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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:14:50 GMT
FOX NEWS & RIGHT WING NOISE IS KILLING IT'S AUDIENCE AND DIVIDING OUR NATION. Ted Koppel on why he thinks Sean Hannity is bad for AmericaI have mentioned this before on this forum and I am creating this thread to explore and prove the connections. The largest and most frequent group of opiod users are rural and predominately Red State conservatives. People use opioids to ease their pain. I have found so much information online that an inordinate number of these users begin using because of back pain. Back pain, unless one has been in some sort of an accident is related to the "autonomic" nervous system and is affected by things like mental stress and anger. Where does this anger come from? FOX NEWS and the right wing noise machine...tv, cable, radio, online sites.....This noise machine KNOWS how to stir up it's viewers. They use psychological tactics on them. Trump himself has utilized these tactics. Most of these people are not bad people but these purveyors of propaganda and hate stir up something terrible inside of them that manifests in verbal outrage, crude behavior and physical maladies. FOX News creates chronic stress and anxiety in its viewers and is the creator of diseased minds and bodies.
Frankly I can't figure out why we hear so little about the real cause of this epidemic but maybe we haven't looked closely enough. And that is what I intend to do.
0:09 / 1:17:07
Outfoxed • Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism • FULL DOCUMENTARY FILM exposes Fox News
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Outfoxed shows how the Fox News channel is used to promote and advocate right-wing views. SUBSCRIBE youtube.com/subscription_cente... Follow Robert Greenwald twitter.com/robertgreenwald Celebrate 10 years of Brave New Films with our Boxed Set: bravenewfilms.org/10th WATCH MORE: bit.ly/1znT0LQ
3:09 During the first few years that Murdoch's ownership of Fox's DC affiliate, he had a hands-off approach to new content; partially due to their success. One day orders came from Murdoch's offices that the network should cut away from their regularly scheduled program and broadcast the RNC's fawning tribute to Reagan: "we were ordered, from the top, to carry propaganda; Republican, right-wing propaganda". It foreshadowed what Fox News would later become.
6:30 Former Fox News reporters and bookers say that they are afraid to be seen "talking to the wrong people". Working for Fox meant you were constantly being monitored. It created a culture of fear. If you challenged the heads of the network On ideological matters, you were history.
10:45 “Some People Say” – FOX uses the phrase "some people say" to mask opinion as news.
19:04 Fox News contributors are under paid contract for their appearance; if they deviate from the party lines, they might not get asked back onto shows.
21:22 Fox News went after Richard Clarke as soon as it was apparent that he was going to paint the Bush administration in a bad light. For Fox News, "mudding" arguments is almost as good as winning them. So, they didn't need to definitely prove that Clarke, a former member of the Bush Administration, was angling for a position in a Kerry Whitehouse, they just had to make it look like a possibility.
22:28 They put weak-looking , lesser known liberals up against photogenic, self-assured conservatives.
26:29 Republicans accounted for 83% of the guests while Democrats accounted for 17% of guest on the network's most prestigious show. Of those democrats, most were either centrist or conservative.
27:50 Stories they Cover...Stories they Ignore - Management set the tone for stories: Jesse Jackson was always to be painted in a negative light, as were immigrants. Culture war issues - abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage - were often covered while ignoring issues regarding the economy, health care, and the environment.
34:38 O'Reilly's show is a good example of everything that is wrong with Fox News --
Stories are selected to prop-up the Republican party and their point of view; O'Reilly is very hostile to guest who disagrees with him; and he distorts and misrepresent things.
42:00 Many Fox News stories are meant to generate fear; for example, stories about what to do if there's a "dirty bomb" attack. Fear is a great motivator and organizer; even when there is no real evidence for it. Terrorism is the ultimate fear-baiting; and when people are fearful, they are more likely to support military interventions. Talking about terrorism also means that you can avoid talking about other issues, like the economy.
46:29 Fox made the decision to present the Iraq war as a success. "The senior producer told the two or three writers for her news hour...'now, just keep in mind that it's all good. This is such a fair and balance issue. Keep it positive. We got to emphasize all the good we are doing".
48:43 Knowledge Networks Poll - It's a simple survey about fact regarding current events. The more likely people were to watch Fox News, the more misinformed they were and the more likely they were to back the Bush Administration.
50:49 Fox News repeats and propagates the Republican Party platform. It was widely known that the Fox reporter covering the 2000 Bush campaign was married to a Bush campaigner. This wouldn't have been allowed at CNN.
