How Fox is Just Leading All The Way Down
There's always someone or something threatening you and yours.
A few years ago, while visiting with my parents before they passed, I realized that, like many older Americans, they had taken to watching Fox News regularly. I also got to watch their moods continue to get worse bit by bit.
I later saw the same thing with other family members too. People who had gone from relatively happy, easy-going friendly folks to angry, bitter and paranoid. They were convinced that people they worked with or went to church with did not like them and meant to do them harm, let alone strangers and people not like them. Sometimes they started hoarding various items, “just in case”. They fell into deep worries about money and crime. They no longer trusted doctors, neighbors, even friends.
As someone with mental health issues in my own past, I recognized much of this as signs of depression, and while depression among older Americans has been an issue, this felt a little different. The more time I spent with these folks in their house, with Fox News on almost non-stop, the more I realized that this fact alone might very well be contributing to what I was seeing.
If I stopped to pay attention to the news segments on the TV, I was struck by just how many of them were based on the idea that Fox was going to give you the information you needed to keep you safe. Safe from the scammers that target the elderly, but also safe from the Socialists, the Gays, the Left, the Arabs, the Teacher’s Union, immigrants, the deep-state, and on and on. Every single day was filled with story after story about someone coming to get you, your money, your kids, and on and on. It’s no wonder older people in my own life were getting crankier and paranoid. Fox had latched on to something that worked.
Fear.
Nothing gets our attention like fear. Nothing keeps our attention like fear. It’s instinctual. We do not have the ability to turn off that instinct. That’s how we stayed alive in the wild, paying attention to the things that we should be afraid of.
Fox took advantage of that, and was successful. Of course, like everything else in media, once they were successful at it, others were bound to try it. If fear sells on the Right, surely it will sell on the Left too. And so, we came up with new things to be afraid of. Religious Conservatives were coming after us, the rich were stealing our money, Big Tech and Big Pharma were conspiring against us, the police are all racist, and corporations are evil polluters.
And the cycle continues. Now, even while we laugh at the people who watch Fox for being afraid, we have created our own media monsters with no limit to the ways they will also sell us fear.
Go look at social media right now and ask yourself, how many news stories do I see in a given hour that are just some retelling of this same narrative.
This is happening and it is going to harm you and people you care about, come to our site so we can tell you all about why you should be outraged and fearful.
So it’s no wonder that everyone thinks their side of the media game is honest and the other side is just selling fear. It’s not that our side isn’t, it’s just the fear we already had, and they have tapped in to it.
That’s not to say that there aren’t things we should be afraid of, and that there aren’t groups out there who are actively trying to gain power and don’t care who they hurt to get it. These stories wouldn’t catch our attention if there wasn’t some truth to them, after all. But maybe, just maybe, they are more fringe than we’ve been led to believe, and maybe, just maybe, we’d all do well to stop assuming that everyone is out to get us because our media tells us they are.
If you’re in the media, you might also do well to remember that Twitter represents a very small percentage of the country (less than 25% of adults even say they use it at all). You might even say that people who post about politics on Twitter actually are the extreme fringe, and not the majority of the population, and thus we aren’t in as much danger as you might think just scrolling through tweets.
Maybe.
Either way, let’s ratchet down the fear and think about why your favorite media site keeps telling you what to be afraid of instead of what to be proud and happy about. Then act accordingly, because you might just realize that not everyone is out to get you, and most people just want to live their own lives.
But keep an eye out for the extremist folks who are out to hurt others because they do exist and they are taking advantage of all this media-driven fear.