Fox News on the President

What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News

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No matter where the stories came from they all featured a few familiar beats: A loved one seemed to have changed over time. Maybe that person was already somewhat conservative to start. Maybe they were apolitical. But at one point or another, they sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person — someone difficult, if not impossible, to spend time with. The fallout led to failed marriages and estranged parental relationships. For at least one person, it marks the final memory he’ll ever have of his father: “When I found my dad dead in his armchair, fucking Fox News was on the TV,” this reader told me. “It’s likely the last thing he saw. I hate what that channel and conservative talk radio did to my funny, compassionate dad. He spent the last years of his life increasingly angry, bigoted, and paranoid.”

Something about the piece struck a chord. It had gone viral, and wave after wave of frustrated and saddened Fox News orphans began to commiserate with me and with each other on Twitter and in my messages. Others wrote of similar phenomenon in Australia with the television channel Sky or in the U.K. with the tabloid Daily Mail. I heard from more than a hundred people who felt like they could relate to what they all seemed to think of as a kind of ideological brain poisoning. They chose Fox News over their family, people told me. They chose Fox News over me.

There was the one reader who wrote of his Puerto Rican uncle becoming a Fox News junkie, and turning on his own people, as he put it, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. “He was literally sitting in the dark and still defending Trump,” he said, which seemed a metaphor almost too on the nose. Hearing stories like that over and over again all weekend wasn’t pretty.

As some critics of the piece pointed out, it seems a bit silly, if not stupid, to scapegoat a cable-news network for our family members’ interpersonal shortcomings. I get that. I don’t have an empirical way to assign blame or figure out causality. Maybe Fox News causes some people to turn toward hard-right conservatism; maybe it’s merely a precipitating factor; maybe it’s neither, and for most people, change in political attitudes came from elsewhere. In requesting stories about family members and Fox News, I wasn’t undertaking a scientific experiment — merely seeking to see if there are other people who had the same experiences I had, and felt the same way I did.

What I learned is that there are. Whatever the actual direction of causality, there are many, many Americans who blame Fox News for changes in their loved ones, and many people out there who feel as though their friends and family members have been lost to a 24/7 stream of right-wing propaganda.

Dozens who responded to my piece talked about the sad lonely twilight of their parents’ or grandparents’ lives, having been spurned by, or having disowned much of their families over political disagreements. Older people, recent studies have shown, are much more likely to share misleading information online, but the anecdotes I was hearing seemed to indicate this behavior wasn’t limited to the internet. Young parents wrote that they don’t want to bring their children to visit aging Fox-brainers. “The worst is when my children go to spend time with their grandparents and come home with Fox News talking points coming out of their mouths,” one told me. “I have to decontaminate them every time.”

I heard from several people that Fox News was a key factor in a divorce. One reader told me about his father, a one-time Trump skeptic turned believer. “He and my mom separated last November. There were other reasons but one of the big ones was his Fox addiction,” he wrote. “I went down to help him get set up in a new apartment. He cried a lot. We found an apartment and furniture and I got the utilities set up but I did not sign up for cable TV. He did that after I left, before he got a job.”

Another person told me that Rush Limbaugh sent his father on the path to isolation before eventually mainlining Fox News on a regular basis. Eventually, out of the blue, his mother filed for divorce. “He was crushed, couldn’t understand why, and took comfort in drinking while watching his friends on TV. She is happier than I have ever seen her and he is sad and angry living in the basement of a rented house, still watching The Five, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro, etc.”

For some, the Fox-driven political affiliations of family members represent a deep betrayal. A son wrote to me of his widowed father choosing Fox News over the well-being of him and his wife, both of whom are disabled. “He is aware that the GOP wants to take away health care and he still voted for Trump. He still likes Trump.”

If I had to pinpoint the most common reaction to all the thousands of replies to the story, I’d say it was one of exasperation — and desperation. I didn’t realize so many other people were dealing with this, many said. “Does anyone know an online support group for people going through this to share tips on deprogramming and/or surviving these relationships?” one asked. “If not … would anyone be interested in starting one?” It’s not the worst idea. The most positive story I heard came from a woman who brought her brother back from the edge with persistent and careful and sustained bridge-building work, showing him the error of his paranoid conspiracy thinking.

