How to effectively combat the Fox News propaganda machine?

Great Debates
1

It’s hard to overestimate the impact Fox News has on the US political scene. It’s a highly effective ultra-conservative

Regular Fox News viewers obediently swallow whatever the Fox propaganda machine tells them, including that climate change is a hoax and that the impeachment inquiry is a Democratic witch hunt. And Fox has convinced many/most of them they can only trust Fox News. I’m out of patience and would like to shove every Fox-News-Lovin’ climate change denier and impeachment obstructionist out of the way so the rest of us can do what needs to be done. I won’t, obviously (Nellie is jelly.), but how do we ever get the truth to these people?

2

Play CNN on the televisions in airport lounges and dentist office waiting rooms.

3

Just wait. In five years, 67% of the Faux demographic will have passed on, so new program material will be developed for whatever audiences can be sucked in. Expect the usual high quotient of female flesh.

4

Of what or whom are you jealous? :wink:

5

It’s hard to see how it can happen. Big corporate interests support conservative politicians and conservative politicians support big corporate interests. It’s all a big intertangled web and when you try to pull one piece out, the rest of the web resists.

It took a generation to build up this power structure and it would take another generation to slowly dismantle it. And I don’t see that happening; most people aren’t going to be willing to make that kind of sustained effort towards a goal that’s not very clear.

So I think the only thing that will change our current political system is a violent shock. Something like a major economic crisis, a major environmental crisis, or a major war. It will have to be something big enough to jolt people out of their established political beliefs.

And that kind of thing can be very bad. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a good leader like a Washington or a Lincoln or an FDR who will make the necessary changes while exercising some self-restraint and respecting fundamental values. But other countries have been unlucky and their crises have produced bad leaders like a Napoleon or a Lenin or a Hitler who used a crisis to put themselves in power and destroy opposition.

6

…the problem is bigger than Fox News.

This is propaganda direct from the President of the United States.

Here is the official twitter account of the White House.

And here is the White House lying to the American people.

Its hard to hide from Fox News. Its easy to be outraged, we can see what they are doing, its out in the open.

But its stuff like thisthat is happening quietly in the background, that is being micro-targeted directly to both Trump supporters and to people who are easily influenced, that is in my humble opinion a much bigger danger to democracy.

I can not overstate enough how much trouble democracy is in at the moment. Not just in America. And I can’t overstate enough how normalised this has all become. The Trump Administration is broadcasting what would be accepted as propaganda if done by any other nation on a daily basis and Americans have just accepted it.

Fox News propaganda is much easier to deal with than State propaganda. Go after the money. Target the advertisers. Call them out loudly and clearly. It won’t fix the problem, but you can work your arses off to effectively marginalise them.

But State propaganda? You’ve only got one solution.

Vote the fuckers out of office.

Not just this current administration. Everywhere. Local council. Mayors. School boards. Fight for the Senate. Hold onto the House.

Pick a presidential candidate who understands what the Trump administration is doing, because getting Trump out of office is only half the job. (And in my opinion Biden would be woefully out of his depth)

Fight voter suppression. Don’t base your strategy around appealing to Trump supporters, instead focus on massively increasing voter turnout.

Up until now things have been bad. But the call for impeachment will accelerate things. We are in the endgame now. The volume of propaganda, the blatant lies, is going to increase. And those lies re going to be essentially mainlined directly to those who choose to listen, and you probably aren’t going to even see it. In my opinion the next election will be the most important election in American history.

So…no pressure guys.

7

I don’t know how to combat it, but it’s an extremely serious problem that is literally undermining democracy. Fox News viewers and readers live in a delusional world of their own that is exactly equivalent to what happens when a totalitarian dictatorship censors all news and information that is unfavorable to the regime, and fabricates favorable news out of thin air: most people living in such Orwellian dictatorships simply have no idea what’s really going on. The only difference is that Fox News isn’t devoted to manipulating news in support of a regime in power, they are devoted to manipulating the news in support of Republicans, always.

