For decades now so-called Fox News has been pushing the absurd proposition that the “mainstream” media in this country is covertly liberal and the equally absurd corollary that therefore people who want to know the truth should stop listening to the “mainstream” which pretends not to be biased and instead listen only to those who wear their bias on their sleeve. If the first were the case, which it is not, the solution would not be to listen instead to the right-wing response but to listen to both the mainstream and the conservative media and make up your own mind. But they would never say this. There is a liberal media in this country, most obviously represented by in MSNBC. But neither the NY Times nor the Washington Post nor the major networks other than Fox nor NPR nor the major papers in this country—whatever their editorial stance—is pushing a liberal agenda in their news coverage. All responsible news organizations fight against their prejudices. They often fail. There are a great number of legitimate criticisms to be made of the media, but a clandestine liberal bias is not one of them.
Fox “News” has pushed the two absurdities so hard for so long that many Americans simply accept them. Thus Fox “News” has made significant steps toward raising the stupidity level of the country. If you base your network on brace of lies, if you invite your viewers to accept the irrational conclusion that only an avowedly partisan agenda can present the truth, you teach them to see everything through the clouded lens of unreason. If you want to get people to make irrational choices you have to work very hard and very long to make them stupid—not completely stupid, because that leads to chaos—but just stupid enough so that the starting point of their thought is inside your bubble. It’s working very well.
Fox can’t be given sole credit for the raise of the most mendacious candidate probably in the history of the country to the presidency, a grandiose and mentally unstable egomaniac, but I doubt it could have happened without the softening up of the territory that has been going on all these years. Irrationality and prejudice are not new to our culture. They have always been there. But I wonder if we ever had a machine as powerful for promoting them before this. If you can be sucked in by the founding absurdities of Fox “News,” you can be taught to accept any number of easily disprovable things: the Climate Change is a hoax, that immigrants are a threat, that Muslims are all extremists, that socialism is evil, that the promotion of so-called American values of capitalism and democracy throughout the world is benign, that higher education is a form of liberal indoctrination. That a dangerous monomaniac has any business being in power.
And on and on.
As with any multivariable and constantly changing system, it will never be possible to weigh the particular effect of any one element. We’ll never know with precision what the world would have been like if not for Fox “News.” But we can be pretty sure it would have been a whole lot better.
