This is what peak propaganda looks like.
It only took 36 years.
That’s how long ago the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine was abolish. It should come to no one’s surprise that it was abolished under the Reagan Administration.
For those that do not know, the Fairness Doctrine essentially forced TV News to present BOTH sides to a story in an unbiased manner. There are many people reading this who were not even alive when this was abolished which means they have always had biased news in their lives. It amazes me how rarely the Fairness Doctrine is brought up when it comes to the destruction of our news media and ways the Right has tried to undermine our democracy and shift this country’s attitudes toward the Right.
What is equally infuriating to me is when I hear people on the Left endlessly waffle from one rather insignificant topic to the next that they should focus their efforts on, and ultimately never getting anywhere. Enacting some type of new Fairness Doctrine should be near the top of the list of things the Left should be pushing for. An unbiased news media is the foundation that a democracy is built on. The news media is how the general public becomes educated on what is happening and that simply can’t happen when they lie endlessly like FOX News so famously does (other stations do as well, but few do it as well as Fox does). But the Left doesn’t focus on things like the Fairness Doctrine because it admittedly isn’t a “sexy” topic. It doesn’t get people’s attention. And it isn’t something that can get solved in a few weeks. The lack of focus is frustrating.
Anyways, this topic put me on a tangent that nearly no one will read, but people love to react to what is happening this instant, but rarely ever think about how we got to this point. These bamboozled Fox News watchers didn’t simply wake up one day and believe all the shit that network spews out. The Right plays the long game on things and having an army of brainwashed listeners takes years and even decades to develop. The Left needs to learn this strategy.
Sorry for the rant.
Fairness Doctrine reinstated and enforced on anything claiming to act as news would definitely go a long way towards fixing the political hellscape fascist billionaires have created in their endless greed. Their strategy works off of fear and nationalism, you won’t be able to replicate it on the Left and still retain an audience of freethinkers, the propaganda is designed to wear people down and make them dumber than when they initially tuned in. Only authoritarians seek to erode the meaning of words for their own gain like the Right does on Fox, the best longterm strategy the Left has is education and voter-participation. - Things the Right undercut and underfund every chance they get.
Lol he admitted on tape he committed crimes.
They don’t read good
They don’t read
These are not smart people. You can ignore their opinions. They are lizards. They hate failure and weakness. As soon as Trump falters, they will pretend that they never supported him. These people would have died for George Bush, and he became a laughing stock within a couple years.
Only 42%? That’s more than enough to win the primary if Fox news is a comparable sample of primary election voters.
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That were actually sampled. Coulda been a whole 200 people.
Does anyone remember this?
STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All
Society will never progress while Fox News is allowed to remain on the air. Fox News creates digital walls to segregate the audience from reality.
I remember a time when news for most people came from the local paper and/or a 30 minute network evening TV show. Both were written by real journalists who attempted to be unbiased.
Read up on roger Ailes and Reagan destroying ‘The Fairness Doctrine.’
Back in the day, you could only own two radio stations in one town [AM and FM] and any editorial had to provide time for rebuttal.
Yup. You can take nearly a modern “bad thing” and trace it back to Reagan policy.
Nixon too. Particularly around the state of insurance in the US.
And cancelling Apollo. The Saturn V was the greatest engineering achievement of the human race. If the Wright brothers had done their first flight and 8 years later some group flew a 747 across the Pacific ocean it would have been by multiple measures a less impressive achievement.
He cancelled the remaining missions and shelved the rocket. Within 2 years it could no longer be built and the country that went to the moon could not put a human into space. In the 50 years since then no rocket has come close to what it could do.
And he did it all for tax cuts.
That is, until Sinclair and Clear Channel started gobbling up local affiliates to push their own narratives.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy
This Is Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy
This Is Extremely Dangerous To Our Democracy
Fox News tapped an audience which was already open to such bullshittery. Removing Fox News does not remove that audience. We need to better understand why a significant proportion of the population (not just of the US, but of the world) embraces fascism and the structures that drive towards it. Then, to identify how to convince fascists to abandon fascism.
Maindrivers of fascism are the insane people fearmongering and stoking nationalism in a bid for more power and money. It’s corruption and nonsense all the way down only made possible by poor education and voter participation. FPTP and lax campaign laws make it easy for the super wealthy to influence elections behind the scenes too. A lot of democracies are still run with systems designed by ancient wealthy romans for the benefit of ancient wealthy romans and are left unchanged. It’s to the surprise of noone when billionaires act like emperors in modern times with inequality on the rise everywhere and with news indistinguishable from entertainment given how the fairness doctrine has been long abolished even if that was precisely why it existed in the first place.
Do we? Hasn’t there been lots of books written by Europeans who lived thru the 1930s documented step by step how their nation fell.