I don’t have a huge problem with some degree of media bias since to some extent all media has a certain degree of bias. But Fox News goes so far beyond mere “bias” that it’s a dangerous threat to freedom and democracy, and anyone who thinks they’re only “biased” is already in their delusional spin zone. The reality is that they omit essential information and context, they blatantly distort facts, they muddle the difference between news and opinion, and sometimes they totally just make shit up. And a very significant proportion of voters think Fox News is reporting facts.

A good recent example concerns the packet of documents that the State Department inspector general handed over to Congress a few days ago. As most of us know by now, these documents are mostly a compilation of crackpot conspiracy theories and other garbage put together by Rudy Giuliani in an effort to smear Biden and other Democrats. The basic story here being reported by legitimate media is the disturbing length to which the Trump administration will go to smear Democrats with lies and innuendo. And how is Fox News reporting this? They’re reporting the various crackpot conspiracy theories and other lies in these documents as if they were actual facts, under headlines like “Files reveal that …”! And Fox News viewers and readers are eating it up, and after thoroughly opposing impeachment because it’s a “witch hunt”, next year they’re going to go out and vote for Trump, because of how scary evil the Democrats are.

8

Sure, and the extent of it is unprecedented, but the counter to that in a free democracy is a free press, media that exposes the lies and tells people the truth. But in the US today, I would bet that something approaching nearly half the voters consider Fox News to be “the media”. As for the real media, the current president of the United States has convinced them it’s “the enemy of the people”.

9

…one would think.

But the “free press” in America operate at the whim of their corporate overlords. And many of those corporate overlords don’t give a fuck about doing the right thing. Propaganda from the administration isn’t treated as propaganda, its treated as a press release and a click-bait headline. And by doing so it just continues the normalization of that propaganda.

The “free press” is often *complicit *with the administration. Its often unintentional, but that doesn’t matter. The free press isn’t going to save us. We are all just going to have to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves.

10

I don’t really agree with that. Do you think the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers, and CNN, NPR, and the major broadcast networks, don’t do real journalism? There’s a reason Trump lumped them all together as “the enemy of the people” – because they tell the truth and threaten his hold on power. The major issue with commercial media (outside of Fox News, of course, which is just a Republican propaganda machine) is their tendency to sensationalize and and a tendency to emphasize stories with big audience appeal over more serious news stories. Sometimes I get better US news coverage from non-US public networks like the BBC or CBC. Still, the major media generally manage to get the job done in terms of informing the public, but you can’t force-feed information to those who won’t listen. The kinds of wingnuts who support Trump don’t read real newspapers or watch legitimate media.

11

To me, a conflict seems to arise when this free press is or is part of a larger profit-driven corporation. Corporations exist to make money, bottom line. I dont see much value in vilifying an entire section of our economy as “evil” as we seem to do with corporations and their"soulless overlords"

But, when delivering the news or exercising this free press conflicts with the bottom line, and that bottom line dictates the shaping of that political narrative, the bottom line always will win.every time. Its blatant on propaganda machines like Fox News. But it is much more subtle and therefore insidious, in left of center media sources, including but not limited to cable news like MSNBC.

They soften the edges here, they gloss over little inconvenient details there and in the process write there own narratives. Narratives to attract eyeballs and advertisers. But its not just the money. Its also the ideology propelling these clashing narratives. The ads and the eyeballs and the ideology all, at least at times, take precendence over pure objective fact re the state of the country and the world.

I honestly dont k ow what the solution to this is. Do it ourselves? Wtf does that mean? No idea.

12

…I never said that.

Except when they don’t.

For example: the framing on this story.

That’s bullshit framing of that story. Its irresponsible framing of that story. And it was a framing of that story that the Trump administration used to frame further attacks on Schiff. The story is “real journalism.” But the story is framed in a way that makes an entirely normal and standard process look suspect. This is what normalisation of propaganda is.

I don’t agree. I think this is a problem: but I think the bigger problem is that most mainstream outlets don’t recognize that there has been a substantial shift in what this administration is doing, and they are treating it as “business as usual.”

Just have a read of this. Its a twitter thread that is an examination of stories written by Maggie Haberman and makes a compelling case that she is one of many journalists that trade “access” for stories. Here is an absolutely fawning profile of Kellyanne Conway by CNN. The story about Trump wanting to shoot migrants in the legs and to build a moat full of alligators? The story was known to journalists for months. But they didn’t report it: until they had finished writing their book. Journalists all over Washington knew about the existence of the Steele Dossier for months but (with the exception of Mother Jones) nobody dared even *mentioning *it until Buzzfeed finally broke the story and published its contents.