52:47 Election Night 2000 - The first guy to call the election for Bush was the head of Fox's New's election analyze division; Bush's first cousin. He called it a clear win, when in fact it was too close too call.
59:16 The Republican send out "the message of the day" so that conservative talk radio, Fox News, and Republican elected officials will all be talking about the same issues, in the same way.
58:41 2004 Election; coverage of Bush was always glowing, while Kerry was shown in a negative light.
1:02:51 During the 2004 election, Fox News painted a very rosy picture of the American economy and by selecting statistics which showed just that. Of course, they credited Bush for the "good" economy. When the stock market had a bad day, they claimed it was because of fear over the prospect of a Kerry presidency.
1:05:28 Murdoch is foremost a politician and this is what makes him dangerous.
1:06:57 The Fox Effect - It made other news organization more conservative because they saw how well Fox did.
1:09:13 A Call to Action - Media control is a political issue. People need to demand accuracy.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:15:20 GMT
Here is some politics of the situation. My solution is much simpler and cheaper. BAN FOX NEWS. Air anything but FOX. Run Mr. Rogers Neighborhood or something reasonable in its place that is more calming to these people. Hate and anger is addictive and that addiction causes pain and that pain needs an antidote. AT LEAST TURN OFF THE TV!!
Early this century Linda Ronstadt declared she couldn't understand why so many Americans vote against their own best interests. This thread should go a long way in answering that question.
 Why The Opioid Crisis Could Shatter Trump’s CoalitionBy Eric Levitz
Donald Trump won the presidency with the votes of rural communities beset by industrial decline and opioid addiction — and the financial backing of rich, right-wing ideologues beset by progressive taxation. Since taking office, the president has developed a (largely) successful formula for eliding the tensions inherent to this coalition: Give the plutocrats their preferred policies, and let the masses eat Colin Kaepernick.
But this gambit has its limits. Red America can’t live on culture-war grievances alone. Not when drug overdoses are killing hundreds of its sons and daughters every week. In 2016, 50,000 Americans lost their lives to the opioid epidemic, up from 33,000 the year before, according to the federal government’s preliminary count. That’s more than the number of Americans killed in combat in Vietnam. It’s more than die annually from car accidents or gun violence and more than the 43,000 who died from HIV during the worst year of the AIDS crisis. And unlike the victims of that plague, deaths from opioids are disproportionately concentrated in the rural counties that keep the GOP competitive as a national party.
On other issues, Trump has been able to hide his betrayals of the party’s downscale wing in hollow rhetoric. Giant tax cuts for the rich can be framed as a means of onshoring jobs; cuts to health-care spending as an expansion of consumer choice. But there’s no talking point that can hide a botched disaster response; not from those living amid the wreckage, anyway.
And that’s a big problem for Trump and his party — because, when it comes to the opioid epidemic, talking points are all that conservatives are prepared to offer: When the president’s opioid commission first recommended declaring the epidemic a national emergency last summer, the administration’s far-right budget director Mick Mulvaney — and much of the (heavily Koched-up) Domestic Policy Council — scoffed at “the multibillion-dollar price tag.” One senior administration official told Politico last week that “everyone wants opioids to be a priority” but that “there’s a lot of resistance to calling it an emergency” because of the “legal and budgetary implications.” This is a roundabout way of saying that many in the White House do not want opioids to be a priority, because that would entail diverting significant funds away from tax cuts for corporate shareholders.
Trump deferred to such objections for months. But emergencies don’t go away when the White House makes them feel unwanted. And so, on Thursday, the president will take a half-measure: Instead of declaring the epidemic a national emergency — and thus, giving opioid relief efforts access to the billions of dollars in FEMA’s disaster relief fund — Trump will declare it a public health emergency (the Public Health Emergency Fund currently has all of $57,000 to its name). Nonetheless, the move is an important symbolic step, and will relax certain regulations and laws, so as to expedite the federal response to the crisis.
What matters most, though, is what comes next. Soon, the president’s commission will release its official policy recommendations. There’s some ambiguity as to exactly what these will entail. But the broad outlines of a serious response to the opioid crisis have long been clear: To stem the tide of drug overdoses in the United States, the president will need to increase federal health-care spending, impose more stringent regulations on the pharmaceutical industry, and embrace a harm-reduction approach to drug abuse that insulates addicts from the worst consequences of their nonviolent crimes. In other words: He will have to break with governing preferences of the GOP donor class.