Books that the majority of Americans are too apathetic, ideologically poisoned or just busy to read, much less take concrete actions as a result.
I wish it wasn’t so, but that’s the current reality. Telling your average Faux News viewer to read and honestly reflect on objective history books is a fool’s errand.
We have to fight intolerance not with the information of the tolerant, but with vilification, exclusion and other severe consequences for their misanthropic words and actions.
Agree with the point that Fox News tapped that audience, disagree that removing them wouldn’t help.
Media literacy must be included as part of primary education. How do we know things? How do we find out things? What does it mean to “create a podcast”? etc.
They (GOP) created the audience over decades by gutting education, social support programs and encouraging racism.
By the time fox came around people were ripe to be abused.
Mostly agree, but I think that’s just one step removed. It’s not like the GOP (more correctly, conservatism) erected everything out of whole cloth, against a social democrat utopia that already existed. There has always been a very overlapping and sizeable Euler diagram of populism, conservatism, nationalism, and fascism, extending back into the tribal fog of prehistory.
It’s easy to point the finger at the primary bogeymen of today, and that over simplification is a major way that these horrible political and social views propagate. Their messaging is wrong, but it’s easy, and generally speaking, people prefer easy to complicated, with disregard to what’s more accurate.
The technology that allows powerful people to make war with each other and oppress the weak has vastly outpaced the advancement of more inclusive social and political philosophies. We’re going to need to come to a better understanding that we humans are all together one tribe. We need to be dedicated to the common good, not only of people like us, but of people unlike us, too, on the basis that we are all people.
CNN is working on becoming a Fox News clone now too after the Warner-Discovery merger.
If people weren’t as stupid, they’d already be ignoring fox news.
The solution to misinformation isn’t censorship, it’s for people to be better educated. Are we supposed to ban every conspiracy theory website? If so, who gets to decide what is the truth and what is “misinformation”? The same type of government organization that is now banning books in florida? No thanks.
Wait, so, people who get their news from a biased entertainment company believe something biased and non-factual? I for one am flabbergasted.
91% of people think they’re smarter than the United States justice system. This is because most of the United States citizens actually study law as a hobby, and even though they’re more qualified than the United States government, they choose alternative forms of income instead.
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I mean, that’s an appeal to authority (one of the well known fallacies). Not saying these people are smart, but that logic doesn’t make sense.
There was some nobel prize winning scientist who literally claimed white people were genetically superior to blacks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779
You get the idea…
Appeal to authority isn’t a fallacy if it’s a relevant authority, though. The US federal courts are a pretty dang relevant authority on US federal crimes.
I was being sarcastic 😉
91% of the dumbest people on Earth are even dumber than we thought.
The thing is they don’t believe he committed any crimes because Fox keeps telling them he didn’t.
This is like saying that 91% of members of the KKK hold racist views.
It is actually quite interesting that the number is only 91%, that means that some people are watching Fox who do have a brain, I don’t know why they’re doing that.
some people are watching Fox who do have a brain, I don’t know why they’re doing that.
They watch it for the entertainment value that it uses to defend itself in court - or they’ve yet to be worn down by the stupid nonsense they spout altogether.
I can’t watch it. It just makes me angry.
Propaganda works.
When I was in school and learned about propaganda, I thought how do people believe in crazy lies. Like a Korean dictator having a divine birth, walking at 3 weeks of age, or not pooping. It is because propaganda works if that is all the info you have.
Lol. 42% is still much higher than any of the other
dumbassGOP presidential candidates.Makes me think of the old Mr. Show sketch - “85% of supporters think he didn’t do it, even if he did.”
“91% of Fox viewers conditioned to never say anything bad about someone with a R next to their name, regardless of what they actually believe”
FTFY
Ronald Reagan famously said that the “eleventh commandment” was: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.”
The phrase was coined in the 1960s by Gaylord Parkinson, who was the state chairman of California Republicans at the time: “Henceforth, if any Republican has a grievance against another, that grievance is not to be bared publicly.”
Gaylord Parkinson
Is that… is that really a name?
Semi spoiler but haven’t watched Meet the Parents? That’s actually the first time I found out it was an actual name but it’s older now I know. Sorry if that spoiled it for anyone but it’s literally the last joke of the movie. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it, not outstanding but solid comedy, plus has the best nipple joke.
According to Republicans, a terrible disease and a bad disease
“Only”
Conservatives lie to pollsters
There’s probably more truth in this than everyone in this discussion would want to admit.
They secretly want Trump, but they’re embarrassed in public to say that.
I’ve never been contacted for a poll. I didn’t even consider this. Lying to a poll jfc. Imagine being ashamed of what you believe.
That’s the only way you can reconcile still being in the cult with seeing yourself as a smart and kind person: constantly lying to everyone including yourself.
