What can be done about right-wing propaganda?

So last week was not a good week for Donald Trump. Much like most weeks for Donald Trump since his election. He fired the head of the FBI, admitted he did so because he was displeased with how that person was handling an investigation into his campaign. He shared top-secret Israeli information with Russia, an action which, while technically legal, was exceedingly stupid (as were his reasons for doing so - he was bragging), and puts the USA’s intelligence-gathering and counter-terrorism capabilities in danger. It came out that Trump had told Russia that Comey was “crazy”, and that firing him took pressure off him.

In short: not a great week. But more importantly, a week full of lots of really important news stories. Any news organization worth their salt would be all over this. Right?

Well, it depends. Is your most trusted news source FOX News? If so, what you heard had very little to do with the actual news stories:

That means the conservative media narrative went something like this:

[ul]
[li]Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for his mishandling of the Clinton investigation and his stubborn insistence on continuing the Russia investigation despite no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.[/li][li] The liberal media drove this narrative to take down Trump, who only wanted the investigation “done properly,” and then started to question Trump’s mental stability.[/li][li] The “deep state” leaked classified info to the Washington Post. Plus, Trump has the right to disclose classified information to Russians, and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster agrees.[/li][li] Comey is getting revenge with memos that reveal Trump asked him to shut down the investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.[/li][/ul]

On CNN, Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr was explaining to readers why the Post’s allegations were so grave: By sharing an ally’s classified information with the Russians, “you could put people and assets at risk overseas — that’s the reason you don’t do this,” she said to Wolf Blitzer.

But meanwhile on Fox News, Krauthammer was telling viewers the opposite. He reckoned that, if anything, Trump had made an innocent mistake — a “slip up” — and that America’s compromised ally would quickly forgive the president. “It’s like a three-day story if it’s true,” Krauthammer said. “I don’t think there’s a lot in here. This is the president slipping on a banana peel.”

“We are acting like we’re on the eve of World War III with this story tonight,” added Laura Ingraham. “I think this is part of why people are tuning out.”

Fox News then played an old clip of Trump complaining about Hillary Clinton’s email servers, which contained classified information that could have been obtained by hackers. It was a strange, Rashomon moment. As liberals on Twitter were calling Trump a hypocrite for himself volunteering state secrets to Russia, the Fox News host spoke as if it were self-evident that Clinton had made the graver intelligence error.

And that’s just FOX, which at least tries to maintain a veneer of respectability some of the time. If you look to other news sources, it gets even more absurd, such as Breitbart’s headline, which characterized a story about Donald Trump sharing “code word” intelligence with Russia on a lark as such: “Deep State Leaks Highly Classified Info to Washington Post to Smear President Trump”. Infowars and Hannity openly wondered if all this hubbub about this unimportant Russia witch hunt has to do with the democrats wanting to distract from… an insane conspiracy theory to do with a murdered DNC staffer.

What we have here is a media environment where half the country gets the real news, mostly unfiltered, and the other half gets partisan propaganda, which will carry water for the president under just about any circumstances, downplay any news story, and push a narrative that is not just separate from the “mainstream” media, but also utterly separate from realty. And along the way, they paint a picture of the lying liberal media, that absolutely nobody other than, well, them, can be trusted to cover the media honestly. So you end up with an epistemological closed loop of propaganda, in which republicans only trust FOX News, but FOX News will not tell them about Trump scandals, and FOX tries to negate anything that would lead these people to distrust FOX News.

What the hell do you do about that? This is a serious problem. Democracy doesn’t work with propaganda like this. What can, well, anyone do about this? The government can hardly censure FOX News - the right to lie is definitely covered under the first amendment, even if it’s on national TV. FOX would die without viewers, so you could in theory just educate people out of this, but FOX has done a great job of painting real news sources as “left-wing” and biased, so… good luck with that. It’s turned talking politics with half the country into the equivalent of talking evolution with Young Earth Creationists - your sources are legit, and theirs are bullshit, but there is nothing you can do to convince them that that’s the case.

I dunno. What do you do about this?