The modern conservative movement’s animating purpose is to strip money from the welfare state and return it to the pockets of the “job creators” who earned it. Thus, Republicans have spent most of their time in power trying to pass trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid and insurance subsidies for low-income people, even as a historic public-health crisis raged in their own backyards. Medicaid pays for 44 percent of all addiction treatment in Kentucky; 45 percent in West Virginia; and roughly 50 percent in Ohio. Every Republican senator from those states voted to slash $700 billion from the program anyway — except for Kentucky’s Rand Paul, who opposed that legislation because its Medicaid cuts weren’t nearly steep enough.
To prevent his emergency declaration from ringing hollow, Trump will need to give up on repealing Obamacare, and order his administration to cease its (overt) sabotage of the individual insurance market. That isn’t just the plea of a progressive blogger — according to the Washington Post, multiple members of Trump’s opioid commission are pushing to include such language in their final recommendations.
But the president will have to do more than that. Patrick Kennedy, a former former Rhode Island congressman serving on Trump’s opioid commission, told the Post that the panel is poised to recommend an expansion in health-insurance coverage and new subsidies to fund addiction treatment.
This makes sense. The primary reason for the opioid epidemic’s brutal acceleration may be this: In the United States, it’s much easier for addicts to find heroin than to find help. A 2016 report from the surgeon general’s office found that just 10 percent of Americans with a drug disorder secured specialty treatment. This result is largely explained by the fact that wide swaths of the country — including many counties where opioid abuse is prevalent — lack affordable treatment options.
In 2016, Congress appropriated $1 billion, over two years, to fund addiction services. But this is woefully inadequate to the scale of our problem. Experts who spoke with Vox’s German Lopez suggested that it would take tens of billions of dollars — annually — to make treatment easily accessible for those who need it. Lopez notes that the total economic burden of prescription opioid abuse, alone, was pegged at $78.5 billion in 2013. Thus, a massive investment in addiction treatment could pay for itself, in the long run, by preempting even higher costs to our health-care system and economy.
But to make such an investment, Trump will need to embrace ideas that are antithetical to the GOP’s main projects. Instead of seeking to curtail public spending on the health care of low-income people, he will need to increase it. And not only that — he will need to target that investment on the very non-working, dysfunctional poor whose undeservingness has long been his party’s favorite argument against the welfare state.
And then, he’ll need to break with conservatism’s implacable hostility to regulation. The prescription opioid crisis has thrived on pill mills — renegade doctors and pharmacies that hand out OxyContin like (pricey) Tic Tacs. But these illicit practices would have been impossible, had pharmaceutical distributors not put profit over probity: In a two-year period, three of the largest drug distributors in the country shipped nearly 9 million hydrocodone pills to a single pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia — population, 392.
This was an especially egregious case of a common phenomenon. As prescription opioid wholesalers fed the booming black market for pain pills, conservatives on Capitol Hill grew outraged — at the Drug Enforcement Administration, for giving such distributors too hard of a time.
Federal law empowered the DEA to freeze drug shipments that posed an “imminent danger” to a given community. As the opioid crisis spread, the agency began using that authority with greater frequency. In 2014, Republican congressman Tom Marino — Trump’s initial pick for drug czar — introduced legislation intended to restrict the DEA’s capacity to halt drug shipments. In a hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder, Marino lambasted the DEA for treating distributors like “illicit narcotics cartels,” a “mind-set” that the congressman felt was “extremely dangerous to legitimate business.” Republican senator Orrin Hatch led the effort to bring relief to these drug suppliers in the upper chamber.
Eventually, Marino’s desired reduction of the DEA’s authority passed Congress by unanimous consent — as the Washington Post’s investigation of the matter vividly documents, giving undue deference to the demands of pharmaceutical lobbyists is a bipartisan pastime. Nevertheless, it was conservative lawmakers who led the charge. And it is conservative lawmakers who habitually fight to prevent the federal government from taking aggressive action against industries that profit off public health problems — because their ideology places a greater value on the liberty of private firms than on almost anything else.
Combating the opioid epidemic will require Trump to reject his party’s allergy to regulation. Recent federal measures have significantly reduced the overprescription of opioids. Still, enough were prescribed in 2016 to fill a bottle for every American adult. Given the dearth of evidence that opioids are an effective treatment for chronic pain — and the glut of evidence for their dangers — this is a disconcerting statistic.
