• Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    8 hours ago

    FOX News is possibly the most honed outlet of the massive oligarch-owned far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and television viewership.

    It offers a diet of fear, rage and bigotry, and then seasons it with red-pill conspiracy theories, implying that everyone else is lying to you, but FOX knows better. It encourages its viewers to reject all other sources, so that you’re watching news in a silo. Just FOX and you.

    And this is the carrier by which it feeds you culture war and a narrow, extremist ideology.

    And we know it works. Presidents, US Senators and Supreme Court Justices will regurgitate FOX talking points verbatim, using the very same words in the same order, when expressing opinions and passing policy.

    We’ve known for a long time human beings are fallible. Fox Mulder tells Robert Modell his shoes are untied and he looks. Societies regulate gambling, outlaw false advertising, investigate confidence ploys, because we know humans are fallible. Cybercrime divisions take phishing seriously because we know that the weakest link in the security chain is between chair and keyboard.

    So it’s interesting that Ronald Reagan, as part of deregulation, had his FCC end fairness doctrine regarding news media, opening the gateway for conservative radio like Rush Limbaugh and eventually Murdock’s new project to change minds, the FOX News channel. We’ve known that humans can be sown into panic since Orson Welles’ radio drama of War of the Worlds.

    So yeah, we’re being subjected to what is literal mind control, and our government isn’t doing a thing to stop it. But at the same time we’re in the age of prediction markets and online sports betting, and our respective protection bureaus have stood down, so it’s not exactly like our state is watching to make sure we’re not being defrauded.