Forums

[Diane_Keaton]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Diane, I have to quibble with your second point about how we should side with the victims. But I think that's implied.

But the problem with "homicide bomber" is it sounds, generally speaking, stupid. It's as though Fox were too stupid to understand that "suicide bomber" is just a way of describing a certain type of bomber. It's a dumb knee-jerkresponse that assumes the word "suicide bomber" is some leftist term coined by CNN or Reuters to give gravitas to those bombers. It's clearly not. It's just a descriptive.

Now, Fox isn't stupid. But they know a lot of their audience is. So what they've done is play to the dim bastards who think "suicide bomber" is a Lefty term. Really, at the end of the day, its nothing more than a trick of branding. Fox is trying, cynically, to distinguish itself by purposefully misconstruing a vanilla, descriptive term. And it knows how idiotic "homicide bomber" sounds, yet it pushes the term anyway, because it knows that to a certain uneducated sector of our society, using "homicide bomber" looks like the network is "taking a stand against all them damned lefties."

The term "homicide bomber" doesn't offend me so much as it saddens me. We have a nation of people who can so easily be cowed with these slick propaganda tricks? It's upsetting.

I think you're saying that the term used by Fox News is reactionary and not original (it is a term inherently critical of the term "suicide bomber.") If so, I agree. But I don't think Fox viewers are bunch of toothless idiots, or that they are catering to stupidity. Unless you think those who vote Republican are all toothless idiots. I hear a lot of presumptions about red-staters being stupid and "simplistic" but I have never bought that.