When I Worked for Fox News

by Barbara Fischkin

I once wrote a political column for Fox News. My point of view was liberal and at times decidedly leftist.

This is true-true and not fake news.

The notorious Fox was then a media baby, albeit an enormous one. At its American launch in 1997, it already had 17 million cable subscribers. Millions of Americans looking for a conservative alternative to CNN and company.

Two years later I was hired, as a freelancer, to write an opinion column for a nascent website: Fox News Online. Back then, the television screen ruled. The website was an experiment, to see if the Internet was real. I was told I could opine as I wished, as long as the facts backed me up and I was not libelous or incoherent. A cartoonist was assigned to illustrate my words.

When I was first approached about writing this, I thought it was a practical joke. A dear friend and former newspaper colleague showed up one morning in our family backyard and told me to stop calling her every morning with my take on national and world events. “Write it,” she said. “I will pay you. Two hundred bucks a column once a week. Eight hundred a month.”  Not a lot for Fox News, even then. But I needed the money. Needing money is one of my hobbies. Read more »

A Straight Line

by Akim Reinhardt

“It’s a long, long way from the Trump administration to an actual fascist dictatorship,” I said, “but it’s a straight line.”

Although generally reserved, Julius (I’ll call him) belly laughed a good while at that, his outburst fueled by personal experience. He’d spent his childhood in General Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain. Specifically in Catalonia, that provincial hotbed of resistance during the Spanish Civil War, and target of fierce repression for nearly nearly four decades following. Franco’s authoritarian rule was ruthless: censorship; banning opposition parties; prisons full of Catalan political dissidents; some four-thousand Catalans executed from 1938-53; thousands more in exile.

Julius deeply loathes Donald Trump. But he also has no patience for hyperbolic claims that El Trumpo is a dictator. Because he knows better. Read more »

Some of the People All of the Time (On Trump’s Legion)

by Akim Reinhardt

You can fool all the people some of the time
and some of the people all the time,
but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Lincoln quotesFor example, some people will always believe that Abraham Lincoln first uttered this famous aphorism, even though there is no record of him ever having written or said those words.

A French Protestant named Jacques Abbadie authored an early incarnation of the adage in 1684.

In 1754, the French editors Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert helped cement its popularity.

The phrase doesn't show up in American letters until some Prohibitionist politicians started using it in 1885. Twenty years after Lincoln died.

Until recently, I simply took at face value the common claim that these were Lincoln's words. It's not a very important issue, so what would push me to question it?

My decision to title this article.

A little healthy skepticism is all it took. After all, lots of famous quotes are misattributed to famous people, ergo the Yogi Berra line: “I really didn't say everything I said.” Which he really did say.

So before titling and publishing this essay, I looked up the maxim at a reputable site with citations, just to be sure. And presto: suddenly I am, at least in this regard, all of the people some of the time, and not some of the people all of the time.

You really don't want to be some of those people who get fooled all the time. Which brings us to Donald Trump.

He's very good at fooling people. At the moment, he's successfully fooling millions of Republican voters into thinking he'd be a good president generally, and more specifically, that if elected he could actually do many of the outlandish things he's claiming, like getting Mexico to pay for a wall.

Thus, the question lurks forebodingly: Are we living through “some of the time?”

Is this the moment when Donald Trump fools all of the people, or at least enough of the ones who call themselves Republicans, that he lands the GOP's presidential nomination?

Read more »