The Fox News Prolefeed

By Scott Horton

What news network leads the pack, many times over, in its transmission of gratuitous sexual material and violence? Fox News, of course. Robert Greenwald takes a look at Fox News and its use of gratuitous sex and violence. Here’s a clip:

“Fox News shows more sexualized violence and humiliation than probably any other network — all in the name of condemning it — while under-showing violence in Iraq, all in the name of supporting it. After this video, smart viewers and advertisers will boycott Fox.” -Gloria Steinem

Once again, Fox News lives up to the Orwellian nightmare.

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth is responsible for providing a steady supply of “prolefeed” to Oceania’s broadcast system. Here’s a key description:

And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.