The Lie Economy Flourishes on TV
After a few decades working in broadcast, print and online media as a journalist, I am well aware of the rules and regulations of this profession. To report a story you need facts, reliable sources and attributions like “according to Professor Smith…” Stealing someone else’s copy is called plagiarism, and any journalist can be fired for it. Of course, it goes without saying that fabricating facts or falsifying the truth is moral turpitude. In Canada such behavior is theoretically illegal because the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) has rules and hands out licenses. Whether the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in the United States has any rules is hard to ascertain given the behavior of many “media personalities” masquerading as TV reporters.
Take, for instance, Alex Jones of Infowars, the mouth that roars and spits out B.S. on a daily basis. Jones works the Lie Economy angle well, earning a fortune for making up ugly stories. Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN also excel at lying through their teeth. A Texas jury ordered the InfoWars demagogue to pay $49.3 million in punitive and compensatory damages to the parents of one of the Sandy Hook Elementary students slaughtered in 2012, for disgusting and defamatory lies Jones told about them.
This lawsuit, one of several filed against Jones, accused him of repeatedly asserting on his webcast that the parent of the killed student interviewed on CNN was simply an actor in a scheme to cover up the truth about the massacre. Jones business empire has an estimated value of between $135 million and $270 million. Jones has profited and will likely to continue to profit from his falsehoods in the Lie Economy, and probably will only pay a fraction of that cost in this case and others. He also called Robert Mueller a demon and a pedophile, said John McCain was the real leader of the Democratic Party, accused the government of staging the 9/11 attacks, and claimed the Pentagon has devised perfumes that make men gay to prevent them from procreating. You can’t make this stuff up.
Jones’ BS excites the rubes who always want to hear more of the same salacious sleaze. Blatant lies are almost always exciting and good for ratings. Then he turns watchers over to his merchandising team that sells survivalist gear and health supplements that Jones claimed could mitigate Covid. The Huffington Post reports that InfoWars made $165 million in such sales from 2015 to the end of 2018.
On the Fox News Channel Tucker Carlson claims that January 6th was a “false flag operation.” The channel hyped ivermectin as a Covid treatment and continues its blatant lies and bogus coverage about a “stolen election.” Health supplements and pain relief products are its top 10 biggest advertisers. Meanwhile, Jones’ company filed for bankruptcy at the end of June, which will delay other cases against him, perhaps for years. While the lawsuits pile up, the money keeps rolling in.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when lies became the truth. You could select “Tricky Dick” Nixon, who got his nickname in the 1950s by slandering his political opposition. He is known best for uttering the phrase “I am not a crook” as he was forced to resign as President for helping fund and plan a burglary. Jump ahead to Ronald Regan’s amusing policy of “trickledown economics,” verbal sleight of hand that held if you made the rich even richer, somehow their prosperity would find its way down the food chain to everyone else. Pie in the sky, worse than a lie. Then he weakened the rules of the FCC that allowed the Far Right to start stretching the truth. Don’t get me started on Dick Cheney’s “weapons of mass destruction.”
Here in the Great White North we humble Canucks have historically been averse to outright lying, but some on the Far Right of the political spectrum have picked up the Trump baton and run with it. Conservatives have always been the party of law and order and normally would be disgusted by a politician like Pierre Poiliviere supporting a motley crew of racist truckers, anti-Semites, and promoters of insurrection, while boosting bitcoin and slagging the opposition. His campaign has been a total Trump knock-off, a mix of lies and outright nonsense.
While Poiliviere and others like Maxime Bernier can use their own social media to find naïve followers, thankfully here in Canada we don’t have a Fox News TV channel pretending to be a legitimate source of trustworthy information, although Rebel News gives it a shot. Sensationalism American-style hasn’t caught on yet in a culture that says “sorry” all the time, apologizing for being polite. The Lie Economy is just catching on north of the border, and it’s worth watching to see if Poiliviere can ride the cash cow all the way to the bank.