Maybe it’s because my family is dominated by academics, but I’m fortunate not to have any close or even remote relations that watch Fox News or regurgitate the network’s toxic talking points. A lot of people aren’t so fortunate. Luke O’Neil has collected a bunch of sob stories for a piece in the Guardian. Here’s a typical example:
I don’t watch Fox News because of course it warps your psyche, but it must have changed tone after Trump was elected. My dad slowly became even more xenophobic and angry than he used to be.
My wife and I are worried about letting our daughter stay with our respective parents, because their toxic anger and resentment is slowly becoming their entire identity. I hate what Fox News has done to almost everyone in my family. It’s absolute poison and the only thing I think is worse is that there are people who think that destroying the morals and conscience of multiple generations is worth a few more bucks. I absolutely refuse to believe that people like Hannity don’t know what they are doing.
I wish I could do something, but who has the time or energy to combat that?
This hits on a theme I often discuss, which is the destruction of people’s morals and conscience. As things have taken a darker and darker turn in our country, and really throughout the world, in the last two decades, I’ve come to see moral leadership as more and more important. I don’t think human beings are basically good or fundamentally bad, but they’re highly malleable. How they behave, even what they feel, can be influenced by whether they’re asked to be generous or resentful, welcoming or defensive, optimistic or angry.
Fox News definitely seeks to make many “bucks” by catering to people’s worst instincts, and it actually transforms people. It makes people fearful and furious. A liberal who spends all day watching MSNBC will have reasons to be anxious and upset, too, but they’ll also be receiving constant messages about the value of tolerance, inclusiveness, and care for the vulnerable. For the most part, the moral instruction is consistent with what you might hear Pope Francis say about the poor and with Martin Luther King Jr.’s aspiration that we judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
Fox News has such a broad reach in our culture that it is measurably damaging people’s morals and conscience. It’s turning good people into bad people, much the way that civil or sectarian conflicts harden populations against each other, sometimes for centuries. But it’s still just a news outlet. It’s influence is nothing compared to the influence of Donald Trump who has transformed one of American’s two major political parties into smoldering heap of dung.
I sometimes rolled my eyes when President Obama exhorted us with moral language and insisted that America was fundamentally good, and far better than how it was presenting itself. But, just by making that effort, he incrementally made us better people. Sometimes we are blessed with the right leaders at the right time, and sometimes we seem to be plagued by poor leadership. Right now, the West seems to be lacking competent leaders, and it’s having a crippling effect here at home and also in Europe. But we’re also suffering from outright bad moral leadership in some cases.
I began my adult life as a secular-minded philosophy student, impatient with moral arguments and suspicious of leaders who spoke in moral terms. My initial problem with the Bush administration was that their reckless disregard for the truth prevented people from having reality-based conversations. I no longer see this as the primary threat we face. What I see now is a daily devolution of the basic goodness and generosity of our people. Every day this gets worse, the path back gets longer, and the prospect of societal breakdown grows.
Our next president will hopefully bring as much of the country together as possible, but what they absolutely must do is exert moral leadership to stem and reverse this tide. If they can.
This is why I have largely abandoned social media, particularly Facebook. It is the place where I have watched people I care greatly about turn from seemingly loving, kind, and charitable people into racist, hateful monsters who actually cheered on putting children into cages and transformed a monster like Donald Trump into an hero of their evangelical Christian faith. Even a moral argument cannot dent their consciousness to any great degree. They simply have been rewired to accept that empathy extends only to those who are like them. They all sit in their own self created bubbles and digest this shit day after day after day.
The reality is that these characteristics that have bubbled to surface in my loved ones were probably always there in some form. But the combined catalysts of Fox News and Donald Trump provided all the fuel necessary to complete the metamorphosis into monsters.
I am still on Facebook but we had knock down fights on there. The sides were pretty evenly matched. I thought many times to quit or block the offenders but I could not bring myself to do it. One person constantly brought right wing memes and he and his friends, I swear, were always loaded for bear, as if they prepared. But in the end we beat them back. Ultimately him and his friends blocked us. They are all gone now except one fella who now seems almost human. I don’t ask about the others. Better they are gone.
In part, one’s Facebook experience reflects your social circle. I no longer use Facebook because it is a total time sink and I deeply suspect that android Faceberg of bad faith.
I have never encountered the kind of people you have interacted with on my Facebook page. My social circle is an international and well-educated one since I have lived most of my adult life overseas. My impression is that Trump’s deplorables rarely step outside their communities whether rural or urban and are almost by definition xenophobic and misogynistic.