Thus, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recently called on the Food and Drug Administration to conduct a review of opioids already on the market, and to strengthen its post-approval oversight of such painkillers. Trump should honor that recommendation. And once he’s done sicking the nanny state on the drug industry, he should turn to the insurers. In 2016, an Obama administration task force found that insurers were still discriminating against patients with mental-health disorders and substance-abuse problems, due to lax enforcement of laws that guarantee such Americans parity in the insurance market. If Trump believes the opioid epidemic is an emergency, he should direct the Department of Labor to crack down on such violations.
Finally, and most critically, the president will need to break with conservatism’s virulent opposition to the very concept of harm-reduction policy. The most effective remedy for opioid addiction, bar none, is medication-assisted treatment (MAT). Under MAT, addicts are provided with methadone and buprenorphine — less powerful opioids that satiate most addicts’ cravings, and arrest their withdrawal symptoms, without inducing heroin’s debilitating, euphoric high. Decades of research, the World Health Organization, CDC, and National Institute on Drug Abuse have all demonstrated MAT’s efficacy. Some studies suggest that the treatment reduces mortality among drug addicts by more than 50 percent. And yet, the therapy is only available in about 10 percent of America’s conventional drug-treatment facilities.
Tom Price recently articulated the specious logic that drives this failure. “If we’re just substituting one opioid for another, we’re not moving the dial much,” Trump’s first Health secretary said in May. “Folks need to be cured so they can be productive members of society and realize their dreams.”
In reality, dependence on a substance and productivity are not mutually exclusive — a fact readily apparent to anyone who drank a cup of coffee this morning. Plenty of methadone users are productive members of society. But countless opioid addicts who lacked access to methadone — and thus, sought relief from withdrawal from the wrong batch of fentanyl — never will be.
The conservative aversion to harm-reduction inhibits other, life-saving reforms. As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence resisted calls to provide opioid users with sterile needles, even as the first major outbreak of HIV in recent memory ravaged Scott County. Pence eventually relented. But the ideological belief that led him to drag his feet — that protecting people from the worst consequences of illicit behavior is to condone that behavior — remains core to the conservative worldview. In Maine, it led Republican governor Paul LePage to veto legislation that would have allowed pharmacies to provide naloxone — a drug that reverses opioid overdoses — to those at risk of suffering one, without a prescription. To protect heroin addicts against the threat of death would only “perpetuate the cycle of addiction” LePage argued, in defiance of copious evidence to the contrary. And this ideology renders more radical, evidence-based measures to reduce opioid deaths — like the provision of prescription heroin to incurable addicts — unspeakable in U.S. politics.
To mount a response to the opioid epidemic commensurate with its severity, Trump will need to make naloxone available without a prescription at every U.S. pharmacy; invest billions in expanding access to MAT; and at the very least, launch pilot “prescription heroin” programs modeled on those that have succeeded in saving lives and reducing crime in Canada and Europe.
Reality has always been unkind to the dogmas of movement conservatism. But in recent years, the abject uselessness of the GOP’s ideology to its own constituents has grown more conspicuous. Instead of adapting their ideology to changing circumstances — a financial crisis that exposed the immense hazards of deregulation, the deepening economic insecurity of their voters, the accelerating frequency of wildfires and hurricanes — conservatives have opted to mold reality into conformity with their prejudices. So, the housing crisis was caused by irresponsible (implicitly nonwhite) borrowers; corporate tax cuts are necessary to revive American manufacturing; climate change is a Chinese hoax.
But the GOP’s rural white base does not witness the opioid crisis through the filter of Fox News — they see it out of their living-room windows. Conservatives can’t spin away this reality. And their ideology compels them to exacerbate it.
The opioid crisis is now a public-health emergency for our nation — and that’s a political emergency for the Republican Party. Or, at least, it will be, if Democrats ever find the nerve to declare it one.
nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/10/the-opioid-crisis-is-an-emergency-for-american-conservatism.html
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:16:04 GMT
By the numbers, white communities do seem to be suffering the most from this epidemic or impacted the most. How is opioid addiction affecting black and Latino communities?
The opioid addiction epidemic is sparing African-American and Latino communities, and it's striking when you look at the data. Whether you're looking at overdose deaths or emergency room visits for opioid use problems or treatment admissions for opiate addiction, it's very clear that this epidemic is overwhelmingly white. And it begs the question, why?
I can tell you why. Minorities for the most part DON'T WATCH FOX NEWS!
