![]() On any given night, he might have a heart attack. Bill O'Reilly, the network's first prime-time star, invited viewers into a "no spin zone." Unlike the professionally sedate Peter Jennings or Dan Rather, he delivered his take on the news with unusual, irresistible passion. Many point to 1994 as the year when the current-day political rift began to show, with an invigorated Republican Party, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, clashing with President Bill Clinton on many of the same issues that continue to animate the right: guns, abortion, welfare.įox News has played that polarization to its advantage more brilliantly than any other media outlet, offering itself as a refuge from the slings and arrows of outrageous bullshit slung by the mainstream media. 60 Percent Fakeĭespite what its myriad detractors say, Fox News did not singlehandedly turn America into warring political factions that cannot agree on taxes, North Korea or when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Only Fox News did it first, and Fox News still does it better. "No one is dying from climate change," Jesse Watters, lead host of The Five, said this past June, some three months before hurricanes devastated Houston, South Florida and Puerto Rico, killing about 200 people.Īnd let's be honest, MSNBC peddles outrage as eagerly as Fox. ![]() What a bummer, right? Not if you watch Fox News, where only about one in four references to global warming was truthful, according to a 2014 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. ![]() Outrage is rooted in certitude, a conviction that the other guy isn't just wrong but flagrantly, offensively so. Benjamin Lowy/Gettyįox News is often accused of trafficking in outrage, but it offers viewers something far more valuable than that: self-assurance. The reward for that loyalty is a vision of America where the right's deepest fantasies are realized: abortionists jailed, Muslims detained, Rosie O'Donnell deported to Antarctica.įox News personality Sean Hannity at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. In doing so, it has managed to convince people whose views may have been considered fringe or extreme that they are, in fact, part of a silent majority bound, above all, by its devotion to Fox News. In the approximately 185,000 hours of programming since its inception, Fox News has managed to turn that underground revolt into above-ground theater, a captivating spectacle of "homicide bombers" and "coastal elites," of truth-telling patriots and politically correct traitors. "As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament." Hofstadter wrote that modern American anti-intellectualism had its birth in the erosion of the agrarian society de Tocqueville had observed a little more than a century before. More than any other major media organization in modern American history, Fox News has found a way to appeal to those "passions of the populace." The network represents a strain of populism that political scientist Richard Hofstadter described in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, his classic 1963 study of demagoguery. The typical American journalist had "a scanty education and a vulgar turn of mind," he wrote, and made "an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors." The press was, like the country itself, decentralized and unruly. "The United States have no metropolis the intelligence as well as the power of the country are dispersed abroad." In his native France, he would write in Democracy in America, "almost all power is centered in the same spot, and vested in the same hands." He figured the diversity of American journalism resulted from the vastness of the nation. Visiting the young American republic in 1831, de Tocqueville marveled at the flourishing free press. Because while I find much of Fox News objectionable, I also find much of Fox News irresistible. Actually, a confession: I am the one who turns the television to Fox News. ![]() So do my mother and uncle, hooked long ago by its loathing for the Clintons and its love of Israel. Like many progressives, she charges Fox News with feeding on "conservative paranoia" while also manufacturing it, a brutally effective and profitable feedback mechanism. "It's just everywhere," says Lauren Duca, a political columnist for Teen Vogue who has been a target of Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.
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