re: #249 KGxvi

I don’t watch Fox News (I’ll admit I used to back in the day, but also watched the other cable news channels as well), so I heard jokes about The Five but didn’t really think they could be that… obtuse. But I was just on the FNC website to see how they’re framing whatever the fuck that was that Trump did today, and there was a video from The Five talking about Jimmy Kimmel. One of the women on the show said something along the lines of “he’s in a bubble, and only wants to talk to people that agree with him…” She said it without a hint of irony or, apparently, any sense of self-awareness. That 30 seconds or so of watching The Five might have killed more brain cells than all of the drinking I did in undergrad, law school, and in my first two years of practice.

FOX doesn’t just present information or misinformation, it creates a world. It’s actually an interesting academic exercise if you can divorce your mind from the pure evil of it. It’s both micro and macro - immersive imagery, a carefully constructed narrative, but also constant use of phrases and words to reinforce, so that even exposure for a few seconds reinforces the worldview. You can walk past a TV with FOX on and casually hear a phrase like ‘we know Obama hated the Constitution’ (as I heard recently), and such an explosive lie isn’t even central to any particular story on the network, it’s just a casually tossed around lie that seems so minor in the context of the day of lies. But it’s not minor - it’s part of a deliberate plan to smother viewers with a blanket narrative that alters their very reality.

I went back through my post history recently, to see just when it was that I first started here. Interesting, if self-indulgent. But I note that even from my very first post, almost 9 years ago now, I was saying how oppressively evil FOX was and how existential a threat it was. I’m not happy to see that come true.