None of this is meant to suggest I am a superior person. I’m certainly not but I do strongly believe in critical reasoning and a strong moral (not religious) grounding. Which is one of the reasons I like this community.
I have nineteen nieces and nephews.
Without Facebook, the family wouldn’t work, basically.
It’s how we run the family fantasy baseball league, too.
I go days without seeing a political post.
I guess I’m doing it wrong.
No, you are doing it right. I stay on Facebook because of the “groups”, family, school, and otherwise. You just have lucked out and don’t have any Trumpies and reactionary conservatives in you FB “Friends”.
I was actually able to scrub Facebook of politics, too, but I still deleted my account. I have a small family that largely doesn’t participate in social media. I have a core group of friends scattered around the world that used to participate but gradually drifted off. If I want to get in touch with them, I can do it the old fashioned way.
So there was nothing valuable in Facebook, but I was wasting a monstrous amount of time there anyways. So I killed it. All the amoral bullshit that they’ve done to promote conspiracy theories and propaganda made my decision easy.
The only thing that I miss is school postings about upcoming events, but that page is publicly facing.
Facebook is my salvation. If I have any friends who strongly disagree with my political stances, they have the good sense to keep quiet. Some keep quiet, I suspect, because they have friends or relatives who would give them a hard time, and they are trying to keep peace within their own orbit.
This is not to say there aren’t spirited discussions and differences of opinion on my timeline. Plenty of both, but our basic values are the same, and we disagree in good spirit.
And unfortunately Murdoch’s brand exists in Australia and the UK. One of the best reactions from the NZ news when the shootings happened was to pull the plug on Murdoch’s feed of the shooter’s video.
This is exactly, exactly right, and eloquently stated.
It’s turning good people into bad people…and that is the plan.
It’s cynical and deliberate, and the only beneficiaries of Republican corruption are the rich.
And Putin. (But he’s probably even richer than Bezos, when all is said and done.)
We need to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. Once that is done, maybe Fox News will disappear.
I wish you were right, but I’ve always understood that the Fairness Doctrine only applied to the Broadcast networks not to any of the cable news outlets.
I honestly don’t know what the solution is. I wish I did. I must think about this some more because I have to believe that there is one.
Additionally, while Fox News is an obvious contributor to the disintegration of our public discourse, I’ve got friends and relatives who have listened to Conservative Talk Radio going back to the early Limbaugh days. They, in many respects, are worse than the Fox News watchers.
This post by Booman is so good I am tempted to share with close family and friends of both political persuasions. I’ll have to think about it, because I’ve specifically avoided all political back and forth with them since 2016. Told them so, too, so that will make it harder.
But, I so want them to open their eyes to the moral degeneracy that is the current iteration of the GOP and it’s leader, Donald Trump. How can they not see this? How can he have a 90% approval among all Republicans?
Since the Fairness Doctrine has to be reinstated, and since communication technology has expanded since the days when it was in force, it needn’t be reinstated in exactly the same form, just the same principles.
The principle of fairness is not tied to any particular technology, or any technology at all. The FCC is still the regulator, and the object is still the public interest.
The real problem is this:
“The fairness doctrine was never without its opponents … many of whom perceived the equal airtime requirement as an infringement of the right to freedom of speech enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution. In 1969 the doctrine survived a challenge in the Supreme Court case Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. Federal Communications Commission, in which the court found that the FCC had acted within its jurisdiction in ruling that a Pennsylvania radio station had violated the fairness doctrine by denying response time to a writer who had been characterized in a broadcast as a communist sympathizer.
“In 1985, however, the FCC decided that the doctrine had a “chilling effect” upon freedom of speech. At about that time, representatives of cable and satellite television networks challenged the applicability of the doctrine to their industries.
“In 1987 the FCC formally repealed the fairness doctrine … ” (Britannica.com)
We need to revisit these decisions. In retrospect they seem to foreshadow the argument, now enshrined in Citizens United, that regulation of political fundraising is an infringement of free speech.
Because the result is that instead of having the right to equal time, you have to have enough money to buy equal time. This is a benefit to the networks and the rich, but everyone else is having their right curtailed. oh , you have the right to speak, but not the right to be heard. We are being converted from citizens (one person one vote) into customers (one dollar one vote). This is not democracy but the neoliberal creed.
No public interest, if no public spectrum used — there’s no place for the law to insert itself.
The FCC only got involved in the chain of events that led to the Fairness Doctrine in the first place because the electromagnetic spectrum is/was a commons, and needed to be divvied up to work at all.
