, and the next time you hear someone term MSNBC to be the liberal
equivalent of Fox, you might want to note, in person if possible, that
this liberal network accords a former conservative Republican
congressman control over four hours of programming every day
!
(That and the fact that even the genuinely liberal MSNBC hosts and
guests are not encouraged to lie, as well as to spew racism, hatred,
antisemitism, etc., but I digress ...)

Virtually all the news out of Israel and the West Bank has been awful of
late. Here are a few lowlights:

* Israeli Settlers Rage Through Palestinian Town, Marking the Latest
'Nationalistically Motivated' Attack in the Region

* A 78-year-old Palestinian American man died this month from a
stress-induced heart attack brought on by injuries sustained while he
was detained by Israeli soldiers

* Israelis Were Mostly Unbothered About NSO's Spyware-Until It Was
Reportedly Turned on Them

* 'Tantura' Director: Israelis Have Been Lied to for Years About
Alleged 1948 Massacre

Film at Lincoln Center and the
Jewish Museum recently had their annual
New York Jewish Film Festival. I braved my virus concerns for only one
evening, but one I felt I could not miss: a night of two
documentaries-ones that I might never be able to see otherwise-on
the authors A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman. I'd been thrilled to
spend a few hours with Yehoshua (and his late wife) way back when I
wrote this longish piece on Israel for The Nation
on the
occasion of the 60th anniversary of its founding. All readers of
contemporary fiction should be familiar with his work. Grossman, too, is
a towering literary figure, with his books translated into 30 languages.
(The documentary begins and ends with a meeting he apparently holds for
every novel with all his translators. I counted about a dozen;
interestingly, almost all are female.)

Together with Amos Oz, who passed away in 2018, these three authors have
presented a face of Israel to the rest of the world that I, and so many
others, liked to imagine as the "real" Israel, as opposed to one
evident in the stories cited above. That Israel is still alive, but it
grows smaller every day. I'd say that roughly, its size is akin to the
circulation of Haaretz, one of the world's great newspapers, but
that's barely more than 5 percent of its population. Most of the rest
of Jewish Israelis-Arabs constitute more than 20 percent of the
population-vote for right-wing parties. They're perfectly OK with
the direction the country has taken in recent years and simply ignore
the horrific injustices inflicted on the Palestinians every minute of
their lives. Yes, I know it's complicated. I would not know how to
make "peace" with either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority now
either. One is dangerously fanatical, and the other is corrupt and
discredited. But that is a separate issue from the way Israel treats
both Palestinian Israelis, and more egregiously, those Palestinians
living under occupation.

Grossman, who lost his son on the final day of Israel's war in Lebanon
in
2006-a war he opposed-and Yehoshua represent a vision of Israel that
was always something of a fantasy; these are uniquely talented writers
and dedicated soldiers for peace with the Palestinians. It's inspiring
to see the latter keep going, publishing new fiction at 85, meeting with
Palestinians in the West Bank. Grossman only became a novelist because
he was fired from his radio job for his terrific reporting on Israel's
brutal treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, as he
recounted in his 1988 book, The Yellow Wind.

But again, I am depressed. To the degree that this ever was Israel, it
is no more. And the Palestinians-thanks, in part, it must be said, to
their own awful, awful leadership, refusing compromise offers in 1921,
1922, 1939, 1947, as well as potentially promising offers in 1978, and
especially 2000 and 2001-have never been further as they are today
from getting their own country or even being allowed to live their lives
in basic decency, much less democracy. Both sides were responsible for
the collapse of the 1993 Oslo Accords, but, personally, I think neither
side will ever be able to make the compromises necessary for a genuine
peace, for reasons I lay out in my forthcoming (this fall),
seven-years-in-the-making book We Are Not One: A History of America's
Fight Over Israel. But that does not justify Israel's behavior; nor
does this failure take anything away from the personal courage of these
two writers in keeping up the struggle.

You can watch interviews with the filmmakers of both
documentaries-Yair Qedar for The Last Chapter of A.B. Yehoshua, and
Adi Arbel and Arik Bernstein for Grossman-on the Film Society's
YouTube channel here
, but I'd
also recommend that you seek out the fiction of both writers if you have
not already.

I also want to recommend a new book by my favorite literary critic Adam
Kirsch. It's called Come and Hear: What I Saw in My
Seven-and-a-Half-Year Journey Through the Talmud
.
Kirsch spent seven years doing what is called "Daf Yomi," which is
the practice, undertaken by many traditionally religious Jews of reading
one page of Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half
years. He wrote about what he read once a week online during that time,
and the book comprises what I understand to be his greatest hits. In it,
he manages to do something I would have thought impossible, which is to
communicate the surreal weirdness of the arguments in the Talmud while
simultaneously remaining respectful of its underlying seriousness. The
writing is also quite clever and entertaining, which is what you'd
expect if you've been reading Kirsch elsewhere and in his previous
books.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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