3:27 a.m., Pacific Standard Time.
Author sits sorting Korean War documents in the full brunt of the Fox News broadcast glow: exposure is thus achieved to the tail end of Glenn Beck, most of O’Reilly.
No techno music or cello arpeggios to drown down the magnetism.
Beck pastiche: Patriotic men profess attachment to no political party, stirring the masses toward a Christian nation. Texan preachers near cotton fields demand return to founding father’s principals. Old men demand an end to the communistic thought of people in power. A veteran in D.C. for a “tea party” bellows into a microphone that he fought for the freedom of the people in South Vietnam. The young man with slightly gay spectacles and a microphone asks “Are you an angry mob?” before being tossed back to the studio. Correspondents in the field speak openly of their rage. No specific aspect of the legislation in Congress is discussed. Beck urges peaceful change, laughs at the normalcy of protesters, then finally hates on misuse of the flag for political purposes. The last moment actually endears. He hates his own logo! Ah yes, change is on the way, via the cherubic apostle of Ephesians.
O’Reilly impressions: I realize that Obama is a poor advocate of his own plan when O’Reilly becomes the first voice to articulate the benefits of covering everyone (e.g., much less expenditure on expensive emergency care for the uninsured). Maybe O’Reilly is really an independent as he professes? The non-partisan veneer quickly falls off like a mask of peace from MacArthur in a North Korean cartoon.
George Stephanopulous quickly gets manhandled and sandwiched, after which an angry author demands that we remember the horror and anger and leaping bodies of 9-11. (Right, what a great idea — maybe a tatoo of people jumping out of a burning building in a city I love to my core would prove my Americanness? Suddenly I am sympathetic to Japanese who want to forget the war.) And that Obama’s surge in Afghanistan doesn’t impress him in the least.
O’Reilly reminds us that he will be paired with angry 9-11 book man in a special 9-11 twin-billing editorial in the New York Post. (At the mention of this rag, I suddenly miss it, feeling the rattle and tug of the N train to Queens, smelling the black ink of the Post, and I long for a Dunkin’ Donuts crumbling down the chute amid the acrid mixture of all things New York.)
Then things get really interesting. Up until now we have had points of view, but now the broadcast veers into propaganda. O’Reilly cuts to video (having used as “outro tease” material three times now) of two Fox actors posing as a pimp and prostitute in an ACORN office in Baltimore. Not suprisingly, their fake premise resulted in footage of a black woman talking about prostitution which ends up on Fox. Since the actors were posing as sex workers looking to buy a house and evade taxes, it seems awfully strange to be accusing ACORN rather than FOX of impropriety, but then again the purpose was served. The equation remains. ACORN=scofflaw blacks; and someone on a subsequent Van Jones/William Ayers broadcast will close the loop on ACORN=Obama=Chicago corruption.
Fortunately Fox decides not examine what actually happens in BALTIMORE, which is, I am sad to say, basically a very deep shithole of a city with serious and systematic problems. I was there as a shocked boy at age 12, shuttled between the vast and endless ghetto and Baltimore Symphony music director David Zinman’s mansion. And then we sang Mahler’s 3 Symphony in Meyerhoff hall and regained our Viennese-style boyhood.
As for Fox and the ACORN story: at least O’Reilly and Obama are on the same page here, e.g., don’t talk about heroin, crack, or foreclosures in Baltimore. That would be unpleasant.
Then platinum blond anchor/editorialist Megan Kelly shows up to pump more life into the ACORN story, asking “Why wouldn’t every newscast in the country be showing this?” Uh, because it’s two FOX news ACTORS posing as a pimp and a prostitute? And we should be shocked and surprised when the ACORN worker tries her best to take them seriously IN BALTIMORE? Completely absent from the story are basic things like, say, statistics about average income in black neighborhoods in Baltimore or prostitution (and its connection to income and/or drug addiction in that city).
Statistical breakdown of females on the broadcast: (4) blonde caucasian female commentators, each employed by FOX, indignant with militant patriotism and assumed to be credible; (1) black female, employed by ACORN and assumed to be in league with prostitutes, drug dealers, and the (communist) President of the United States.
Why does the FOX-ACORN propaganda war remind me so much of the CCP-FALUN GONG propaganda war? Because it does.
Although I start to have a droozy flashback to Bigger Thomas in Native Son (where we have real white bourgeois Marxists trying to help out a benighted black man in 1930s Chicago), FOX just keeps on rolling, preventing me from forming a complete thought. The show after O’Reilly delves even deeper into the pimp/prostitute ACORN video from Baltimore! Investigative non-reporting at its best. Then the story becomes about ACORN’s accusations of “lies and distortions” coming from FOX.
My Falun Gong hypothesis holds.
Adam Cathcart 
shouldn’t the journalist be an 33poch Times as opposed to Global Times? Isn’t Global Times a Chinese-language tabloid and an English language propaganda vehicle? And on the subsequent post, shouldn’t it be Ottawa, not Ottowa?
Thanks, anon, you are right on both counts; corrections follow.
At this point I would normally try to write something witty or reassuring about how my peer-reviewed publications contain no mistakes, but, since I just found that somehow I attributed a source to one of my mentors at Koryo University in KAESONG, NORTH KOREA (Koryo University is in fact in Seoul) in my recent Journal of Korean Studies article, I will just sit down and try to minimize future errors flowing from this keyboard.
But, come to think of it, I wonder if others are mixing up Epoch Times with Global Times. Both are full of propaganda, but at least Epoch Times covers classical music concerts, if quirkily and by music critics who are actually medical doctors.
Thanks again for noting the faux pas. Hope you are enjoying the blog nevertheless.
Splendidly written article, if only all bloggers offered the same high quality content the internet would be a very much better place. Please keep it up! Cheers.