Entrepreneurs can’t camp on frequencies unregulated without the whole spectrum becoming unusable.
Exclusive rights to a frequency were granted by the public, through the state (FCC), in exchange for a modicum of public service.
If you want to nationalize cable systems, then there’s a colorable case for something like the Fairness Doctrine, but not until.
Cable is in the ground – who owns the ground? Couldn’t local authorities insist on the a fairness doctrine in exchange for easement access of the cables?
Local government determining media content?
I can’t see any way that could go wrong.
Everyone knows how well local government works out when we try to be more egalitarian with public space. Well that is unless you want to build homeless shelters and more housing and light rail projects
Love me some DXM but…That doesn’t answer my question.
It was asked in good faith w/o regard to whether it was a good idea or not. Is it possible?
Why is only one side allowed to sow chaos?
The side you like is losing, I take it….
Yes – humanity is losing – infested by a cancer from within…
I don’t know if it’s possible, but that is, after all, what I was suggesting. I don’t mean to minimize the poitical difficulties. But you might as well say the air is unlimited, so you can’t regulate air pollution; or the fish in the sea are unlimited, so you can’t regulate ocean fishing.
The original Fairness Doctrine only applied to the networks (it’s that old) so it will need to be updated after the future Democrats kick Ajit Pai’s ass off the FCC.
No over-the-air, no place for FCC regulation.
Unless you nationalize cable, there’s no commons to regulate.
I don’t see where updating the Fairness Doctrine is a problem. Just as I don’t see why other laws could be written to address some of our present problems. For example, how hard is it to write a law that says NO sitting president is above the law. Therefore, a sitting president can be indicted while in office if the evidence shows he committed crimes.
How would you like the Department of Commerce deciding who gets how many column-inches in your newspaper, and for what?
This is a fabulous post.
I have a few relatives who are Republican as thought it would be a sin not to be. We have agreed to not talk politics. On the side, they tell my spouse they don’t like Trump, but we both know they all voted for him.
As for my other immediate family, children, relatives by marriage, cousins we are in close contact with and so on, they are on the same page we are. The younger ones even more progressive/liberal in their politics. I just don’t know what I’d do if we couldn’t lean on each other right now.
Everyone I know is suffering and talking about sleeplessness, anxiety, depression–the whole ball of wax.
So upsetting that a TV network could destroy good will in this country. But they have, even in my rural county.
I don’t recall seeing any moral leadership in Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, or definitely not Clinton. I think lack of true moral leadership is a feature not a bug in all but two of the Presidents I remember: Carter and Obama. That’s twelve of the last fifty-eight years or 20% of the time.
I think about the behavior I see being exhibited now and what I saw growing up, and what I’ve learned about the Jim Crow South and think white Americans haven’t changed much during that time. Go back to the first decades of the 20th century and you’ll see the attitudes toward immigrants were just as awful, possibly even worse than now. It wasn’t that long ago when we interred the Japanese, expelled the Chinese, Muslims and Sikhs. This kind of reactionary behavior has always been part of the American experience. Ask Native Americans.
The occupant of the White House, rather than being a moral compass, is more a hall monitor, there to give permission to certain behaviors and discourage others. Obama gave people permission to be good. He actively encouraged inclusion and respect. He demonstrated compassion and empathy every day. People who were open to modeling that behavior did.
The current occupant is letting the inmates run the asylum. He models juvenile, reactionary vindictiveness. The people who are already like that view his behavior as permission to act out, and they do.
He hasn’t influenced my behavior one bit, though. I’m immune to him. His absence of moral leadership isn’t shaping my behavior. All he’s doing is exposing bad people. Now we know who they are and can avoid them.
Not everyone can do this. In fact, many can’t.
Great post. Their contempt of the truth is tightly coupled with their depraved behavior. This is not new. John Kenneth Galbraith: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
The disregard of the truth enables the moral decay. Claiming Mexicans crossing the border are murders and rapists enables immoral actions to be justified. Immorality is the rationale for the lies. For 40 years their lies have been immune to logic, truth, and facts. If we’re ever going to “turn the tide” we need to confront the root of the problem – immorality.
Certainly we see that shame has some limited effect – the message “babies in cages” worked. The administration backed down. For now anyway…
These are Old Testament bigots. So it should be no surprise that fear motivates them. I never hear them quoting Jesus. I propose that any time you hear a conservative lie you respond with a New Testament quote. Perhaps: Ephesians 4:31-32: “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”
You’ll forgive me for injecting religion into this space. But evangelicals make up 26% of our population and lean heavily towards Trump. If we believe morality is on our side, we should be fighting them on their own turf – righteousness. Put them on the defensive for a change and be relentless.
