More Truthiness From the Folks at Fox

The wonderful marketing wizards at New Corp. at are it again.

Have your heard the new slogan for the Fox Business Network?  Fighting For You!

Yeah, they’re fighting for us—me, you, all the little people, and  Joe the Plumber (especially Joe the Plumber)—every blessed minute of the day over there at the FBN 24-hour business-oriented cable news channel.  Suddenly, I feel safe and secure, just like I did sipping Ovaltine back in my grandmother’s kitchen.

 Thank you, Fox Business Network, for manning the barricades and putting up your dukes on my behalf!  I slept sounder last night than I have in years.

I have just one question: Whom, exactly, are you fighting?

A digression: While I’m no fan of Rupert Murdoch’s nominal politics (he’s not so much a fire-in-the-belly conservative as much as a money-in-the-bank opportunist), I’ve always harbored a guilty admiration for this audaciousness, his ability to pivot on a farthing, and lack of any core principles.  (Some of you may recall that some years back this champion of freedom caved in to Beijing’s demands that the remove the BBC international service from his Star TV beamed into China.) 

And then there’s that “We Report, You Decide” mind-wash blared endlessly by Murdoch’s flagship Fox News Channel, which, in its sheer ridiculousness and total, utterly straight-faced disregard for what we call on my planet “reality,” should be chiseled on the façade of 1984’s Ministry of Truth.  It’s a perfect example of the Big Lie:  Repeat something often enough, loud enough, for long enough, and a certain percentage of the population will believe you, even if monkeys don’t really fly out your butt.

But back to Fox Business Network, which, while I’ve been jotting this post for the past 20 minutes has not relaxed its meaty, sledge hammer-like fists even to quickly scratch its nose, because it’s perpetually on guard, bouncing on its toes, getting off a few good jabs when it sees an opening—There’s a left! And a right! And another left!—and fighting for you and me!

I ask again, just whom is it fighting?  General Electric?  General Motors?  Con-Agra?  Microsoft?  The U.S. Treasury?  The Dow Jones Industrial Average? Or, maybe, the entire S&P 500? (Is that a fair fight, I mean, really?)  Is Murdoch, one of our era’s most successful practitioners of ravenous, gloves-off capitalism really turning on his fellow corporate titans?

Or maybe it’s a clever (?) attempt by Murdoch’s marketing lieutenants to tap into and ally Fox with the resurgent sense of populism and demands for a more equitable democracy that seems to be gathering steam (I hope) under Obama. 

 Sorry, America, for doing so much to foist that phony Iraqi war off on you a few years back, but now we’ve seen the light. And we’re fighting for you!

Trying to suss out what this marketing bilge is supposed to mean makes my middle-aged teeth ache and my gums bleed.  I’ll tell you what:

I’ll report and you decide.