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Consequentialist Fox sacrifices truth to the greater good
Submitted by Constant on Fri, 2008-11-21 15:39.
Fox News will attempt to maximize global utility.
Ailes responded to the report in the New York Daily News that he instructed FNC to tone down attacks on President-elect Barack Obama. He denied giving specific orders, but said he told staffers "all presidents deserve time to get their team on the ground and get organized."
"We have some obligation in a new presidency not to attempt to destabilize it," he said.
News is to be reported, not on the deontological basis of whether or not it is true, but on the consequentialist basis of whether or not reporting it will destabilize the presidency, thereby threatening global utility.
Of course, we have long known that members of the media see their noble mission not as to inform their audience but as to promote the greater good by manipulating the public. It is too bad for the media that the paying customer remains the audience and not the greater good.
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There are some lies that lie so deep in the hopes of man that they can never be killed, no matter how many are executed to make the lie true.
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the audience
Hence the decline of the mainstream media.
One interesting question is: Why do all organizations move left?
Observe, for example, that the piracy crisis has not inclined shipowners to arm their vessels. Vessels are disarmed in part because of regulatory reasons, but the owners could easily bypass regulations or find loopholes, or just damn well break regulations and beg for forgiveness if problems ensued. As one of my bosses used to say whenever I remarked that what he was doing was illegal "The sword of the law has two edges, both of them blunt."
The curious reluctance of Fox to report the news parallels the curious reluctance of shipowners to arm their crews.
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