Approximately when did the opiod epidemic begin?
In the USA, opioid epidemic started in the 1990s. The shift towards opioids for pain management led to a dramatic increase in prescription opioid production. From 1996 to 2012, global OxyContin sales increased from US$48m to over US$2.4bn. The worldwide increase in OxyContin parallels that of other opioids, such as morphine and codeine, which, similarly, experienced an unprecedented rise in production and sales.
When did FOX News first broadcast?
Fox News Channel, American cable television news and political commentary channel launched in 1996. The network operated under the umbrella of the Fox Entertainment Group, the film and television division of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox (formerly News Corporation).
 FEEDING THE BASE
How YouTube's Right Wing Echo Chamber Influences Millennials
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:16:30 GMT
AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEMDoctor Sarno on back-pain Howard Stern's Eulogy for Dr. Sarno www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiaVq-tHc8CKuhiNraZnGp-5BjprjB5tNI saw the original airing of this 20/20 and it changed my way of thinking. The doctor in this video has changed people's lives. Dr. John Sarno was revolutionary in his theory that the autonomic nervous system was the cause of back problems. Stress, anxiety, fear, etc. are all factors that activate the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system (aka reptilian brain, amygdala) which in turn causes physical ailments, in this case back pain. As I mentioned before, the bulk of people on opiods are on it because of back pain. Back pain is brought on by stress, anger, anxiety, etc. which are all brought on by viewing FOX News by conservatives who make up the larger part of the epidemic. If there are liberals, progressives, etc. with similar issues and they don't watch FOX there are most likely similar things activating that same brain center to cause these issues. (like Donald Trump, Mr. Chaos himself) It must be said that FOX AND TRUMP are using psychological techniques to effect a result. FOX News techniques are laid out further down in this thread. As far as Trump goes, his ex wife has told us that Donald kept and studied speeches by Hitler and studied his propaganda techniques. Both FOX and Trump are deliberate in what they are doing. They are dividing America and making us all sick for their own personal gain and profit. In my opinion, this is evil. Trump wasn't sent by GOD, quite the contrary. How does the Autonomic Nervous System affect my pain/symptoms?The Autonomic Nervous System controls numerous parts of your body automatically and without your conscious effort. Things like digestion, respiration, circulation, and heart rate. It has a significant influence on your immune, endocrine, muscular, and nervous systems. It is run automatically and is primarily directed by the primitive parts of your brain, especially the brain stem. A crucial role of this primitive or reptilian brain (amygdala) is protection. It does that through protective reflexes aimed at quickly altering body systems in order to respond to danger. When a dog runs out snarling and barking at you unexpectedly, you startle and prepare for action – this is an example of your Autonomic Nervous System at work.
The autonomic nervous system has two components;
1) the sympathetic, which ramps you up for danger, and
2) the parasympathetic, which calms you down balancing the stimulation of the sympathetic.
Unfortunately in our modern world we have too many stressors, or sympathetic activation, and too many of those stressors where we don’t complete the act of “fight or flight”. When a car cuts you off, when your boss yells at you, when you’re frustrated because you’re in a job you don’t like - (watching the news: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-worry/201206/the-psychological-effects-tv-news ) ‐ all these activate your fight or flight response causing chemical and physiological changes in your body. When we don’t complete the act of fight or flight, those stressors get trapped in our body. Add to that real dangers such as a car accident, trauma, surgery, etc. and you can see how your nervous system becomes one-‐sided, operating primarily out of the sympathetic mode.
When we operate from the sympathetic mode, our primitive protective muscles (primarily in the head, neck, and spine) carry increased tension and tone ready for action. This does not allow them to relax, causes metabolic changes in the tissues, and can be a major factor in chronic pain. Add in the other systems affected by an over active sympathetic nervous system and you get changes throughout your body that can cause cognitive problems, fatigue, gut problems, sleep issues, depression, anxiety, and a host of systemic problems that are difficult for physicians to find a cause for.
So, what can we do? Get to the root of the problem instead of chasing the symptoms. By reprogramming and rebooting the Autonomic Nervous System, we can allow the body to function like it was designed to function. This includes a relaxed nervous system, relaxed muscles, and body systems operating in a balance of stimulation and rest. The rest is easy – the body works and repairs itself like it was designed to do. The body really is an amazing thing, and given the environment it was designed to operate around, it can perform miracles.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:16:56 GMT
I am breaking this article up into sections so it isn't too overwhelming but it explains exactly what FOX News is doing and how it is harming its viewers (and America). FOX News is very cultish in its approach.
www.autostraddle.com/this-is-how-fox-news-brainwashes-its-viewers-our-in-depth-investigation-of-the-propaganda-cycle-297107/
As you read the next several posts you will come to realized FOX News is NOT just reporting news...THEY ARE USING BRAINWASHING TECHNIQUES.
