Posted on 09/16/2020 11:45:01 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
All happy families are alike; some unhappy families are unhappy because of Fox News.
You might have come across the articles (“I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you’ve known your whole life. They acknowledge how easily national crisis can become a personal one. At this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox.
Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct.
But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Completely ignoring SJWs in-group language from “woke” to “performativeness”.
After decades it still hasn’t occurred to the people who say this shit that the real problem is themselves.
Sorry, but I don’t understand hate speech (that comes from watching Fox).
so I can’t understand what the Atlantic is saying. I guess I must learn to decipher Lies and the rest of liberal speak.
Don’t forget “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to account for the hate and vitriol spewing out of left-wing propaganda machines like the Atlantic.
Language, too, is a norm. It is one more shared fact of political life that can seem self-evident until someone like Trump, or something like Fox, reveals the fragility that was there all along. You might have observed, lately, how Americans seem always to be talking past one another—how we’re failing one another even at the level of our vernacular. In the America of 2020, socialism could suggest “Sweden-style social safety net” or “looming threat to liberty.” Journalist could suggest “a person whose job is to report the news of the day” or “enemy of the people.” Cancel culture could mean … actually, I have no idea at all what cancel culture means at this point. Fox, on its own, did not create that confusion.
But it exacerbated it, and exploited it. The network turned its translations of the world into a business model. Every day, the most watched shows of the most watched cable network in the country—a prime-time destination more popular than ESPN—take the familiar idioms of American democracy and wear away at their common meanings. The result is disorientation. The result is mass suspicion. Like a vengeful God bringing chaos to Babel, Fox has helped to create a nation of people who share everything but the ability to talk with one another.
If you weren’t a regular viewer of Fox, Guilfoyle’s speech, and the many others that followed it as the convention wore on, might have been nearly unintelligible. If you hadn’t been informed that inclusivity is “groupthink”; if you weren’t conditioned to understand that the definition of media is “the enemy”; if you hadn’t been aware that Democrats want to “destroy your families, your lives, and your future”—you might have been jarred by all of the vitriol. You might have found yourself wondering why, in the midst of a global pandemic that had sickened millions of Americans and claimed the lives of more than 170,000, the RNC was warning about the threats of “cosmopolitan elites.” You might also have wondered why, during the nation’s long-overdue racial-justice reckoning, the RNC gave airtime to a couple who brandished guns at peaceful protesters—or why, during an economic emergency that has cost millions of Americans their livelihoods, a teenager was trotted out to talk about cancel culture (“being canceled, as in annulled, as in revoked, as in made void”).
The speeches, yes, were distractions from the ground truths of our crises. But they also attempted another kind of control: They reveled in the power TV has to shape—and to limit—viewers’ empathies. Instead of describing the America that is, the Republican Party described the America that is manufactured, every day, on Fox. It used its platform to refight some of Fox’s fondest micro-wars. It told its viewers not to focus on the people who have died, or the many more who might, but instead to focus on themselves: Your freedom. Your future. Your America. Watching it all, I felt the familiar fog that descends when something is lost in translation, when someone talks about something you share—in this case, a country—using details that are unrecognizable. It was the same kind of haze that came when Trump, newly sworn in as president, coined American carnage to describe a nation where violent crime had been declining for decades. Do we live in the same America? the broken words whisper. Maybe not, the same words reply.
I’m old enough to remember when The Atlantic was actually a fairly decent magazine. It’s disappointing to see it’s descended to the level of continuous CNN-MSDNC Marxist propaganda.
But, The Five has Juan Williams as the liberal voice of reason. Shouldn’t this writer be happy that Juan puts all those Neanderthal conservatives in their place on that show? What the heck????
That was actually published? The leftist rag is now a certified journal of how to go insane, and needs to be shut down.
Ha, ha, what would they say if they heard they were “lost” to FR or other true conservative media?
All SJWs speak is Marxism.
I know i don’t speak liberal...you know:
Russia! Russia!! Russia!!!
Racist!!
Xenophobe!!
Sexist!!!
Looks like Megan Garble forgot about the feud between Trump and Fox? So OAN is no longer the favorite and Fox is back in?
Who writes and publishes such utter tripe?
“After decades it still hasn’t occurred to the people who say this shit that the real problem is themselves.”
Agreed
You, my dear friend, are spot on.
Wish I could say exactly that to the thousands of Libtards I meet every day.
The Left is soo full of hate. No wonder they have no difficulty recruiting molitov cocktail throwers and BLM/Antifa rioters.
Don’t forget “Drumpf”, “Orange man bad”, ad nauseam.
Hope hope they go out of business.
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