[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: In U.S versus elsewhere?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, so I have a friend who left working for State media in China to come to Canada in their particular situation and describing it to me tonight over a call is that they felt it was very controlled. And I remarked that Chinese media, the way she was talking about sounded like American media to some commentators for people working for it or people that are just sort of paying attention a little bit to in terms of structural analysis. The Chinese media that she was mentioning is state media.
So there’s a lot of oversight and control and you don’t know whether your colleague really believes what they’re saying or not. There’s a lot of prefabrication of things rather than free flow honest journalism. For American media it’s not owned by the state, a lot of it is corporate and then there’s a lot of ideological stuff too. I mean Fox News is the kind of the easiest example of the Conservative side for instance. But the way she was talking about it when working for it, it sounded the same but the structural analysis would be different. So sort of the output or the process to getting the output seemed the same, the structure to get to that process, to get that output was different in each country but it’s still controlled.
Rosner: In the U.S right-wing media definitely has an objective which is to sell their message but let’s go to China which is I mean China is an entrepreneurial Communist dictatorship with the emphasis on entrepreneurial and dictatorship, that they want to be the dominant economic force in the world. Their policies which are exercised with dictatorial power are to get China to be this power. China has compelled its people to go from being rural to urban. China has more than 200 cities with more than a million people and a new city goes from under a million to over a million, I think like once a week they want to have some high percentage of their population living in cities by some date.
The U.S already has a lot of that where I think 80% of Americans live in at least a decent sized town. So China wants a bunch of people just making shit and developing shit in cities and where the making shit and the economic developing of shit conflicts with the party line. Maybe the party line wins but I don’t think those conflicts are a huge percentage of that… I mean people do run afoul of the government and there are plenty of shortcomings like medicine outside of the big cities maybe in cities can be unresponsive and people can be super pissed at some people getting good medical treatment and other people being neglected. And it’s like fuck you we’re a dictatorship and you take what you can get but I’m not real hip to that.
But anyway, there are plenty of worldwide websites probably like YouTube and Twitter and all that, that you can’t get in China because they’re used to sending messages the government might think is subversive and they have their own version of these that are highly policed. As long as you your efforts are directed in a in a direction that’s work in a factory or go to school get highly educated to be like entrepreneurial… not in the factories I mean factory work is where you’re living in a dorm and working I don’t know how many hours a week that that can be super oppressive but you are probably making pretty decent money for China but it’s still miserable. But if you’re somebody who’s a member of the ruling Bourgeois class, life in China is probably almost as nice as it is if you’re Bourgeois in America.
In America the government doesn’t control the message but there are controls on the message depending on who the message is coming from. The Murdoch family, Rupert Murdoch who’s 90 is a multi-billionaire because he’s built this conservative news Empire and a it’s a symbiotic relationship between Murdoch and Republican politicians and billionaire donors and gullible viewers. Fox wants Republican politicians to win; Republican politicians want their billionaire donors to be happy. There are all these calculations you see articles on where a billionaire will give 50 billion dollars in an election cycle to run ads and then you see that over the next year the politicians that those ads elected save that billionaire 215 billion in taxes. So the billionaires have a lot of money to throw at this shit and it pays off for them. So there’s a very consistent message coming out of Fox because they make a shitload of money.
I’m sure Fox has divided, I don’t know that the billionaires are giving billions of dollars to Fox but everybody supports their business model and they’re able to pay their on camera talent like Hannity gets and fucking Tucker Carlson gets 30 to 35 million dollars a year. Fox is not obligated to be truthful, they’re only obligated to come up with takes on stuff that gets their viewers to vote the way they want them to vote. They’ve been sued, they’re being sued over this and in court they’ve claimed that they’re not officially a news channel even though their name is Fox News, that they are an entertainment channel and that any sophisticated viewer watching their products would know that you’re not to meant to take everything they say seriously, except their viewers aren’t sophisticated. The Republican party has for the last 50 years turned dumb people gullible people into a voting bloc because they’re easier to push around.
And then among non-Fox media, the emphasis is still on making money which is getting people to tune in which means they have all sorts of terrible habits in terms of what stories are covered and how they’re covered. This year the polls are political polls, seem to be particularly troublesome. I’ve read some articles that say that in the old days everybody had landlines, 20-30 years ago nobody had cell phones. You call people up on their home phones, ask if they want to do a survey and you might have a success rate at 25%. And now only one third of American households have landlines and when you call and people who still have them kind of hate answering the phone even though they still have a landline because every call is a nuisance call, a scam call, a cold call from some contractor, political calls and survey calls.
