One of the first things any authoritarian government does is to (i) establish its own news outlet to disseminate propaganda, and (ii) attack legitimate, non-censored news outlets with a goal of discrediting them and, if possible, shutting them down. If readers have never done so, they would do well to study what the Bolsheviks did in Russia after the October 2017 Russian Revolution and what Hitler did as he rose to power to news outlets. If he could, Trump would readily do something similar and, at least for now, he continues his daily assaults on legitimate and credible news outlets that do not regurgitate the correct propaganda. As far as establishing a state news outlet apparatus, Trump has had no need to do so. Fox News has willingly and enthusiastically stepped up to perform that role, wilfully lying to its viewers and working to undermine American democracy as it falsely wraps itself in the American flag and clutches a Bible edited to remove all but the passages utilized to condemn others. Recently, Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, with experience in Russian affairs, resigned from Fox News. His op-ed in the Washington Post is an indictment of Fox News, and by extension, those who blindly eat up its lies and propaganda. Here are highlights:
You could measure the decline of Fox News by the drop in the quality of guests waiting in the green room. A year and a half ago, you might have heard George Will discussing policy with a senator while a former Cabinet member listened in. Today, you would meet a Republican commissar with a steakhouse waistline and an eager young woman wearing too little fabric and too much makeup, immersed in memorizing her talking points.This wasn’t a case of the rats leaving a sinking ship. The best sailors were driven overboard by the rodents.
As I wrote in an internal Fox memo, leaked and widely disseminated, I declined to renew my contract as Fox News’s strategic analyst because of the network’s propagandizing for the Trump administration. Today’s Fox prime-time lineup preaches paranoia, attacking processes and institutions vital to our republic and challenging the rule of law.
Four decades ago, as a U.S. Army second lieutenant, I took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” In moral and ethical terms, that oath never expires. As Fox’s assault on our constitutional order intensified, spearheaded by its after-dinner demagogues, I had no choice but to leave. My error was waiting so long to walk away.
As early as the fall of 2016, and especially as doubts mounted about the new Trump administration’s national security vulnerabilities, I increasingly was blocked from speaking on the issues about which I could offer real expertise: Russian affairs and our intelligence community. I did not hide my views at Fox and, as word spread that I would not unswervingly support President Trump and, worse, that I believed an investigation into Russian interference was essential to our national security, I was excluded from segments that touched on Vladimir Putin’s possible influence on an American president, his campaign or his administration.
I was the one person on the Fox payroll who, trained in Russian studies and the Russian language, had been face to face with Russian intelligence officers in the Kremlin and in far-flung provinces. . . . Yet I could only rarely and briefly comment on the paramount security question of our time: whether Putin and his security services ensnared the man who would become our president. Trump’s behavior patterns and evident weaknesses (financial entanglements, lack of self-control and sense of sexual entitlement) would have made him an ideal blackmail target — and the Russian security apparatus plays a long game.
As indictments piled up, though, I could not even discuss the mechanics of how the Russians work on either Fox News or Fox Business.
All Americans, whatever their politics, should want to know, with certainty, whether a hostile power has our president and those close to him in thrall. This isn’t about party but about our security at the most profound level. Every so often, I could work in a comment on the air, but even the best-disposed hosts were wary of transgressing the party line.
Listening to political hacks with no knowledge of things Russian tell the vast Fox audience that the special counsel’s investigation was a “witch hunt,” while I could not respond, became too much to bear. There is indeed a witch hunt, and it’s led by Fox against Robert Mueller.
The cascade of revelations about the Russia-related crimes of Trump associates was dismissed, adamantly, as “fake news” by prime-time hosts who themselves generate fake news blithely.
Then there was Fox’s assault on our intelligence community — in which I had served, from the dirty-boots tactical level to strategic work in the Pentagon (with forays that stretched from Russia through Pakistan to Burma and Bolivia and elsewhere). Opportunities to explain how the system actually works, how stringent the safeguards are and that intelligence personnel are responsible public servants — sometimes heroes — dried up after an on-air confrontation shortly before Trump’s inauguration with a popular (and populist) host, Lou Dobbs.
[I]t reached the point where I hated walking into the Fox studio. Friends and family encouraged me to leave, convinced that I embarrassed myself by remaining with the network . . . .
During my 10 years at Fox News and Fox Business, I did my best to be a forthright voice. I angered left and right. I criticized President Barack Obama fiercely (one infelicity resulted in a two-week suspension), but I also argued for sensible gun-control measures and environmental protections. I made mistakes, but they were honest mistakes. I took the opportunity to speak to millions of Americans seriously and — still that earnest young second lieutenant to some degree — could not imagine lying to them.With my Soviet-studies background, the cult of Trump unnerves me. For our society’s health, no one, not even a president, can be above criticism — or the law.
Hopefully, history will judge Fox and its lying anchors very harshly.Trump idolaters and the merrily hypocritical prime-time hosts are destroying the network — no matter how profitable it may remain.
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