Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

So now Simpson, who cannot be retried for the murders of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, can in his effort to make money go the ultimate route while doing his best to save face.  

Simpson can provide details of how he killed his former wife and the mother of his two children along with a young man who just happened to arrive on the scene while he was butchering her with a knife to deliver a pair of glasses she had left behind at the restaurant where he worked.

So the media takes another nosedive and Fox Television once more grovels in the mud in the pursuit of money without regard to taste and decency.  

To follow the path of media plummeting we can begin with none other than the California cowboy that the right wing tells us "ended the Soviet Union," Ronald Reagan.

We received a clue of what it would be like under a Reagan presidency when, after the debate briefing notebook of President Jimmy Carter had somehow turned up missing and ended up in the hands of Republicans, media political analyst George Will assisted the former California governor in his preparations for the lone debate pitting the two candidates in the 1980 election campaign.

After his efforts to assist Reagan concluded Will then showed up to participate in post-debate television analysis.  Will concluded that Republican nominee Reagan had done a superb job and won the debate.  What a surprise conclusion coming from such a non-involved party!

One of President Reagan's most frequently quoted phrases became, "Get the government off of people's backs."  This statement was not applicable to the nation's leading corporations and wealthiest citizens, just agencies that got in the way.  The maxim specifically applied to the enforcement realm, such as the anti-trust arm of the Justice Department.

Reagan had been pleasing big money benefactors since his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild, so upon assuming the presidency he had a chance to deliver muscle to enhance corporate largesse as never before.  The time had come when California could share Reagan with the other forty-nine states.

Nothing would serve the Republican corporatist right quite like a good old monopoly in the communications field, and so the Equal Time Doctrine that had been enforced for years by the Federal Communications Commission was terminated.  As time elapsed we would see fewer local stations since they were gobbled up by media colossus Clear Channel.  

The Reagan-generated media atmosphere could not have been more to the liking of Australian Rupert Murdoch.  In fact, after conferring with his accountants, he concluded that America provided such a beneficial deal for him that he became a U.S. citizen.

Murdoch had achieved notoriety by presenting tabloid news on a broad scale to England. His tabloid style newspapers influenced Britishers in the closely fought 1992 election by presenting patriotic messages extolling the U.K. to carry on in the Thatcher tradition with Prime Minister John Major on the same pages that displayed bare-breasted, barely clad young beauties.

Murdoch has maintained consistency.  On Fox Television he has maintained this same judicious mix of tabloid activity aside glowing tributes to patriotism.  No wonder an impressionable and highly paid Fox propagandist such as Bill O'Reilly has a hard time telling the difference.  

One moment O'Reilly denounces purveyors of bad taste and sings paeans of patriotism. On other occasions the Fox talk show superstar pens pornographic novels and engages in what one former network employee alleged to be "sex harassment".  

The former Fox employee was convincing enough that the lawsuit that was filed by the purported victim never reached trial.  A settlement was reached after O'Reilly and the network exclaimed that the harassment charge would be litigated and exposed as baseless and totally without merit.

The Fox News network that proudly displays its mottos of "fair and balanced" and "we report, you decide" got the jump on all other networks in the closely contested 2000 presidential election by declaring in the wee hours of the morning following when the ballots were cast that George W. Bush had been elected.  

Who made the decision?  Fox's man in charge for the night, John Ellis. By some strange coincidence, Ellis happened to be George W. Bush's cousin.  

See how niftily things can be manipulated in a climate where the government has been removed from people's backs?  Was this what Ronald Reagan had in mind?

En route to the upcoming O.J. Simpson interviews Murdoch displayed his penchant for pop culture with Fox's daring new popular entertainment entry, Celebrity Boxing.  Tonya Harding, who gained notoriety for paying to have a figure skating competitor injured, was scheduled to fight Amy Fisher, who was serving out the end of a prison term for shooting the wife of her boyfriend, Joey Buttafuoco.

When Fisher's parole officer was not able to arrange a Hollywood sabbatical for Fisher to appear, Paula Jones, President Bill Clinton's accuser, became a late substitute.  The Fox obsession with Clinton persisted even into the realm of its Celebrity Boxing series.  

Given the determination of Fox, if Fisher could not be represented then Buttafuoco, by then out of prison following a four-month jail stretch for a statutory rape conviction resulting from his affair with Fisher, was booked to fight a female wrestler.  

This match resulted from the inability of John Wayne Bobbitt to appear to fight Buttafuoco.    Bobbitt made national headlines after his wife severed his penis.  His inability to appear stemmed from a recent charge of spousal abuse.

The Celebrity Boxing series also included one bout involving a former Olympic gymnastic champion matched with a woman who made headlines by being married on How to Marry a Millionaire, followed by a swift annulment.  The former Olympian was in obvious need of cash, having been arrested for shoplifting shortly before the match was arranged.

Celebrity Boxing suffered a swift demise after some rocky reviews and tepid ratings.  Murdoch's network cannot stay away from tabloid style controversy, and so ultimately arrangements were made for Simpson's upcoming appearance.

Today Fred Goldman, father of Ron, who was killed along with Nicole Brown Simpson, appeared live on CNN and declared outrageous the upcoming book and Fox two-part interview with O.J. Simpson.  Goldman recommended a boycott.

A full-scale boycott would be in order, meaning not buying the book and enriching someone that DNA evidence clearly proved was a brutal two time killer, along with not watching the interview sessions and boycotting companies sponsoring them.