So the rate of success when a surveyor is calling landlines is as low as 0.4% which means they have to robocall 250 people to get one person to agree to take a survey which means to do an 800 person survey, they would have to make 200,000 robocalls which is just fucked for everybody because that means they’re annoying hundreds of thousands of people just to get 800. It also means that when you’re taking such a small fraction of the population, what kind of people are going to say yes to taking a 20-minute survey when the vast majority of everybody says no thank you, which raises the possibility that you’re talking to fucking lunatics or people with an agenda. So the polls have gotten increasingly unreliable.
In the polls, with eight days to go until the election, the percent of people who say they’re going to vote Republican and the people who are going to vote Democratic according to the polls are about 0.7% away from each other, which the news loves because everybody feels like they have to watch the news because the Republicans feel like the Democrats are evil and if they win they’re going to destroy America because that’s what Fox News right-wing outlets tell them. Democrats liberals feel legitimately based on the last six years that if Republicans get control that they actually will destroy America and the Republicans are not being quiet about this that they will let the U.S default on its debt which has never happened in history if the government doesn’t cut the Social Security and Medicare and just a lot of like blatant shittiness out of Republicans.
So everybody is afraid and pissed off and watching the news because there’s no clear advantage for one side or the other which the news likes and there’s more shit going on with the polls. The conservative polls are the polls that give you results that say the Republicans are doing better, are flooding the ballot box by releasing polls more frequently than other pollsters like Rasmussen has been doing two Biden approval polls a week. So when the poll aggregators aggregate average out all these polls, Rasmussen is twice as represented as the pollsters who only do weekly polls and eight times is represented as the monthly polls. So there’s a lot of bullshit going on. The messaging just has a lot of problems with it.
There’s both sides-ism where a lot of news sources try to present the Republicans and Democrats as equally bad which is bad because the Republicans are wildly worse than the Democrats. Oh! There’s a thing that just happened. The husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, her husband Paul Pelosi was beaten up by a lunatic in his underpants with a hammer. He’s got a fractured skull and a mangled arm. This guy used the hammer to break into the Pelosi’s house at 2 a.m. or something. You look at the shit that this guy has posted online and he started off as a different flavor of lunatic, years ago like a nudist but in the last couple years he’s turned into a right wing lunatic based on what he’s been posting. When he busted in with the hammer he started yelling “Where’s Nancy? Where is Nancy?” So people on the left are taking this as a potential assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi based on who he was asking for and based on just Occam’s razor, a crazy guy who’s been posting right-wing shit, breaks in and he’s been charged with attempted murder. He really fucked up Nancy Pelosi’s husband who’s 82 years old.
So that’s what reasonable news sources are saying. Right-wing news sources are saying it may have been a lover’s quarrel because apparently and I’m not sure if this is true, but that’s what they’re saying. Paul Pelosi was in his underwear because it was 2 a.m. and a lot of people sleep in their underwear. So they’re saying well both guys were in their underwear, the other guy was in his underwear because he’s a nudist. So they’re saying it must have been a lover’s quarrel or they’re saying false flag or they’re saying male prostitute and let’s see what else. Others say like when the 82 year old guy managed to sneak in, I called a 9-1-1 on the phone and was somehow talking and saying my friend here. So the right- wing’s saying he knew the guy because he called him his friend which is also retarded because if a guy’s attacking you with a hammer or maybe has stopped attacking you with a hammer for a minute, you might call them your friend because you don’t want him to start hitting you with a hammer again.
Fox News has said it’s because the Democrats are soft on crime, is saying why didn’t they have better security, it’s all very suspicious. So it’s like this incident which has a fairly clear and reasonable interpretation has sparked this avalanche of a ridiculous bullshit from the right-wing pundits. I mean it’s just like senseless bullshit. So that takes us back to both sides-ism where a lot of so supposedly objective media tries to talk to Republicans spokespeople and Democratic spokespeople but the Republican spokespeople spew crazy bullshit that they don’t call them on because they want to keep these new shows like Meet the Press, want to keep getting these people to come on their shows. And if they called people who are being full of shit and fucking liars, fucking liars they might stop getting them on the shows. So U.S media is a mess.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 