There is another study out that shows that Fox News watchers are aggressively and disproportionately misinformed about pretty much everything. But I wonder whether this is because they believe the lies that they are told while they are watching Fox News or it is because the subset of people who are attracted to Fox News is submental in the first place. I mean, you have to be a half a dick to actually like their programming. I can’t endure it at all, and it’s not just the content. The graphics, the sets…just the whole attitude is aggressively obnoxious.
So, first you get a bunch of reptile-minded dicks and then you subject them to rank propaganda that has been specifically designed to appeal to their most base and mean instincts. The next thing you know, they are buying a Bill O’Reilly coffee mug and muttering about the War on Christmas.
I’d like to see a controlled experiment where they let one group of people self-select which cable news network they watch and another group is assigned randomly. Then we can see if the stupid people are choosing Fox News and being made more stupid, or if Fox News can draw in mentally competent people and turn them into drooling buffoons who think Charles Krauthammer isn’t a deluded crackpot but a sage patriot and overall mensch.
they don’t deal well with reality
There have been several studies of conservative mind-sets vs liberal mind-sets. But you cannot do this experiment as a single time-point evaluation. Besides, you are trying to separate out two components of thought process that are at this time entirely co-related:
That is, for 2, conservatives view the world as a political thing, and use this filter to see all actions. News about the government is inherently biased, as government actions to a conservative are entirely different than government actions to a liberal. This affects what they are willing to listen to, and what the manner in which news is delivered means.
It is essentially the viewpoint of the communist party. Remember the scene in Dr. Zhivago in which Zhivago is captured by the communist partisans while he is on his horse returning from his mistress in Yeltsin? There were two leaders, the military leader and the political leader. The political leader interpreted reality and assigned meaning to it, based on political considerations. That is today’s Republican Party and conservatives. Meaning is based on political interpretation.
That’s Weltanschaung. :o}
..wow, so THAT’s what happend to the pomo litcrit types!
Not that I missed them or anything, all that crap about “constructed reality” was just annoying.
There is a historical reason why US conservatism looks so much like the viewpoint of the USSR Communist Party.
In the 1960s, conservatives got so freaked out that the USSR was winning the ideological battle between godless Communism and Christian capitalism that it studied how the Communist Party in the Soviet Union worked, ostensibly to argue how liberalism was on a slick slide to Communism. Where they came out is in adopting many of the tactics of the Communist Party: propaganda, captured news media, political supervision of the civil service (very apparent in the Bush administration), operation as impenetrable cells, organizing popular fronts around wedge issues, unquestioning loyalty to party, and seeking one-party rule to advance their agenda.
Your observation is not surprising and was predictable even in the activities of Young Americans for Freedom in the late 1960s.
And just as in Zhivago, the merchants and old ruling class soon found ways to use that sort of politics to their advantage.
Democracy requires more democracy to keep democracy going. There are no short cuts to patience persuasion and stimulating real political discussion. All the short cuts lead to tyranny of one sort or another – tyranny by an authoritarian party, tyranny by corporations, tyranny by a unified unresponsive government locked in its own agenda, tyranny by cultural institutions like religion or ethnic movements. There are no short cuts.
I think it’d be an interesting experiment. From the people I know who watch Fox News, they generally fall into two categories.
The first is the one you mention, the people for whom Fox News and all it’s built around both consciously and subconsciously is just a good match. Not a lot of critical thinking in this group.
The second are people who don’t, or at least didn’t pay attention to cable news a whole lot. But then there was one issue that they cared about that came along…usually this is an issue that causes them to fear something. 9/11 is of course the prime example, but others certainly include the other focuses of the Republic Party such as gay marriage, the ‘persecution’ of Christians and their symbols, abortion, etc, etc.
This is where Fox News is at its subversive best, because they know that people just tuning in are doing it because they’re afraid of something, and Fox News is more than willing to use that as a mental foothold. Gradually they’ll open that little hole up and pour in the propaganda bit by bit, and pretty soon they’ve taken a nice enough person who happened to be a little uninformed and afraid and turned them into a misinformed dittohead.
I thought about this quite a bit while visiting some relatives who had it on continually until they noticed it was bothering me and they kindly turned it off.
Most just want someone who will conform the facts to their own narrative about how the world works. Do that long enough and you can’t really tell fact from fiction, nor do you care to distinguish between the two. As the conservative narrative about how the world works becomes more disconnected from reality, this trend will become even more pronounced.
I only know a few people who watch Fox and they are all family members. For them, the late 60s were sort of a breaking point and from then on it was Dems bad, GOP good. They are thankful that there’s a network that will do the hard work of taking reality and molding it to that perception. And to think, back in the 90s these folks had to fish around on weird web sites and conspiracy theory literature to have their views that that the Clintons were evil murderers confirmed. Now its on basic cable.
I think it is more a case that there is a certain cultural subset of people in this country who are very comfortable tuning into FOX because it confirms their innate biases. I see it around here as almost a tribal sort of thing. FOX News is on the TV in every place around here that is not exclusively a Sports venue. Coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores, bars, carry-outs; they play FOX round the clock. No matter where you go when you are going about your daily chores or leisure time activities, FOX is playing somewhere in the background. You are never far from it’s din. It is exactly like the perpetually running telescreens in Orwell’s 1984.
And people around here can connect easily with other people who are a part of the in-group (tribe) because they all share that commonality. It is the same psychology of confirmation bias that anyone uses who wants to control someone who is part of the group. You dare not challenge the orthodoxy of the group or you risk being cast, at best, as an outsider. Or, at worst as a radical threat to the stability of the group. And you can, in the worst case scenario, risk physical harm.
This can happen in any group, really. In the case of FOX viewers, though, they tend to be white, Protestant and older. Those are the major characteristics of their particular tribe. And most in this group see their world through a common lens of backgrounds and experiences.
That is a perfect description of wht I see here in East Central Texas. Of course you can still wonder how many people are actually paying the slightest bit of attention to what’s being nattered about on the screen.
This is not really on point, but in the past few years I have traveled a lot in the heartland of the country and stayed in motels. First, many do not get MSNBC, but they will get FOX on cable. So there isn’t an opportunity to watch another other than Fox of CNN, and CNN is pretty dull. Second, if I go to have my free continental breakfast and FOX is on the TV, I ask them to change the channel. Maybe they turn to the Today Show or one of those other morning shows. Fine. Others see me do that and no one objects. But I wish I could make it a “movement” nationwide!
There is such a campaign.
http://turnofffox.org/
http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/article_8b0ac0de-a10c-11df-9202-001cc4c03286.html
Newswatchers in general are aggressively misinformed, but not as disproportionately as FoxNews watchers.
Coverage, for example has failed to point out that estate taxes applied only to those with an estate of over $3.5 million.
Yes, folks, you don’t have to pay federal estate taxes on the $250,000 sale of your parents’ house. State estate taxes are a different matter.
“Charles Krauthammer isn’t a SMUG deluded crackpot”
Fixed that for you Boodood.
The smugness is what drives me nuts. They are so fucking wrong, and most know they are shoveling shit, yet they do it with such arrogance.
Of course it’s easy to be smug and arrogant when you know the one thing you are right about is you can say anything, anything at all, and your stupid viewers will believe it.
It really is amazing how stupid most Americans are.
nalbar