Somewhere, on a more conservative-leaning message board, somebody right now is writing a post titled “what can be done about left-wing propaganda?” that is almost identical to yours, except that it complains about how half of the population is being brainwashed by left-wing propaganda outlets such as CNN (and that’s one of the ones which at least maintains a veneer of respectability some of the time!).

That post from your evil twin then says the exact same thing as you:

… except that it has the opposite opinion about which half is which.

The post from mirror-you ends by saying:

And the people on that conservative message board read this and nod their head, because according to all the evidence available to them, the post is saying things that are obviously true, just as all the things you’re saying are obviously true based on the things you’ve learned from CNN etc.

The theory that you can “educate people out of this” is not so well supported by recent research by social scientist. There’s a book on the subject recently reviewed in the NYT Sunday Book Review section, but I can’t find a link. Bottom line, though, is that attempts to correct political misunderstandings by education, generally have the opposite affect (on both sides of the political spectrum). That is, the person being educated is more likely to emerge from the “re-education camp” with a stronger sense that his beliefs are correct than before.

Looks like your best recourse is to remove children from right-wing parents and raise them in a carefully controlled, left-wing bubble. Might as well include the kids of left-wing parents, too, just in case. If you’re unwilling to do that, then… welcome to the wonderful world of democracy. It sucks, but supposedly it sucks less then all the other systems. Supposedly.

I think it’s time to start using all those FEMA concentration camps we built under Obama. I mean, they’re just sitting there, empty. Seems like a waste of money not to put somebody in them.

By the way, you might find this blog article interesting.

Rather than positing a situation of perfect symmetry, as I did in my slightly facetious previous post, the author acknowledges that FOX is farther to the right than most mainstream news sources such as CNN are to the left. However, he then goes on to point out that those mainstream sources cannot exactly make a claim to perfectly neutral objectivity either, and that conservatives do have a legitimate complaint in that regard.

Here is a study about the political beliefs of journalists, pointing out that as a group they are farther to the left than the most liberal congressional district in the US, the one containing Berkeley California. No surprise then, that the “neutral” news sources which these journalists work for, tend to make conservatives feel just a little bit alienated and inclined to either go looking for alternatives or set up their own.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out so well:

It’s an interesting analysis of how the US media ended up where they are today. It doesn’t posit any magic solutions, but it might give you a better insight in the other side’s point of view…

I recall reading that the best way to defuse your opponent’s beliefs is a two-step process: 1) Acknowledge the truth in your opponent’s view (many viewpoints in the world, however heinous they may be, have *some *kernel of truth in them) and 2) Refute it calmly with facts.

Too often, in America, people are doing 2# but not 1#, and even when they do 2#, they do it shrilly, not calmly, which then fails.

So, for instance:

Right-winger: “Obama destroyed this country!”

You might counter: “*Yes, there were some things that didn’t go well under Obama *(for instance, national debt shot up by $9 trillion,) but Obama did do things that helped the country; his anti-ISIS campaign is working, there was job growth, etc.”

This was the headline topic of this week’s episode of WYNC’s On the Media. Mostly diagnosis, little prescription. A writer for Commentary did suggest that trying to recenter a philosophical/policy grounding for US conservative media was critical – turning it away from becoming a cult of personality centered around defending Trump and attacking his critics – but he didn’t seem hopeful that this would happen. He predicted that the GOP would slink into November 2018 following in line behind their party’s leader, and that the pro-Trump media would be lining the parade route, cheering.

Charlie Warzel from Buzzfeed did nice step-by-step description of how this PR crisis played out:

The last step, “closing the loop,” is particularly ingenious and damaging: after Fox & co. changed the news cycle by introducing a counter-story (reviving the Seth Rich murder), Alex Jones & co. accused the MSM of bringing out the Comey memo as a distraction from the impending Seth Rich bombshell.

This is God’s work you’re describing, but it is a person-to-person, one-on-one strategy for dealing with the OP’s systemic problem. (Also, very challenging and slow to succeed.)

