Fox, Horrowitz, and media bias

This is an article I wrote for my college debate magazine.

I would like to talk about anti-intellectualism in America. First off, I agree with Mr. Cooper [fellow debator] completely on the accusation that America is rife with anti-intellectualism. It is a simple fact that one can find a guttural distrust of the ivory tower that goes back to our frontier days. What Mr. Cooper failed to mention, however, was who was doing it and why. Anti-intellectualism is not a universally held philosophy, but rather one held mostly by people bound together by conservative ideologies. Before conservatives take offense to this, know that there are particular conservatives who do this, and it is therefore not a universal trait among all those who claim to hold conservative ideals in the United States. The particular conservative who runs the Republican Party’s anti-intellectual machine is named David Horowitz. I have been looking for a way to expose effectively to people his methods of advancing his cause and how damaging they are, and I believe that I have finally found a satisfactory example. The story below is a seemingly innocuous news story that appeared on Fox News about a class at UCLA on whiteness studies. It is not only an example of someone promoting anti-intellectualism, it is an excellent snapshot of the Republican spin doctors in action, and of the one-sidedness of Fox. While I have added comments throughout, I suggest that you read the Fox story first and then reread it with my comments.

William Lajeunesse: Well Martha, whiteness studies is actually taught at 30 universities around the country from Princeton to San Francisco State.

Even in the subject of the news story, it is clear that the reporting had an agenda. The use of the word “actually” sets up an element of surprise. "This course is actually taught?" An impartial phrasing of this would be "Well Martha, the new field of whiteness studies is currently being taught at 30 universities around the country, from Princeton to San Francisco state." While the sentence is innocuous out of context, it sets up an unspoken presumption in the article that this field is inappropriate.

It is based on the idea that whites are born to privilege, a position used to oppress blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans for 200 years. [Said while showing Asian students]

This is fine, but apparently not the whole truth. According to the student’s comments below, the course supposedly did not focus on "white against the other." This also sets up the ideological premise for the story, that teaching the above is, as the announcer says below, "racist and one sided."

We contacted a half dozen universities about their whiteness studies programs, and each declined to talk.

This could be taken two ways. Either as plain fact, that they didn’t respond, or it could be read to mean that they didn’t respond because they had something to be ashamed about. I mean, what university wouldn’t want to talk about their courses on national televistion? The real reason they didn’t respond was that fox has incredibly intrusive reporting methods, and these professors understand that is not for the purpose of curiosity, but for ridicule that Fox seeks them out to interview them.

We also approached Dr. Eric Avila who teaches understanding whiteness at UCLA.

I e-mailed Dr. Avila, and it appears from an op-ed that he sent me that fox sought him out because he was put on a list of UCLA professors who taught "radical" views called the "Dirty 30." This list was compiled by a UCLA alumnus and former employee of David Horowitz, Andrew Jones, who was interviewed for this story.

Now, according to the syllabus, it introduces students to the process of racialization and examines what it means to be white.

Ok. First impartial, unloaded line in the whole piece.

Avila refused an interview although his students defend him [rising intonation, implying surprise] saying his class is neither racist nor one sided.

Here they say their thesis, which they have been hinting at since line one of the story. They are saying “The class is racist and one-sided, and is a perfect example of liberal intellectuals gone awry. ” They have been building up to this thesis, and use the rest of the piece to pound it into our heads.

They continue with this line of attack immediately. We have not even seen any material from the course, no-one has been quoted as saying that the class is racist or one sided, yet they further their agenda by asking unprovoked whether the class is racist propaganda, as we are supposed to believe. I quote Dr. Avila here:

“This course, labeled "sub-academic rubbish" by [Andrew] Jones, recently drew the attention of a certain television news network, who has been hounding me for an interview on this course. Long suspicious of what this network foists upon the public as "news," I ignored its invitation for an interview and left it to UCLA's Office of Media Relations to explain my unavailability. But last Thursday, as I was preparing my material for the course in question, I hear a quiet knock on my door. As I open the door, it is nudged open by a reporter from this network, who is accompanied by a cameraman moving closely towards my face. The reporter fires a barrage of questions: "Isn’t your course simply racist propaganda?" "Aren’t you biased in your classroom?" "Can we interview your students?" Though I am caught off guard by these sneaky and invasive tactics, I dismiss the questions, depriving the reporter of his story. Fifteen minutes later, approaching my classroom, I discover the same reporter questioning my students as they enter class."

Now the student’s interviews.

Serina Salinas: Again, its that language, of white against the other, and its so much greater than that. That's simplifying it to a term that is not justifying the course.

Adriana Garcia: you cant just say 'oh white people are privileged' or white people are that. Because that's not always true.

In defense of Dr. Avila, we have two quotes out of context that effectively make no sense. We do not know what questions they were asked, but we know that they had to defend themselves against accusations by the reporter, just as their professor did. After giving no voice to the professor or his students, they go on to trash his class.