This type of behavior and activity HAS TO BE WELL PLANNED AND IMPLEMENTED BY WILLING PARTICIPANTS THAT ARE NICELY PAID to fool and mesmerize their audience. But to what end? The type of personalities attracted to these messages are conservatives as they are controlled by the fear center of the brain (the amygdala). That has been scientifically proven.This Is How Fox News Brainwashes Its Viewers: Our In-Depth Investigation of the Propaganda CyclePosted by Heather Hogan on September 2, 2015 at 12:57pm PDT
2016 presidential primary season is in full swing, which means, among other things, that Fox News’ ratings are skyrocketing. Fox News has been the most watched cable news network in the country for 12 straight years, regularly pulling in more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. During the first Republican primary debate of this season, Fox clocked its most-ever (24 million) viewers, making the two-hour show the highest-rated non-sports cable telecast of all time.
Over the last ten years, everyone I know has lost a friend or family member or mentor to Fox News. Like me, they have watched helplessly as people they love have become part of the conservative punditry herd and, over time, traded their compassion for paranoia; their thoughtful opinions for manufactured outrage; and their empathy for hateful rhetoric. These people — these moms and dads and aunts and uncles and grandparents and brothers and sisters and pastors and politicians and friends — have been deceived into believing that Fox News and Fox-approved talk radio hosts provide the only commentary they can trust.
What these people so dear to us fail to understand is that Fox News is not only uninterested in being fair and balanced; it is also uninterested in being a reliable source of news. That’s because Fox News is playing a zero-sum political game in which every major news story is an opportunity to use their viewers as pawns to advance the power and agenda of the most extremist ideology of the Republican Party.
Consider Trayvon Martin. After he was murdered by George Zimmerman, multiple journalists pointed out that Fox News had been oddly silent on the subject. Until they had a firm grasp on how to mold the story to their benefit, they refused to report on it. Then, as Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert explains: “Obama addressed it, and once Obama enters the conversation about race, you know, [Fox News] went from zero to a hundred … they decided that the story was partisan, and that supporting Trayvon Martin was the Democratic position, supporting the guy who killed an unarmed teen was the Republican conservative position, and so they set up the markers, and went for it.”
When a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown, Sean Hannity proved Boehlert’s claim. Hannity was practically giddy when he announced to his audience: “Zero for three, a three-time loser! President Obama on high-profile race cases.”
Study after study after study after study has shown that Fox News viewers are the most uninformed and misinformed people in America. One recent study even found that people who didn’t watch any news programs at all had a firmer grasp on the reality of current events than those who only watched Fox News.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:17:22 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:17:43 GMT
Rather than adhering to any kind of journalistic standard when reporting the news, or — as is the case with liberal-leaning MSNBC — reporting truthfully on the news and offering ideological commentary grounded in facts, Fox News starts with their end goal in mind and works backwards. How can a news story be used to damage their viewers’ perceptions of President Obama or the Democratic Party? How can a news story be used to bolster Republican politicians, or advance the causes of Republican-leaning policy influencers like the National Rifle Association or evangelical Christians? How can a news story be used to vilify causes championed by progressive Americans?
Once they’ve settled on the outcome they want, Fox News shapes its narrative and sets in motion its brainwashing cycle.
Fox News’ use of propaganda to isolate and indoctrinate its viewers is deliberate and terrifyingly effective. It thrives off of fear-based sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and dogmatic intolerance toward anyone who is not a straight, white Christian.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:18:06 GMT
The Fox News Propaganda Cycle
I’ve been studying Fox News’ methodology since 2004, when I saw someone I love get pulled into their orbit and transformed for the first time. This article is the culmination of all my research. Below you’ll see a chart I made outlining the way Fox News and their talk radio counterparts use classic propaganda techniques to isolate and indoctrinate their viewers/listeners. And below that, you’ll find an explanation of each technique, along with examples of what these methods look like in action. There are thousands of examples to choose from. I only picked a handful.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:18:28 GMT
Isolate Viewers
“When you’ve got the national liberal media working compulsively on your behalf, it is very difficult to break through the noise to the reality.” – Lou Dobbs, November 2012
“The liberal elite” is a concept created by Richard Nixon’s campaign during his bid for presidency in 1960. Feminists who were advocating for workplace equality; black people who were working to end racist violence, segregation, and laws against interracial marriage; and anti-war demonstrators who were weary of the war in Vietnam were making white men uneasy, so the Nixon campaign began branding those activists and their sympathizers as “the liberal elite.” Good old hardworking white men like Nixon were the real Americans, and the “liberal elite” were a threat to a traditional, God-approved, Founding Fathers-sanctioned way of life.
