• Hazdaz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is what peak propaganda looks like.

    It only took 36 years.

    That’s how long ago the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine was abolish. It should come to no one’s surprise that it was abolished under the Reagan Administration.

    For those that do not know, the Fairness Doctrine essentially forced TV News to present BOTH sides to a story in an unbiased manner. There are many people reading this who were not even alive when this was abolished which means they have always had biased news in their lives. It amazes me how rarely the Fairness Doctrine is brought up when it comes to the destruction of our news media and ways the Right has tried to undermine our democracy and shift this country’s attitudes toward the Right.

    What is equally infuriating to me is when I hear people on the Left endlessly waffle from one rather insignificant topic to the next that they should focus their efforts on, and ultimately never getting anywhere. Enacting some type of new Fairness Doctrine should be near the top of the list of things the Left should be pushing for. An unbiased news media is the foundation that a democracy is built on. The news media is how the general public becomes educated on what is happening and that simply can’t happen when they lie endlessly like FOX News so famously does (other stations do as well, but few do it as well as Fox does). But the Left doesn’t focus on things like the Fairness Doctrine because it admittedly isn’t a “sexy” topic. It doesn’t get people’s attention. And it isn’t something that can get solved in a few weeks. The lack of focus is frustrating.

    Anyways, this topic put me on a tangent that nearly no one will read, but people love to react to what is happening this instant, but rarely ever think about how we got to this point. These bamboozled Fox News watchers didn’t simply wake up one day and believe all the shit that network spews out. The Right plays the long game on things and having an army of brainwashed listeners takes years and even decades to develop. The Left needs to learn this strategy.

    Sorry for the rant.

    • Alex@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Fairness Doctrine reinstated and enforced on anything claiming to act as news would definitely go a long way towards fixing the political hellscape fascist billionaires have created in their endless greed. Their strategy works off of fear and nationalism, you won’t be able to replicate it on the Left and still retain an audience of freethinkers, the propaganda is designed to wear people down and make them dumber than when they initially tuned in. Only authoritarians seek to erode the meaning of words for their own gain like the Right does on Fox, the best longterm strategy the Left has is education and voter-participation. - Things the Right undercut and underfund every chance they get.

  • fidodo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Only 42%? That’s more than enough to win the primary if Fox news is a comparable sample of primary election voters.

  • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Wait, so, people who get their news from a biased entertainment company believe something biased and non-factual? I for one am flabbergasted.

  • rDrDr@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    These are not smart people. You can ignore their opinions. They are lizards. They hate failure and weakness. As soon as Trump falters, they will pretend that they never supported him. These people would have died for George Bush, and he became a laughing stock within a couple years.

  • Bucky@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Society will never progress while Fox News is allowed to remain on the air. Fox News creates digital walls to segregate the audience from reality.

    • ManosTheHandsOfFate@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I remember a time when news for most people came from the local paper and/or a 30 minute network evening TV show. Both were written by real journalists who attempted to be unbiased.

      • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Read up on roger Ailes and Reagan destroying ‘The Fairness Doctrine.’

        Back in the day, you could only own two radio stations in one town [AM and FM] and any editorial had to provide time for rebuttal.

            • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              And cancelling Apollo. The Saturn V was the greatest engineering achievement of the human race. If the Wright brothers had done their first flight and 8 years later some group flew a 747 across the Pacific ocean it would have been by multiple measures a less impressive achievement.

              He cancelled the remaining missions and shelved the rocket. Within 2 years it could no longer be built and the country that went to the moon could not put a human into space. In the 50 years since then no rocket has come close to what it could do.

              And he did it all for tax cuts.

      • TurboDiesel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That is, until Sinclair and Clear Channel started gobbling up local affiliates to push their own narratives.

    • Nougat@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Fox News tapped an audience which was already open to such bullshittery. Removing Fox News does not remove that audience. We need to better understand why a significant proportion of the population (not just of the US, but of the world) embraces fascism and the structures that drive towards it. Then, to identify how to convince fascists to abandon fascism.

