A Tale of Two Foxes

Enroute Nashville/Miami Beach, media schizophrenia is revealed

By Roger L Simon

Sorry you haven’t heard from me for a while, but I have been engaged in what could be termed the missing 5th and a half Circle of Dante’s Inferno, somewhere between 5 (Anger) and 6 (Heresy)—moving.

Well, maybe not. It wasn’t so bad, particularly on the way down from Nashville in my somewhat trusty Tesla Model 3 that performed well on FSD (full self-driving—supervised) on the 900-mile highway south, so well that I rode most of the way as Elon Musk’s passenger with my hands off the wheel.

Unfortunately, when I got to Miami Beach, FSD had the self-driving equivalent of a psychotic break, taking me along with it. I’ll get back to that later, but if you’ve ever driven around South Beach at night, you’ll know what I mean.

Anyway, the route down gave me the opportunity to listen to some of my favorite music from Mozart to Jerry Lee Lewis, multiple times, and to listen to news reports equally multiple times, mostly on the Fox Networks, having long since lost patience with CNN, and somewhat more recently with Megyn Kelly, who seems to have imbibed more than her share of the Candace Owens/Tucker Carlson witches’ brew.

What I learned was, on the surface, something I always knew, that there were two foxes—Fox News and Fox Business. (Yes, there are smaller tributaries, but we’ll ignore them for the moment.)

What I didn’t realize was how deeply divergent the two Foxes could be at times, and what that says about media in general.

I at first turned on Fox News out of habit, but after every attempt, the only news I heard was about the Guthrie kidnapping. Again and again, it was the same, almost always uninteresting theorizing about this mysterious crime, as if it were the second coming of Charles Lindbergh.

Now I consider myself a relatively normal person and was sympathetic to the family embroiled in this crisis, but at the same time, gigantic issues affecting the lives of millions, even billions, of people across the globe were at critical points.

Some of these are domestic, such as the SAVE Act, which requires a government-issued ID to vote, and the ID required to board a plane. The vast majority of Americans favored this, but Congress seemed about to subvert the will of the people.

Other issues were international in scope, including, of course, what to do about the Islamic Republic of Iran, where its leadership was murdering untold thousands of their citizens, some, apparently, in their hospital beds.

President Trump had sent battleships and was poised to attack if the Ayatollah were unable to compromise seriously.

And then of course there‘s the Ukraine War, where casualties (wounded and dead) approach two million—not to mention Europe itself, much of which is falling prey to an invasion of Islamic refugees that is destroying the character of those countries forever. The US itself is similarly threatened. New York City is already falling apart under an Islamist mayor.

Hardly any of this beyond the slightest lip service was discussed on Fox News during the two days I drove. It was nonstop Guthrie kidnapping.

Why, I asked myself.

The answer lies in the nature of our media and, sadly, in us. The minute the executive producers at Fox News discovered the fascination their public, or enough of it, had for this one case, the more they rode it…and rode it… and rode it. Who knows when they will stop? Once the word comes down from the top to the various shows, and you can be sure it did, they will not disobey, no matter what they really think. News be damned. They are more interested in “business” than Fox Business, if you get my meaning.

So I switched within an hour or two to the real Fox Business and never wavered. Maria Bartiromo and Larry Kudlow, an old friend of mine, are always worth listening to. Yes, they paid some lip service to the kidnapping, but turned far more often to important matters of politics and the economy.

But I can’t be sure who, if anyone, I was listening to as I rolled into South Beach. Panic was setting in from all the bikes, motorbikes, motorized skateboards, vehicles known and unknown, whizzing past me in every possible direction as Lamborghinis blew down Alton Road somewhere around MACH 5.

FSD didn’t know what to make of it either. It lurched and squeaked and buckled and gave me two of their “strikeouts” within a minute of each other. Was it my fault or Musk’s? ChatGPT assured me it was Musk’s, but he’s their competition.

Anyway, I came to the only sane conclusion: No FSD in Miami Beach. I will, alas, have to drive myself. But can I remember how?

 

First published in American Refugees