Fox News has piggybacked off Nixon’s strategy and expanded it with wild success.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:18:51 GMT
False Dichotomies
Creating a false dichotomy is a propaganda technique used to oversimplify complicated issues and force people to believe they have an either/or choice. The group creating the false dichotomy knows many choices are available, but for their message to be successful, they must convince listeners that their choices are limited. Fox News and its talk radio counterparts don’t simply position themselves against MSNBC; they position themselves against literally every other source of information. You can choose the good guy, or you can choose the bad guy. You can get your news from Fox and Fox-approved talk radio hosts (true patriots who are trying to save the country) or you can get your news from the liberal media (deceitful or delusional people who are trying to destroy the country).
Maintaining a false dichotomy is essential for Fox News. If their viewers receive information or analysis from any other group, no matter how apolitical or nonpartisan that group is, viewers will be forced to confront the misinformation that is pressed onto them by Fox News.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:19:14 GMT
Ad Nauseam
Ad nauseam is a propaganda tactic that involves repeating a phrase or an idea over and over and over until an audience begins to accept it as fact. Fox News uses the ad nauseam technique in every step of their propaganda cycle, but it’s most crucial in the isolation phase because it’s most effective when a viewer/listener’s media sources are limited. After creating the false dichotomy between Fox and every other news source, Fox pundits scorn the “liberal media” or “mainstream media” with relentless fervor. Political wins that don’t line up with conservative ideology are caused by the evil liberal media. Anyone who questions Fox News is part of the lying liberal media. If you read something on the internet that made you doubt Fox News, it’s because the internet is controlled by the manipulative liberal media.
Hour after hour, day after day, Fox uses the phrases “liberal media” and “mainstream media” to perpetually reinforce the false dichotomy that isolates Fox viewers from reality.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:19:39 GMT
Confirmation Bias and Cognitive Dissonance
Once a person has settled on a core belief, they are likely to seek out information that validates that belief and avoid information that challenges it. They are also more likely to bend evidence to fit inside the paradigm of their belief than they are to alter their belief to align with evidence suggesting their belief is incorrect. The practice of accepting only information that confirms something you already believe while rejecting any information that challenges that belief is called confirmation bias. Having core beliefs challenged causes cognitive dissonance.
One of the main reasons Fox News is so effective at using cognitive dissonance to keep people away from other news sources is that Fox has strategically aligned itself with evangelical Christianity. So, if one of Fox News’ teachings is called into question, Fox itself is called into question; and if Fox is synonymous with God’s politics, God’s politics are called into question; and if God’s politics are called into question, God is called into question. Therefore, any challenge to Fox is framed as an attack on God himself.
Creating cognitive dissonance by framing oneself as God’s true ally and spokesperson is one of the most powerful propaganda techniques of all time. It has worked for fascists on a national scale and it has worked for cult leaders operating out of barns. It is especially compelling in the United States, where our belief that we are God’s chosen people has been methodically woven into our national identity since John Winthrop gave his “City on a Hill” speech in 1630, before ever setting foot on this continent.
+ Fox News radio host Todd Starnes calls notoriously anti-LGBT restaurant Chick-Fil-A “the official chicken of Jesus.”
+ Bill O’Reilly fights an imaginary war to preserve the celebration of Christmas.
+ When Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson went on his now-infamous homophobic tirade in GQ, Sean Hannity called Robertson’s remarks “old fashioned traditional Christian sentiment and values.” Erick Erickson said Robertson “spoke openly of his Christian faith. Because he offended a secular left at war with orthodox Christianity, he must be punished.” And Jim Pinkerton called his suspension from the show “a purge of Southern white Christian patriotic culture out of TV.”