      • Alex@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Maindrivers of fascism are the insane people fearmongering and stoking nationalism in a bid for more power and money. It’s corruption and nonsense all the way down only made possible by poor education and voter participation. FPTP and lax campaign laws make it easy for the super wealthy to influence elections behind the scenes too. A lot of democracies are still run with systems designed by ancient wealthy romans for the benefit of ancient wealthy romans and are left unchanged. It’s to the surprise of noone when billionaires act like emperors in modern times with inequality on the rise everywhere and with news indistinguishable from entertainment given how the fairness doctrine has been long abolished even if that was precisely why it existed in the first place.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Do we? Hasn’t there been lots of books written by Europeans who lived thru the 1930s documented step by step how their nation fell.

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Books that the majority of Americans are too apathetic, ideologically poisoned or just busy to read, much less take concrete actions as a result.

          I wish it wasn’t so, but that’s the current reality. Telling your average Faux News viewer to read and honestly reflect on objective history books is a fool’s errand.

          We have to fight intolerance not with the information of the tolerant, but with vilification, exclusion and other severe consequences for their misanthropic words and actions.

      • NotMyOldRedditName@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        They (GOP) created the audience over decades by gutting education, social support programs and encouraging racism.

        By the time fox came around people were ripe to be abused.

        • Nougat@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Mostly agree, but I think that’s just one step removed. It’s not like the GOP (more correctly, conservatism) erected everything out of whole cloth, against a social democrat utopia that already existed. There has always been a very overlapping and sizeable Euler diagram of populism, conservatism, nationalism, and fascism, extending back into the tribal fog of prehistory.

          It’s easy to point the finger at the primary bogeymen of today, and that over simplification is a major way that these horrible political and social views propagate. Their messaging is wrong, but it’s easy, and generally speaking, people prefer easy to complicated, with disregard to what’s more accurate.

          The technology that allows powerful people to make war with each other and oppress the weak has vastly outpaced the advancement of more inclusive social and political philosophies. We’re going to need to come to a better understanding that we humans are all together one tribe. We need to be dedicated to the common good, not only of people like us, but of people unlike us, too, on the basis that we are all people.

    • 001100 010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      If people weren’t as stupid, they’d already be ignoring fox news.

      The solution to misinformation isn’t censorship, it’s for people to be better educated. Are we supposed to ban every conspiracy theory website? If so, who gets to decide what is the truth and what is “misinformation”? The same type of government organization that is now banning books in florida? No thanks.

      • mindbleach@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Educated fascists abound.

        Not that anyone should take you seriously, with that inane conclusion. ‘Oh, arresting kidnappers? Like the kidnappers did? No thanks.’

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      The thing is they don’t believe he committed any crimes because Fox keeps telling them he didn’t.

      This is like saying that 91% of members of the KKK hold racist views.

      It is actually quite interesting that the number is only 91%, that means that some people are watching Fox who do have a brain, I don’t know why they’re doing that.

      • Alex@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        some people are watching Fox who do have a brain, I don’t know why they’re doing that.

        They watch it for the entertainment value that it uses to defend itself in court - or they’ve yet to be worn down by the stupid nonsense they spout altogether.

  • Synthead@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    91% of people think they’re smarter than the United States justice system. This is because most of the United States citizens actually study law as a hobby, and even though they’re more qualified than the United States government, they choose alternative forms of income instead.

  • Hairyblue@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Propaganda works.

    When I was in school and learned about propaganda, I thought how do people believe in crazy lies. Like a Korean dictator having a divine birth, walking at 3 weeks of age, or not pooping. It is because propaganda works if that is all the info you have.

  • Ballistic86@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    They don’t like him as a politician anymore, but can’t admit that he committed crimes because they supported him doing so.

  • style99@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Watching too much TV in general causes mental disorders, but watching Fox “News” clearly causes severe brain damage. You’d be better off sniffing glue.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        We are really losing a generation of elderly and it is depressing. I had to deal with a few like that once and bite my tongue. One day I had it and just demanded to know why I didn’t know how many grandkids each of them had.

        How is it I can hear you guys talk for hours a day for freaken weeks and not one of you has bothered to tell me about your grandkids? You can’t talk to me for a half an hour without knowing about my kids. There is no way the subject won’t come up. And yet you 3 just go on and on and on about politics.

        They didn’t have an answer and I am not completely proud of myself for snapping like that. Still bothers me. Is this my future? An old grumpy shit ranting at other old grumpy shits with my family, career, hobbies, dreams, memories forgotten and not worth mentioning?