William Lajeunesse: A critic, a former student, calls the program academic garbage, and a UCLA campus activist recently accused his professor of turning the classroom into an anti-white campaign, a charge that Avila denies.

Here, our hero, William Lajeunesse, is saying in a formal, matter-of-fact, news-announcer voice, that the program is academic garbage. Wait. Have we talked to the professor? No. Have we heard a complete sentence from his students? No. Have we trashed the shit out of him using a formal medium which people rely on to be unbiased? Certainly. Also, Who was the critic, and who was the former student? I think that they were the same person, who they interview next. And it ony gets better.

Andrew Jones FMR whiteness studies student: What this class, and what a lot of major Chicano studies do, is give people the ideological ammunition to feel beset by the white race, beset by the man to feel put upon to be a victim.

More on Andrew below.

David Horowitz, center for popular culture: I mean, what they’ve done here is entirely improper, in setting up a whole field, which is a concocted spurious field, designed to show how bad white people in America are.

Ahhh. David Horowitz. He looks like a professor, and sounds like one too. He’s not one. Here we have yet another authoritative voice telling us that the class is inappropriate garbage when we haven’t seen any of it.

Lets recap a little. First Fox provides a series of nonsensical blurbs to create the illusion of a defensive argument from the professor, all the while asking accusatory questions which make it look like the university knows what its doing is inappropriate and doing it anyways. After having no defense from the professor or his students, we have a matter of fact reporter, then a smart sounding "student," then a "professor" trash the class, all expressing their opinion as fact. So here, in summary, we have the process by which fox news plants ideologies in its listeners. They find a provocative subject, such as whiteness studies, then make the people who defend it uncomfortable, and through this, make them seem like they have no defense for their actions. They then interview far more people who have the opposite view, and present it as fact. In this case, it was the news announcer, the smart student (not really a student anymore) and the professor (not a professor anymore). Once you are convinced by a news story (which people trust to be sources of fact) which is apparently unrelated to a political cause, you run into the political cause already knowing about the “problem” that that cause is addressing. They do this again...and again...and again. Planting these news stories creates the illusion that the problem is “all around” you and that they are addressing something real, when in reality they are propaganda pieces for a special interest organization, in this case, David Horowitz' and Andrew Jones'.

Here we can begin to see how deep this really goes, Andrew Jones is not an "FMR whitenes studies student" as we are lead to believe. He is actually the founder of the Bruin Alumni Association, which is the group (which has only one member, him) that compiled the "Dirty 30" UCLA professor list. This man definitely has an agenda, and it matches perfectly with the hidden thesis of this news story, that liberal profs are whack and need to go. His agenda is simply to get all liberal professors fired. In January, Andrew Jones issued the following notice to UCLA students:

UCLA STUDENTS: Do you have a professor who just can't stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican Party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter? It doesn't matter whether this is a past class, or your class from this coming winter quarter. If you help expose the professor, we'll pay you for your work.

Andrew Jones is also the former Employee (he was fired for falsifying student testimony) of David Horowitz, who in 2002 kicked off the anti-liberal intellectual campaign we have been discussing with a survey collected by Frank Luntz, Republican pollster and propagandist. They collected now oft quoted data that liberals outnumber conservatives by huge proportions in Ivy league institutions and began crying bias, arranging news conferences, holding conferences, and getting conservative columnists to write about the issue. He created Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), an organization not run by students but by professional lobbyists out of Washington DC which sets up Republican groups at Colleges across the nation which do the same thing Jones does: Bully liberal professors. They have a pre-made, mail-order club, with constitution, by-laws, and even pre-made flyers which make it easy for the average Republican to become a brownshirt liberal-intellectual-hater in just five minutes. He has his own online magazine to further his cause, called front-page, which from time to time feeds delicious little tidbits to the mainstream media about how the intellectuals are acting up today. He has taken his fight to the courts, trying to get a "student's bill of rights" passed, which would provide disgruntled students and people such as Jones legal process by which to silence liberal professors. This Fox story is just one of their typical publicity stunts that tries to convert people to believing that there is a liberal bias in academia, an issue that no one gave one hoot about before Horowitz’ special interest groups planted it in an unknowing press.

But why go through all the trouble to do this planting of stories and spreading of slander? Its quite simple. Conservatives don't like that universities are liberal, and Horowitz wants to change that.

If this isn’t McCarthy style anti-intellectualism, blatant propagandist media manipulation, and a sorry hit below the belt in the political debate, I don’t know what is.

Reporter: " can I just ask you a question?"
-"no!"
-"you don’t want to answer a question?"
-"no!"
-"they say its racist propaganda"
-"I'm sorry, youre not going to ask me any questions!"

This was the end of the fox piece. My only comment: Jackasses.