Forum Post: Faux News Scat-Wrestling, or Dialectic for short

Fox News has gone into full spin mode on The 5 show, or whatever it's called.

The right are claiming it's a socialist movement, and pointing up the hypocrisy of Moore and other fat cats pretending to be downtrodden victims, and throwing every cliche about coddled kids they can dream up, bringing up unions, MoveOn, Obama, and socialism.

And the left is agreeing that it's a socialist movement, while trying to point up how movie stars that make millions doing ads for banks are legitimate for showing up to protest those banks because they have a 'social conscience'.

The Hegelian Dialectic 'framing' of the news continues unabated.

For those not familiar with this concept, the idea is that they want to project a certain image, a gut feel, to the viewers about what is going on. So they put up two opposing sides of an issue, neither of which is true, then have a vigorous debate over them. This has the effect of crowding out consideration of what the real truth might be, and the real truth is not hinted at. They usually leave it there, the viewer being already trained to reflexively decide that the 'reasonable' view is 'in the middle'. That view is always smack dab in the middle of the scat pile.

This is an ancient, brilliant, and pernicious tactic. It goes far beyond 'divide and conquer'. It completely upends the target because it gets supporters and opponents all arguing about the wrong things, based on false premises. It silences the opposition, because they have to correct the false premises before they can even tell the 'supporters' that they are in favor for all the wrong reasons. By instilling a 'gut feel' in the viewers, a veritable barricade is erected that is almost totally impervious to facts.

This tactic is used by all media, practically all the time.