One thing I have started doing is correcting people when they say “Evangelical Christians”. I say, “You mean “Evangelicals” – to be Christian you must follow the word of Christ and Evangelicals don’t. (Yeah, I’m kind of a dick about it).
I don’t mean to be sermonizing – I was brought up Presbyterian then became Hindu 25 years ago. I think of Jesus much like Thomas Jefferson did. I just think it is a good tactic to attack their roots.
After all as our President said: “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.”
It is a sad comment on our times, when a post with this title seems relevant and needed, rather than just being an obvious “duh.” Surely we can get back to being a society where such a thing no longer needs to be said. We will never fix all of our problems, though we may replace many of them with new ones, but there is no reason we can’t resume being civilized.
As long as the individualism of the enlightenment is wedded to rampant capitalism in our culture it’s a slog uphill.
America’s moral leadership in the world was based on its position on human rights and calling out countries that violated them. We have now become one of those countries. If there had been a country that was separating children from their families, in many cases permanently, the children of legal asylum seekers, and putting them in cages and sometimes having them die while in custody, the old America would have stood against that.
And to be fair, this didn’t start with Trump and the moral rot is not limited to the GOP. We initiated extra-judicial killings around the world, by drone, and justified the killing of family and bystanders as “collateral damage” and apparently, worth the moral cost for our own “safety.” That too would have been a country the old America would have stood against.
I recall growing up how countries that tortured were opposed as human rights violators by the US, and we didn’t just talk the talk, we walked it too, taking action to either sanction these countries and speak against them in the UN.
You know its bad when we’ve reached a point where you have literally millions of people, mostly Trump supporters, who consider themselves “Christians” who “care for children” yet not only have no problem telling all to hear that they see nothing wrong with the practice of taking children from their parents out of retribution (Miller and Trump say its a deterrent, but the bloodthirstiness and relish with which they talk about these policies speak to more vengeance borne of their hatred), in some cases never to be reunited again, but also justify the cruelty of the practice as “they brought it on themselves.” Evil.
I knew it was bad when back in 2012 at a GOP debate the audience cheered lustily at the prospect of a man dying for lack of health care. Cheered!
I knew it was bad when a crowd through coins at a disabled homeless man on the street, taunting and threatening him, for daring to be poor and homeless, because the existence of such a person belied the supposed superiority of conservatism. Which, BTW, doesn’t address problems so much as hides them and taunts or threatens those who so much as points them out.
What we’re seeing today with Trump and what’s left of the GOP is proof that the moral rot that started a while back is not abating as much as it is continuing on its downward trend. We haven’t reached the gutter yet as a nation, but were certainly headed there and we’re not that far away.
Only quibble is the sequence.
The Republican Party committed to being a dung heap when they decided to follow WF Fuckley’s lead. Goldwater’s credo of `extremism in the pursuit of (tax cuts and racism) liberty is no vice’ set the moral tone for Nixon and the Southern Strategy as clearly articulated by Atwater. Then Reagan opened his presidential campaign in a small, obscure MS county infamous for only one thing – the murder of civil rights organizers. All Republican leaders trekked to Bob Jones University of Sexism and Racism throughoutthe 70’s and 80’s. Willie Horton debuts in 1988.
All this pre-dates even Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, never mind Faux News. Then in the early 90’s Newt shows up then Faux News gets going. But they are just riding, while also accelerating, the Republican wave of dung.
Bush/Cheney bring incompetence, malfeasance, and immorality to new lows with 9/11, Iraq, and Guantanamo/torture. The last also being war criminality. 2004 Swift boating is the new, expanded, topic shifted version of Willie Horton.
You have continuous lying, willful ignorance from Bush/Cheney, Palin, Romney/Ryan and of course, the new comer to the racist, sexist, immoral party, Trump.
Trump has distilled the essence of the party and it’s experience since Fuckley first espoused white supremacy was required in the South. And followed the lead of the party base in taking a revitalized Republican interest in Jim Crow national.
So Faux News while perhaps currently intensifying Republican trends in racism, sexism, incompetence, and immorality is by no means the creator or owner of them.
The cult took root with the Southern Strategy based on Fuckley’s belief in White Supremacy and the opening for the racism backlash created by Johnson’s civil rights legislation.