One problem is that once someone gets pulled into the Fox News vortex it naturally leads to other scummier enterprises. You might start out signing up for a Fox email list or one from the president then quickly find your email being sold far and wide to increasingly less reputable charlatans. “The thing that makes me maddest about this is that it’s about money,” one correspondent said. His dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year ago. “I guess Mike Huckabee has been selling his email to fucking everybody, including one list I noticed when I was getting his email set up called Beyond Chemo. They are selling him his own anger and a bunch of mushroom pills for all the money he doesn’t have anymore,” he said. “He’s gonna die destitute because of this shit and people belong in prison for seeing this as a business opportunity.”

Those who hadn’t yet broken off with family said maintaining the relationship with a person they love is exceptionally difficult, and requires all manner of safeguards. “I’ve been on eggshells with my dad for half my life now,” one wrote. “It really hurts having a father who is kind and smart but has Fox News brain worms. I can only talk to my dad about the weather. Anything else will set him off, even football …”

To be fair, there is a rough analog on the other side of the political spectrum, even if it seems, anecdotally, relatively muted. More than a few readers wrote to say this all made them thankful they merely had to contend with Dem-Boomer family who had gone mad for Maddow and Russiagate. “My grandma is a huge Maddow person and operates the same way as Fox News brained people,” one wrote me. “The signaling she gets and reiterates from MSNBC happens in the same sort of ‘brain rot’ way. Like, she heard something on there, or on Facebook, that was about how Trump is about to get impeached — and every day I talk to her and she repeats that.”

“I love her, and she’s bright and it’s obviously less offensive” than Fox News, the reader continued, “but the whole fucking garbage corporate 24 hour news model is insidious and so so fucking bad.”

The unfortunate familial balancing act is one I know well from my own family, where an argument, even among people who have explicitly agreed to avoid politics altogether, can erupt at any time. (Many people insisted, like I do myself, that their Trump-kissing parents are the kindest, sweetest people in the world and it makes no sense they would be Fox News viewers.) But it’s one thing to have grown up a liberal in a conservative family, and learned how to navigate difficult political conversations your entire life — even if those conversations have only gotten more difficult. But many of the people I heard from talked about a transformation, whether gradual or sudden.

One woman told me about her mother, who has stopped talking to her since becoming convinced Democrats are murdering children. It wasn’t always this way, she explained. Her mother had been a Democrat until 2008, and then something switched.

A lot of the stories echoed that turning point. There was something about Obama that seemed to make a lot of previously apolitical or moderate family members lose their minds. Gosh — what could it have possibly been?

This is, I think, where the channel’s genius lies. Any salesperson or con artist will tell you that you can’t incept a thought in a mark’s mind out of nowhere. You have to find the hook that’s already there — fear, or desire — and exploit it. When it comes to exacerbating and honing the anxieties of aging Americans you can’t do much better (or worse) than race and immigration.

Because the truth is, Fox News didn’t invent racism, and many of our family members would’ve believed in it on their own. This may have been the hardest thing I learned from the stories I heard: Fox didn’t necessarily change anyone’s mind, so much as it seems to have supercharged and weaponized a politics that was otherwise easy for white Americans to overlook in their loved ones. “Maybe he was always like this, but lacked the exhaust chamber to say out loud what he was thinking. I’ll never know,” one person told me. “It just sucks because I know the people he hates so much are basically the same people as me.”

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Frankfooter said:

You should read this story:


It really explains a lot of the right wingers here.

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K Douglas said:

So now Fox News is responsible for people becoming cynical, bitter and angry. For families breaking up. For folks dying. Why do Liberals seek to blame everyone and everything but the actual individual?
The reason Fox News has become so successful (they dominate the cable news market) is because the other news outlets have failed to be objective and unbiased in their reporting. .