The MSM actually does something somewhat similar to this a lot of the time: bending over backwards to acknowledge both sides of a controversy, including voices for minority POVs, etc. **Is it winning any hearts and minds?
**

(That’s a serious question, because we shouldn’t catastrophize when describing our situation. People are becoming aware of the issues that Fox wants to gloss over; this awareness is having an effect on the President’s popularity; his unpopularity is affecting his legislative agenda. Perhaps at a systemic level the best-if-imperfect answer to “what can be done?” is just … “keep doing what we’re already doing.”)

Spot on.

That may work with some stuff. But I’ll never “play along” with downright lies or delusions. “Obama is a gay Muslim Kenyan who is racist against whites” does not have any kernal of truth, and I won’t be pretending that it does just so to appease some idiot. There are some beliefs that people just need to be prepared to walk away from because there is no point in challenging them. I refuse to argue with hard-core racists and fundamentalists because these people have belief systems that are immune to reason. And I refuse to waste time trying to find atoms of truth in them. That’s way too much work for too little gain.

Which is cute, in the same way such a play is cute coming from a young earth creationist, or a geo-centrist, or a flat earther. :rolleyes: Hence why, in my starting post, I brought up a very recent and very obvious example of how absurd this is - the right-wing news’s coverage of the last few days.

This is an interesting article, with an interesting perspective. It makes some important points. One thing it perhaps misses in its analysis: why is academia, journalism, and the like so horribly biased against conservatives?

Why are there so few conservative climatologists? Well, okay, that’s an easy one: republicans think the field is fundamentally corrupt, so why would a republican aim to go into that field? It’s a bit like asking why there are so few young earth creationist biologists.

Why are there so few conservative journalists? The article complains, “Roberts devotes four sentences in his six thousand word article to the possibility that conservatives might be motivated by something deeper than a simple hatred of facts,” but it’s not as though “liberal” organizations aren’t reaching out to republicans. CNN has has a “trump surrogate problem” for quite some time. The problem: they hired a bunch of republicans to defend Trump, and it turns out that those people are dishonest, combatative, and unreasonable. Big shockers - they’ve been hired to defend and represent Donald Trump. The New York Times, in an attempt to hire on more conservative voices, hired Bret Stephens, and his first two columns were abysmal global warming denialist articles. If I ran a news outlet and an opinion columnist I hired started like that, my response would be, “You’re fired. We hired you to be an opinion columnist, but dishonest misrepresentation of science paints our news outlet in an extremely negative light, and that’s not okay.” Instead, the paper just put up with it, responding to critics by claiming that the New York Times was a place for intelligent debate and conversation. The problem here is that an intelligent conversation about climate change is not improved by adding a denialist to the conversation.

The problem with republican journalists is not “there’s no room for republicans in journalism”. It’s that there are a paltry few republicans who want to be journalists, and the ones who make a name for themselves seem to often be dishonest people pushing intellectually bankrupt positions. The problem with conservative academia is not dissimilar, in my opinion. See also: the many conservative economists who predicted hyperinflation thanks to Ben Bernanke’s actions at the fed, and the subset of those who admitted they were wrong and apologized afterwards (zero).

To put it in far fewer words: while this does explain why institutions like FOX News exist, it does nothing to excuse them, or conservatism as a whole, nor does it change the fact that they’re a huge fucking problem, in the way institutions like CNN or the New York Times simply are not.

Someone quoted Isaac Asimov in another thread but I think it’s directly applicable here:

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Newsweek, “Cult of Ignorance”, Isaac Asimov, January 21, 1980.

My WAG as someone who is neither an academic nor a journalist (in the strict sense of the terms):

Many institutions have a way of being self-reinforcing. It’s a positive-loop chicken and egg situation; if academic and journalism begin to turn liberal, then they will only become more liberal, because conservatives will find it harder and harder to gain entry. (A conservative paper might have a harder time getting published in a liberal academic journal; a conservative professor will be given a harder time by liberal colleagues, a conservative journalist might be shunned, even fired, by a liberal media network.) Eventually it becomes self-reinforcing where conservatives give up and say, “Why be an Ivy League professor or a journalist at CNN? They’re just going to give me a hard time for the duration of my entire career and I don’t want to subject myself to that treatment.”

