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A Student Activist Community

posted by jakethorn on July 26, 2007 - 9:38pm

Tags:

• activism
• Fox News
• media

http://bravenewfilms.org/foxads

This is a brilliant attempt to create organized resistance to media propaganda by targeting advertisers. It's like adding another layer to democracy by allowing voters to impact the presentation of the information we're presented as "fact" by the mainstream media.

I signed up. If you want to resist Fair and Balanced propaganda, join the network. If this works, I could see the same formula being applied to other cases.

From their front page (emphasis added for skimmers):

Fox is not a legitimate news channel. They consistently misrepresent facts, manufacture terror, and slander progressives.

We're fighting back by identifying and calling all of FOX's advertisers. All of them. Particularly local advertisers who probably have no idea the kind of hatred their money is supporting.

Already a FOX Attacker? Sign in here ?

This is not a boycott. We are simply calling advertisers and informing them about FOX. And making Bill O'Reilly's life a living hell.

Sign up, and get started now:

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I signed up. I have high hopes for this.

From an activist's standpoint, this is pretty interesting since it's an attempt to use the Internet in a very new way. One group of people stays at home and monitors the spewing, kind of like a neighborhood watch, and another group contributes by contacting the advertisers, more like the police. And there're folks who'll do both, of course.

This is applied for all Fox affiliates.

Only the Internet has made such an organization feasible. Hell, not only feasible, but within easy reach of any citizen to create a similar campaign. It's the networking aspect, the ability to chain together a large number of groups working for the same goal, depending on geographical dispersion to maximize their impact.

I'm clapping. Great great great idea. Three cheers for innovation.

Maybe if this works, we'll stop seeing shit like this, from October 2003:

An in-depth analysis of a series of polls (of Fox viewers) conducted June through September found 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found, 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq. Overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions.

snip. and the...

percentage saying that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11 continued to be in the 20-25% range, while another 33-36% said they believed that Iraq gave al-Qaeda substantial support.