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:20:03 GMT
Create Enemy“The days of [minorities] not having any power are over, and they are angry. And they want to use their power as a means of retribution.” – Rush Limbaugh, June 2009
“This is the new America; this ain’t your father’s America.” – Dick Morris, November 2012
The most important component of maintaining a world built on propaganda is creating an enemy who is excluded from an in-group. Bouncing off of Nixon’s concept of traditional Americans, Fox has cultivated an image of its in-group (for its in-group) as people who love God, who love their families, and who love their country. Once the parameters of the in-group have been established, the process of othering begins. By exploiting pre-existing beliefs, images, and negative stereotypes, an out-group is formed. In the case of Fox, this out-group, again, aligns with Nixon’s definition of the “liberal elite”: people who challenge the oppression of the established power structure.
Once the enemy has been created, there’s no need to appeal to logic. In her fantastic book Enemy Images in War Propaganda, Marja Vuorinen explains that humans tend to think of themselves and their in-groups as possessing all the qualities of good virtue (“honesty, righteousness, purity, proper manners, hard work, right religion”), and in an attempt to preserve that fragile self-image, humans project the opposite attributes (“evil, untruthful, cooked, lazy, superstitious, barbaric”) onto groups of people who are not like them. Fox is addictive not only because it feeds a specific ideology, but also because it provides daily reassurance that Fox viewers are God’s chosen Good Guys by reiterating that the “liberal elite” are the Bad Guys.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:20:25 GMT
Projection/Flipping
Projection/flipping is simply falsely accusing someone else of the doing/being the thing you’re responsible for doing/being. These techniques are Fox News favorites. They are used in every step of Fox’s propaganda cycle, but they’re especially effective at creating enemies.
+ On a November 2012 episode of The O’Reilly Factor, notorious bully Bill O’Reilly lambasted dishonest media culture and “vicious” people from the far-left, saying: “There are entire media operations that exist solely to promote ideology; it’s obviously a bad situation that is getting worse.” He is describing himself and Fox news with alarming clarity, but accusing the “liberal media” of his crimes instead.
+ In May 2012, President Obama was asked on The View whether or not he expected the presidential election to be close. He replied, “When your name is Barack Obama, it’s always tight.” President Obama was referring to the tactics conservative pundits have used paint him as a non-American with sympathies and ties to radical Middle Eastern terrorist groups. That afternoon, however, Fox News regular Monica Crowley called the president “bigoted” for suggesting many Americans view him through a racist lens. This is flipping in a nutshell: When a victim calls you out on your bigotry and your suggest that they are the bigot and you are the victim.
+ Glenn Beck — who has a long history of spewing racist rhetoric against black people, Muslims, and undocumented workers — accused President Obama of having “a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture.”
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 10:20:50 GMT
Character Assassination
Character assassination is a propaganda technique used to attack a person, rather than an idea, by discrediting, defaming, demonizing, or dehumanizing them. Fox News does not only use character assassination against liberal politicians and organizations; it also uses character assassination against innocent people involved in tragedies that could be catalysts for progressive changes, like greater equality for racial minorities or gun control. For example, Fox News has made it a common practice to create heroes out of the racist white men who kill innocent black teenagers.
+ When Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman, Fox News guest Doug Burns said, “I know everybody keeps sarcastically saying about the Skittles. You could probably kill somebody with Skittles. The thing is, yeah, you’re spinning a lot of hypotheticals. And you could break a bottle of iced tea, right, with the jagged edge, and you could kill somebody with it.” Geraldo Rivera insisted that Martin’s “hoodie is as much responsible for [his] death as George Zimmerman was.” After which he continued to paint a menacing picture of the unarmed teenager and defend Zimmerman’s decision to kill him.
+ After Eric Garner was killed by New York City police who used an illegal chokehold on him, Fox News went to great lengths to blame his murder on Garner himself. The coroner’s report stated that Garner died of “compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” However, Fox News sought commentary from pundits who blamed Garner’s other health issues for his death, believed Garner had it coming because he was selling cigarettes illegally, or denied that he was even placed in a chokehold at all.
+ After unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot multiple times by Officer Darren Wilson, Fox News hosts repeatedly asserted that Brown was a “bad guy,” a narrative that included the perpetual presentation of false information.
+ When Freddie Gray was killed in the back of a police van in Baltimore, Fox News contributor Bo Dietel said, “I’m just hoping they did toxicology [on Gray]. Possibly he was on drugs.” When Geraldo Rivera arrived on the scene in Baltimore to cover the protests, he said residents seemed to be “looking for trouble.”
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