The media isn’t going to save you. This article heregoes into detail about how many reporters push back against editorial decisions made at the Times. I have no problems with the integrity of most reporters and reporting. But I’m not talking about individual reporters, I’m talking about the corporate entities they report too. They normalise propaganda. They treated Hillary’s emails as equivalent (and sometimes worse) than anything Trump has done and they are playing the same sort of games with Biden and his son right now.

The truth is that the “free press” isn’t prepared to take on a propaganda juggernaut like this administration. We can’t rely on them.

13

…by “do it ourselves” I simply mean that “nobody is coming to save us.” Not the free press. Not Superman :slight_smile:

14

The idea that Fox News is brainwashing an obedient audience of sheeple is akin to focusing on lobbying organizations like the NRA or AARP as fonts of Evil, rather than recognizing that the stances of these organizations strike a strong chord in their constituencies. Their successes reflect genuinely held (if often dead wrong) beliefs held by their audiences/members. Attacking the Evil Groups misses the point.

Fox is merely a more extreme example of what’s been plaguing the major media for a long time - framing the news to please a constituency while avoiding hard-hitting editorials clearly labeled as such. This process has accelerated under Trump and ensures that opposing camps seek out their preferred filters. When CNN and the AP blatantly editorialize in their news stories* it just encourages the belief of right-wingers that the MSM is out to get them.

Fox obviously does run commentary aimed at minimalizing or mocking climate change activism, but pretty much plays it straight in much of its actual reporting.

*“but it’s twue! it’s twue!!” :rolleyes:

15

Still kinda murky there. Even if we had an intact, independent free press, they wouldn’t have the power to save anyone They’d have the ability to offer us the right tools to potentially save ourselves. But even then, salvation would be a crapshoot.

16

…wolfpup argued that the counter to State propaganda in a “free democracy is a free press, media that exposes the lies and tells people the truth.” All I’m saying is that “no, that isn’t enough.”

And salvation, right now, is very much a crapshoot. To steal from Shawshank Redemption, you can either “get busy fighting for democracy or get busy loosing it all.” You simply have to make your choice. I’m not sure what else you want me to say.

17

Ahhh, thanks for the clsrification. Agreed 100%

18

So Fox News is bad but MSNBC is OK and totally not just as biased as Fox News.

19

Well, ISTM you did, and then went ahead and said it again. My point – and I stand by it – is that there are tons of responsible major media that do a good job of informing the public, even if they’re far from perfect and sometimes have mercenary considerations like sensationalism, which is why I have more respect for public broadcasters outside the US than most American media. But the NYT, Washington Post, CNN, etc. do fine journalism most of the time, or at least, adequate and responsible journalism. It’s odd that you think CNN is kowtowing to the powers that be as they are becoming rather vehemently anti-Trump and have been on the warpath since at least the time Trump tried to ban one of their White House reporters. The Washington Post, for its part, has said that Jeff Bezos has never once in any way meddled with their editorial policy. I really think you’re greatly exaggerating the problems with the major mainstream media.

It works both ways, so what you say is partly true because part of the appeal of Fox News to the wingnuts is that it tells them what they want to hear. But a large part of the reason they want to hear those things is that Fox has been instrumental in shaping their beliefs, and the problem with that is that Fox does it through deception, materially relevant omission, and outright lies. Did you not read the gigantic thread we have in GD on Fox News?

So again, what you say is partly true for most and is entirely true for the plutocracy and Republican politicians whose mercenary and political interests Fox News serves, but as far as the masses of wingnut ignoramuses are concerned, Fox definitely shapes their world views in major ways. You see it every time one of these slack-jawed morons is interviewed on the street, invariably parroting some absurdly false talking point they heard on Hannity or Fox & Friends.

20

Change a couple of words and this could easily be a Trump tweet. Im sure the morons will be convinced by the power of your logic and ethics. Trump isnt the disease, he is the symptom.