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Date Posted: 05:39:08 12/18/15 Fri
Author: No name
Subject:

This Is How Fox News Brainwashes Its Viewers

Pay attention Bubbles, this is how you got as fucked up as you are...

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.

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.”

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.

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. Below you’ll see a chart 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.

Isolate Viewers

“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.

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.

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.

Create Enemy

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.

Appeal to Fear

Creating a climate of fear is essential to all propagandists, and Fox News is no exception. Fear is a primitive and often irrational emotion, so messages that appeal to fear bypass the brain’s logic center and land right in the hypothalamus, which controls a person’s fight-or-flight response. Like I mentioned above, Fox News’ out-group includes anyone who is not a straight white Christian, so it’s very easy for the network to exploit their viewers’ irrational fears of every minority group in America. The white victimization narrative is a cornerstone of Fox News’ (and Fox-adjacent talk radio hosts) programming. The idea they perpetuate is that the way of life treasured by hard-working, G0d-fearing, America-loving, family-first Conservatives is under constant threat by minority groups.

Create Alternate Reality

Misinformation is simply spreading false information that is intended to deceive. Fox News constantly, purposefully misinforms its viewers. I’m going to list a handful of examples below with an annotation about which of the aforementioned propaganda techniques the misinformation is used to play into. There are entire websites dedicated to correcting Fox News’ lies on a daily basis. Remember that Fox News viewers overwhelmingly accept these lies as irrefutable facts.

+ In March 2010, Fox & Friends co-anchor Gretchen Carlson said the Texas Board of Education is was considering new history textbooks that would “eliminate references to certain holidays, Founding Fathers, the Constitution! I mean, no surprise that Christmas, they want to get rid of that because they’ve been doing that for the last couple of years, but c’mon, the Constitution?” Untrue. (Isolate viewers: ad nauseam, cognitive dissonance.)

+ In January 2014, on Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade said Colorado welfare recipients can turn their benefits into cash at ATMS, which they will do to buy marijuana. Untrue. (Appeal to fear: minority-baiting, coded language, stereotyping.)

+ In April 2014 Todd Starnes said that liberals had figured out a Facebook algorithm and “all the people getting banned from Facebook are somehow conservatives.” Untrue. (Isolate viewers: false dichotomies, ad nauseam. Create an enemy: character assassination.)

+ In February The Five co-host Dana Perions said about climate change: “The temperature readings have been fabricated, and it’s all blowing up in their (scientists’) faces.” On the same panel, Kimberly Guilfoyle called climate change research “fraud science.” Obviously untrue. (Just pure misinformation, as are 72% of Fox News claims about climate change.)

+ In September 2014, Britt Hume said that President Obama was sending a much larger force to deal with Ebola in West African countries than with ISIS. Super untrue. (Appeal to fear: minority-baiting, coded language.)

+ And let’s not forget Birtherism. In 2013, 64 percent of Republicans still believed President Obama was not born in the United States. (Appeal to fear: minority-baiting, coded language, stereotyping.)

The goal with this article isn’t to ridicule people who watch Fox News; the goal is to to make plain this deliberate, manipulative cycle Fox traps its viewers inside, so we can use our knowledge to begin to set our friends and family free.

I have no hope that Bubbles will actually read and/or understand all the big words here. But it's here anyway, to show him how his mind got so fucked up.

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Replies:

Very interesting breakdown on how FOX does what they do best...propagandizing. (NT) -- Somebody should create a one-page chart so people can take them to holiday events & hand them out to fucked up family and friends., 15:21:07 12/18/15 Fri
(NT) -- No name, 05:19:59 12/19/15 Sat
- Uh huh. I'd ask what that has to do with anything at all... but I know Bubbles couldn't answer a question to save his teeny tiny dick from getting cut off. (NT) -- No name, 06:16:19 12/19/15 Sat
  - Like talking about dicks do you? Good little bitch boy. (NT) -- No name, 13:49:51 12/19/15 Sat
    - That's all you got out of that huh? A 'dick' referance.
      Dude, you need to focus, stop letting every little dick referance get you all worked up and distracted. (NT) -- No name, 07:22:04 12/20/15 Sun
    - ^^This is the same guy who posts photos of a gay parade and is in love with Putin. (NT) -- I don't think you should be tossing shit like this around, Bubbles. As a matter-of-fact, I think you have dicks on the brain (when they're not in your mouth)., 12:35:55 12/20/15 Sun

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