DOMINATION OF THE MEDIA (not an endgame in itself)

  The greed for power seems to override almost everything these days. Fiscal orthodoxy goes out the window in the face of this hegemonic hunger. This is how the lines get crossed, where George Washington’s cautioning the country to beware the strength of political party over love of country has come to prevail. These, I believe, are some of the short-term legacies that Fox News has released onto society as it normalized the complete and utter disregard for factual truth in order to organize behind one political party.

Having raised a generation on false equivalencies and alternative facts, Fox News’ spoon feeding of the Orwellian Pablum has weaned a cohort of the electorate away from reality, unable to recognize differences of opinion from actual facts. Ironically, unlike in a fascist dictatorship where the press gets usurped to create its own bombastic propaganda, Fox News was allowed to infiltrate the traditional news media waves and make its headway onto U.S. soil on the wings of democracy’s love of freedom of the press.

I’m certainly not arguing for anything less than that freedom. However, with that liberty comes certain responsibilities. As early as 2003 when I read Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, I was concerned about the long-term effects a channel like Fox News might have as it ingratiated itself into American culture. As Fox News was allowed to grow without a glitch, fed by ratings and sponsors unconcerned by how profit was accrued, the most problematic consequence of this movement to date was the election of Trump.

Viewers, already inclined by religion and primed by the Reagan era, were ready to be baited by the time Roger Ailes set up shop in 1996. They saw in Fox News an ally in form if not necessarily in content. It wasn’t much of a stretch to go from the hyperbole of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to the “supposed” news format that Fox was offering. It did not hurt Fox’s growth that it coincided with the cable industry’s rise with its 24/7 news cycles along with the advent of the Internet.

Since none of us are immune to propaganda—which is why Orwell’s 1984 is such an important tool for young minds to read—we are now faced with an almost cataclysmic conundrum. How do you retract from and reeducate a populace who has come to believe the claptrap that has been fed to them as worthy news for twenty years? How do you let them know that they’ve been inculpated into a propagandist cult? When the inconvenient truth of science and logic and verifiable facts has become the bogeyman, where do you go from there?

Listening to the commentary these last few days as pundits analyzed the shooting at the Republican baseball practice by what appears to be someone with a left-of-center ideology, it was all too clear that competing realities are at play. We have lost the capacity for common ground when we cannot organize ourselves as a society to agree on simple facts. Rarely do you ever hear of left-wing militia groups in the U.S. Period. End of that debate.

No one in their right mind would argue for violence. Violence only begets violence. But the bellicose language we observed during this last political cycle at Trump rallies primed the public and lowered the bar on what was socially acceptable behavior. The distance between rhetoric and action isn’t as far as people would like to believe. Add to that component a country where more than half of its citizens worship at the altar of ammunition and firearms, completely unable to distinguish a second amendment right advocated in the latter part of the 18^th century when muskets had yet to be invented vs. the array of firepower available on any urban street corner in the United States today.

Is it any wonder we have arrived to what we have in 2017—Trump as president and Senators being shot at baseball practice on suburban fields! The only sound of sanity to be heard this week? When Fox News finally decided on the first honest proclamation in its twenty-one year history: They finally dropped from their logo the “Fair and Balanced”. Hallelujah. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.