NSFW, turn the volume down.

Probably observing Black History Month in their own special way, Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade, Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer mocked a 102-year-old black woman who stood in line for three hours and made two trips to the polls in order to vote last November.

Centanarian Desiline Victor was honored by President Obama during his State of the Union address Tuesday night not just for her indomitable efforts to vote, but for inspiring others to do the same.

But awesome feats of citizenship take a far back seat to partisan politics on Fox. So does good taste and racial sensitivity. On Fox News Radio’s Kilmeade & Friends yesterday, Hemmer and MacCallum suggested that Victor had either faked her wait or exaggerated the difficulties.

Hemmer asked skeptically, “How long was she on line?”

MacCallum asked, “What’s the big deal? She was happy she waited on line. She voted, she was happy that she was there to vote. …I mean, this is such a non-issue.”

Hemmer said, “They held her up as a victim. What is she a victim of?”

Hmm. What other famous sociopaths do Fox yakkers remind us of?

This was while they all yukked it up at Victor’s expense with such jokes as, “Can you hear (the other people on line) whispering, ‘Did she try to hit you with, ‘I’m 102, I’ve been on line five hours?’ Did she try to give you that one again?’”

Media Matters, which recorded this gem, also noted that earlier on their own show, America’s Newsroom, Hemmer and MacCallum had glossed over Republicans’ role in exacerbating long lines to vote.

If anyone is wondering why Fox’s already minuscule African American audience has been shrinking, you can point to this jaw-dropping conversation as a case in point.

Nothing illustrates Republican priorities more starkly than this little piece of video, where Fox News host Martha MacCallum opines that we'd have more of a solid fiscal position to pay for wars if we didn't have Medicare and Social Security.

Media Matters:

MACCALLUM: But I want to ask you one more question, because when I watched the president last night he talked about the things that have driven us to this situation, and he said two wars that we couldn't pay for, a prescription drug plan that, you know, was way too expensive to pay for, and the financial crisis that followed and that was, you know, toward the beginning of his watch and overlapping the Bush administration.

But I couldn't help thinking, well, if we weren't in such a precarious situation and hadn't overextended ourselves to such an incredible extent where we are sending out 80 million checks a month - the U.S. government - wouldn't we have been able to handle those things like the two wars in a much better, stronger fiscal position, and isn't that where we really want to be as a country, where a war doesn't bust us because we've got good fundamentals?

Wow. To her, a social safety net isn't a "good fundamental"?

It takes a special kind of unexamined existence to sit through this segment and not have your head explode.

How many people have heard of the Milgram experiments?

The Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?" Milgram's testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.

It--along with Jane Elliott's famous "blue eye/brown eye" experiment--were seminal in showing just how easily people could be persuaded to hate and hurt others. I remember seeing a school film on these experiments by a teacher concerned by the "Bomb bomb bomb, Iran" chants students yelled during the Iranian hostage crisis. It has stayed with me how susceptible people could be to suggestions of hate and fear, which may be why I object so much to the fear-mongering of the Republicans in the last ten years.

This week, French documentarians decided to update the Milgram experiment for the 21st century: in the guise of a TV game show, contestants were encouraged to administer what appeared to be near-lethal electrical shocks to rival contestants.

Although unaware that the contestants were actors and there was no electrical current, 82% of participants in the Game of Death agreed to pull the lever.

Programme makers say they wanted to expose the dangers of reality TV shows.

They say the documentary shows how many participants in the setting of a TV show will agree to act against their own principles or moral codes when ordered to do something extreme.

I think there are more parallels to be drawn beside the dangers of reality shows, although I'd be thrilled to see fewer of those on TV too. What was amazing was just how horrified Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer were at the thought of people cheering for the torture of another individual. Glennzilla:

Speaking as employees of the corporation that produced the highly influential, torture-glorifying 24, and on the channel that has churned out years worth of pro-torture "news" advocacy, the anchors were particularly astonished that television could play such a powerful role in influencing people's views and getting them to acquiesce to such heinous acts. Ultimately, they speculated that perhaps it was something unique about the character and psychology of the French that made them so susceptible to external influences and so willing to submit to amoral authority, just like many of them submitted to and even supported the Nazis, they explained.

Yeah, those Frenchies...they're all weak-minded and easily-led sheep, willing to compromise their ethical and moral codes by authority figures. Go figure. Again, that the cognitive dissonance doesn't cause their heads to explode is simply stunning.

(T)he connection just never occurred to them. They just prattled away -- shocked, horrified and blissfully un-self-aware -- about the evils of torture and mindless submission to authority and the role television plays in all of that.

I think the easiest job in the world has to be being a producer for Fox News. All you have to do is pitch ideas that you think paint Democrats in a bad light. Bring up Soros, Barbra Streisand and of course, Michael Moore, because we all know that they are pillars of the Democratic Party. Rinse and repeat. Over and over again.

Unfortunately for Fox, I think that the rest of the public (at least those who want to use critical thinking skills) have wised up and are using Fox's tactics against them.

Case in point, from News Hounds:

Martha MacCallum, host of Fox News' "The Live Desk," interviewed Deb Melnyk and Rick Caine, makers of an unauthorized biography of Moore called "Manufacturing Dissent." Although the film presents criticisms of Moore, it also includes interviews with supporters.[..]

While MacCallum tried to focus on the short-comings of Moore's work, Caine had bigger fish to fry.

"At its core here, Martha, what we're talking about is truth-telling via the media," he said. "So for us to sit here and act like Michael is the only person buffalo-ing the American public I think is a little disingenuous."

Continue reading »