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K Douglas said:

So now Fox News is responsible for people becoming cynical, bitter and angry.g

You want less Fox influence on society - start telling the fucking truth for once.

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A loved one seemed to have changed over time. Maybe that person was already somewhat conservative to start. Maybe they were apolitical. But at one point or another, they sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person — someone difficult, if not impossible, to spend time with.

This is, I think, where the channel’s genius lies. Any salesperson or con artist will tell you that you can’t incept a thought in a mark’s mind out of nowhere. You have to find the hook that’s already there — fear, or desire — and exploit it. When it comes to exacerbating and honing the anxieties of aging Americans you can’t do much better (or worse) than race and immigration.

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Frankfooter said:

The reason why Fox users become so bitter and angry is because they think that only Fox is 'objective and unbiased'.
Like you.

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SchlongConery said:

That isn't what I took away from the article, that Fox is creating these feelings. I read that perhaps it is allowing those feelings to come out.

The following reflects my personal experience:




Personally, I lost a very good friend to Rush Limbaugh a few years ago. Knew him most of my adult life. Was my mentor and I made a lot of money, had a lot of fun and experienced so much that I wouldn't have without him. Probably the funniest and good natured guy I will ever know. But he was racist and really disliked black people. Never said it out loud to most.

He started listening to Rush Limbaugh on a drive to Florida. Rush was so anti-Obama and that resonated with him. His biggest, any only criticism he could ever muster against Obama was that he was a "n*gg*r" and didn't belong in the White House. At the same time he hated Trump as we had close calls in business dealings with Trump in Atlantic City. Didn't lose any money that ended up in Trump's pocket but it cost us in pursuing two deals we ultimately bailed on when we realized he was a con man. However, once Trump started with the Obama birther thing, my friend became Trump's biggest fan.

I once showed him a story about Rush and O'Reilly admitting they were entertainers and didn't really believe half of what they say. He acknowledged it but revealed that they were saying what he couldn't put into his own words. So he liked that entertainment. It was speaking his truth. Gave him rational reasons to hate the "n*gg*r" in the White House.

Whenever I or any friends would talk to him, it was all about Obama. Then it is now how all the "liberals" are "idiots" because they don't like Trump. The same guy who almost conned him out of millions of dollars 30 years ago. One by one, his friends have stopped talking to him. I think I was the last one and I tried to explain that he was a Canadian,ying about US Presidential drama. (He has no opinions on world issues that are not derivatives of Presidential drama. That he was only creating his own angst about something he is impotent to influence. He can't even cast a US vote ffs!

Now all he does is watch Fox News every waking hour. His wife hates him. His friends can't stand his presence because everything comes back to something he heard on Fox News.

And it always comes back to race, religion or immigration. Now he "hates them all... n*gg*rs, ay-rabs, muslims and mexicans".

I know his life would be happier if he never listened to the "news". We once spent most of the winter on a yacht in the Caribbean. Almost no "news". We both commented on how nice it was to be disconnected and how we really didn't miss out on much more than our mothers might have if they missed a few weeks of "The Edge of Night" soap operas.

I might just do that again...

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SchlongConery said:

That isn't what I took away from the article, that Fox is creating these feelings. I read that perhaps it is allowing those feelings to come out.

The following reflects my personal experience:




Personally, I lost a very good friend to Rush Limbaugh a few years ago. Knew him most of my adult life. Was my mentor and I made a lot of money, had a lot of fun and experienced so much that I wouldn't have without him. Probably the funniest and good natured guy I will ever know. But he was racist and really disliked black people. Never said it out loud to most.

He started listening to Rush Limbaugh on a drive to Florida. Rush was so anti-Obama and that resonated with him. His biggest, any only criticism he could ever muster against Obama was that he was a "n*gg*r" and didn't belong in the White House. At the same time he hated Trump as we had close calls in business dealings with Trump in Atlantic City. Didn't lose any money that ended up in Trump's pocket but it cost us in pursuing two deals we ultimately bailed on when we realized he was a con man. However, once Trump started with the Obama birther thing, my friend became Trump's biggest fan.

