When LA Fitness Chooses Far-Right Propaganda Over Customer Service

Any private business obviously has a free speech right to play Fox News on their television(s). But the majority of Americans who voted against Donald Trump, and/or just want better news coverage, also have the right to speak out against those Fox News propaganda pushers.

I know it’s a heavy lift to try to change the world one business TV set at a time. But not trying is too depressing a life for me to live. So yeah, I’m afraid I’m that “that guy.” Not “the PC police.” Not a “cancel culture cop.” Just a guy who isn’t going to remain silent when being force-fed right-wing proselytizing at bars, restaurants, waiting rooms, and health clubs.

After all, Fox News is propaganda, not the “fair and balanced news” it claims to be. As several studies cited by the Washington Post found, Fox is not only unfair and unbalanced, it’s been demonstrably dangerous during the pandemic era:

In April, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign published a peer-reviewed study examining how Americans’ media diets affected their beliefs about the coronavirus.

Administering a nationally representative phone survey with 1,008 respondents, they found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection. But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exaggerated the pandemic’s threat “to

These findings held even after controlling for viewers’ political affiliation, education, gender and age.

That doesn’t seem to be the kind of information a health club would want to be promoting during the most deadly pandemic in a century.

My Adorable Little Crusade

So when I returned to my health club after the pandemic died down, I was disappointed to see that MSNBC had been dropped from the channel selections on TVs attached to treadmills, ellipticals and step machines, while Fox News remained. I wasn’t too upset, though, because I assumed it was a small oversight that would be easily remedied.

So I politely asked the local manager to add MSNBC as a progressive option for the mouth-breathing masses.  I asked them to either include both Fox and MSNBC in their channel selections, as they did pre-pandemic, or have neither MSNBC nor Fox News. 

I was simply requesting balance. I thought that was darn reasonable, especially since this club is located in a county that gave Biden 71 percent of its vote, compared to just 25 percent for the Fox News poster child. So, I frankly expected them to quickly agree to such a minor and reasonable request.

Surprisingly, the LA Fitness/Esporta manager has refused, and his rationale is absurd.  He claimed the CNN option they were offering in the channel selection was the leftist equivalent to Fox News. 

Earnest wonk that I am, I shared this non-partisan media bias analysis finding that CNN was left-center (“Skews Left” as they put it), and therefore not ideologically comparable to either “Hyper-Partisan Left” MSNBC or “Hyper-Partisan Right” Fox News.

Beyond his CNN argument, the manager also asserted that the availability of WCCO-TV (CBS affiliate) and KSTP-TV (ABC affiliate) stations satisfied their obligation to balance off “Hyper-Partisan” Fox News, so MSNBC wasn’t needed.  He seemed to conclude that any TV news that wasn’t Fox News was progressive, and therefore those local affiliates should somehow count as being a progressive counter-balance to Fox News. 

This claim is also absurd. I pointed out that 1) the vast majority o of the local affiliate stations’ programming was entertainment, such as The Bachelor, NCIS, and NFL football, not news; 2) the local stations’ news was almost entirely focused on weather, sports, crime, pop culture, and local events, and therefore wasn’t comparable to the kind of hard core national news featured on Fox News and MSNBC; and 3) the brief 30-minutes per day of hard national news on those network stations was at best left-center like CNN, and therefore not close to comparable to “Hyper-Partisan Left” MSNBC.

By the way, while I am a commie, I don’t adore MSNBC. It brings some guests, views, and analysis that other stations don’t, so I do tune in. But the cutsieness, pettiness, and long-windedness of Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell are difficult for me to take.

But if Fox News’s far-right commentary is going to be pushed out to club members there should be something comparable with leftist commentary for the rest of us in this deep blue county. I just wanted a mix of stations that is “fair and balanced.”

After dazzling Manager-guy with this logic and data, I reiterated my simple, fair suggestion: Either include both Fox News and MSNBC, or offer neither. 

But after waiting a few weeks, the manager has, of this writing, refused to add MSNBC. So, Fox News remains the only “hyper-partisan” channel choice for this health club in a deep blue county.

My conclusion is that one of two things is at play with LA Fitness’s refusal to add MSNBC as one option for members.  Either they have far-right wing leadership committed to evangelizing dangerous right wing drivel to their captive audience, or they just don’t give a shit about customer feedback and service. 

Whatever their motivations, their decision is shameful. And I do not suffer in silence.

Minnesota Reporters Should Heed BBC Call On Climate Change Reporting

Flat_Earth_SocietyThere is a small minority that makes heartfelt arguments that the Earth is flat. Do they deserve half of the news coverage related to global geography?  Two maps in every story?

Likewise, there is a small minority that argues humans with a certain skin pigmentation are superior to people with different pigmentation. Do they deserve half of the news coverage about race-related issues?

There also is a small minority that claims the moon landing was a hoax. Did they deserve half of the coverage of moon landings?

In all of these cases, giving minority viewpoints roughly half of the news coverage would have created a false impression that scientists are roughly evenly split about the shape of the planet, the inferiority of some skin colors and the feasibility of space travel. This kind of reporting would have been promoting things that nearly all scientists have proven to be false.

Which brings us to climate change.  This week, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Trust recommended that BBC reporters no longer give equal time to the small minority of scientists who contend that climate change is not happening and/or is not impacted by human activity. A BBC Trust report recommends:

 The Trust wishes to emphasise the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences. The BBC has a duty to reflect the weight of scientific agreement but it should also reflect the existence of critical views appropriately. Audiences should be able to understand from the context and clarity of the BBC’s output what weight to give to critical voices.

So, at a time when 97% of climate scientists have found that climate change is happening and is aggravated by human activities, half of the news coverage should not be dedicated to the viewpoint of the 3% of scientists who disagree.

Despite the increasingly lopsided scientific consensus on climate change, a 2013 report done by Media Matters found that half of print news outlets used a false balance approach to climate change reporting.  On Fox News, 69 percent of guests cast doubt on the science. On CBS news, in reporting about a rigorous United Nations scientific report, climate change deniers were given more than six times their representation in the scientific community.

The BBC Trust is politely telling its reporters to knock it off.  It is telling them to make sure their reporting reflects the reality of broad scientific consensus on climate change.

It’s time for Minnesota’s most thoughtful journalism leaders to follow suit.  Star Tribune? MinnPost?  Minnesota Public Radio?

– Loveland