You might as well ask, “Why don’t more liberals try to work for Fox News or the Heritage Foundation?” Why would they? It’s a self-reinforcing conservative loop that feels hostile to liberal outsiders.

IIRC, something similar, although opposite, happened a decade ago at the US Air Force Academy. The Academy had a strong evangelical Christian influence and student body, and this was self-reinforcing, to the point where atheist cadets felt ostracized or considered the USAFA to be a hostile environment. When a group reaches a certain “critical mass,” (let’s say, 60% liberal, or 60% evangelical Christian,) it can begin to feel hostile to outsiders in a way that makes outsiders unwilling to even try to break in or join - which then makes that group even more insular yet (that 60% liberal media network soon becomes 70% liberal; a school that is 60% evangelical Christian soon becomes 70% evangelical Christian.)

I was at a dinner last week where James Naughtie - a senior BBC journalist - was the invited speaker. He openly identified as liberal - and tried to include the entire assembly in that which induced a stony silence - and denounced an openly conservative couple as ‘quite mad’. His words, not mine. When you start with that point of view, you’re not doing your audience - be it at the dinner or those listening on the radio justice.

It’s winning ratings:

Fox News Ratings Slip As the Network Minimizes Biggest Stories

As Budget Player Cadet laid out in the OP, Fox News studiously ignored the developments of the past two weeks, all of which made Trump look bad and so were declared UnNews, apparently–and paid the price.

Those regular Fox News viewers who switched over to MSNBC and CNN are unlikely to have, as a result, changed their voter registrations from Republican to Democratic. But to some small degree, many of them must have noticed that Fox was censoring the news–and some of them won’t have found that to be admirable.

An actual commitment to actual fairness and actual balance may prove to matter to more Americans than we might have guessed from the November 8 outcome. Journalists who continue to prioritize integrity could, incrementally, win over some of those who’d fallen for the right’s fakery enough to vote for Trump.
Very important part of this question: the role an authoritarian-leaning government could play in changing the present dynamic (in which genuine journalistic integrity has at least a chance of winning over some minds). Industry consolidation, for example, would be one means for pro-authoritarians to advance their agenda; one to watch:

https://www.recode.net/2017/5/8/15579014/sinclair-acquire-tribune-media-company-fcc-merger-regulation

Better education.

It’s lack of education that makes people susceptible to this nonsense. Which is probably why right-wingers have been doing their damndest to undermine public education for the last 75 years.

There is a 3-part series on “The Backfire Effect” on the You Are Not So Smart podcast that I think is pretty enlightening. It doesn’t go into the political realm, but does a deep-dive on the aversion for people to change deeply held beliefs when confronted with contrary evidence, and the “backfire effect” that they actually increase their certainty of the deeply held belief in this situation. They do discuss how to overcome this and the answer is prolonged persistence, that over time with enough evidence, positions do tend to change.

The issue is that people’s beliefs are an integral part of their identity and showing people that their beliefs are not correct is an attack on their person. Fox News, et al makes these people feel good about themselves, watching news with more integrity makes them angry, so what source do you think they will watch/read?

I drink.

Except that one side’s “propaganda” (also known as “objective, demonstrable facts”) tells them that Trump is an ego-driven machine made out of stupid who fucks up everything he gets his hands on, his cabinet is made up exclusively of Perso Who Hates Concept With The Fury Of The Sun being put in charge of Concept and there are probably corrupt shenanigans that do not go very far off the beaten path going on on top of that.
The other tells them that Hillary Clinton and a bunch of other high ranking Democrats are worshipping Satan in a pedophile ring run out of the basement of a pizzeria, sold America to Iran because Them Jews told them to, and every mass shooting out there is a false flag operation meant to spearhead the imminent taking of the guns, all of the guns, Soon™. Oh, and climate change is a Chinese hoax even though there are American coastal cities being evacuated or relocated further inland AS I SPEAK, and you can watch it happening on Google fuck Maps.

In other words, I’m calling quantum amounts of bullshit on the “heh, both sides do it :rolleyes:” argument.

You’re calling the smallest possible amounts of bullshit on it?