I once showed him a story about Rush and O'Reilly admitting they were entertainers and didn't really believe half of what they say. He acknowledged it but revealed that they were saying what he couldn't put into his own words. So he liked that entertainment. It was speaking his truth. Gave him rational reasons to hate the "n*gg*r" in the White House.

Whenever I or any friends would talk to him, it was all about Obama. Then it is now how all the "liberals" are "idiots" because they don't like Trump. The same guy who almost conned him out of millions of dollars 30 years ago. One by one, his friends have stopped talking to him. I think I was the last one and I tried to explain that he was a Canadian,ying about US Presidential drama. (He has no opinions on world issues that are not derivatives of Presidential drama. That he was only creating his own angst about something he is impotent to influence. He can't even cast a US vote ffs!

Now all he does is watch Fox News every waking hour. His wife hates him. His friends can't stand his presence because everything comes back to something he heard on Fox News.

And it always comes back to race, religion or immigration. Now he "hates them all... n*gg*rs, ay-rabs, muslims and mexicans".

I know his life would be happier if he never listened to the "news". We once spent most of the winter on a yacht in the Caribbean. Almost no "news". We both commented on how nice it was to be disconnected and how we really didn't miss out on much more than our mothers might have if they missed a few weeks of "The Edge of Night" soap operas.

I might just do that again...

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K Douglas said:

No. It's that we understand that Fox News has a hard news side and a political commentary side. They also allow alternative viewpoints on there regularly, far more than the other cable news networks. And they do real investigative reporting. Light years ahead of CNN and MSNBC.

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jcpro said:

LOL! You had an idiot friend. Their enemies tried to pin racism(and everything else) on Rush and Bill for decades. Unfortunately, there were always free transcripts available. Ive been listening to Rush since 91/92 when he was still pushing "The way thing ought to be" when I lived in America. Never really cared for O'Reilly.

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Frankfooter said:

You miss the point.
Con men don't succeed because they can convince people to do something they don't want to do, they succeed because they convince them to do something that they really do want to but are afraid to do.
Fox and Trump supporters didn't become racist listening to Fox or Trump, they were racist first and Fox and Trump gave voice to their inner views.

Its just like the anti-Muslim threads here, those are threads by racists who now feel backed in their racist views against those 'ayrabs'.

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jcpro said:

What a relief to find that CNN didn't make you an anti semite.

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jcpro said:

LOL! You had an idiot friend..

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K Douglas said:

Sounds like your friend has some serious underlying issues. Hopefully he can get his life together. Family and friends are far more important than politics.

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K Douglas said:

I'd be very surprised to hear either Rush or O'Reilly state that they didn't believe half of what they said.
Absolutely FNC was very critical of Obama. But they backed it up with substance. And I believe history will back them up. The Obama presidency was disastrous on almost every level.

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SchlongConery said:

You can believe what you want but I have known him for decades and he is no "idiot". But now he sounds like he has a mental illness as all he talks about it what he hears on the "news".

Which is the point of this thread.





That was the point of the article above. His "underlying issues" of being mildly racist have now become the core of his life's expression. Seriously, he is now beyond salvation. He does not see he has a problem, so deep is he into his life of drama politics. Like an alcoholic not realizing they are alcoholics even when everyone else around them sees they do.






Do you realize that you were not able to stay on the topic of some people not being able to have a discussion on anything without bringing Fox News, "Truth" , Obama etc? The very point of the original post?

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jcpro said:

Idiot is a broad term that covers a lot of ground. In the end, people hear and see what they want to. Whether it's left or right, the selective reinforcement only reflects the preconceived bias. We see that right here(and everywhere else) with the "collusion" case. It's over, but letting go is not an option for many. Basically, the parrot is not dead- as in the Monty Python sketch- and there is no way around it.

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Frankfooter said:

Your post is an excellent example of your own argument.

The word 'collusion' is Trump's term, its not a legal term nor did Mueller investigate it.
The only reason its there is Trump and Fox.

You demonstrate all the symptoms yourself.

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jcpro said:

"Any links and/or coordination between (...)" Right out of Rosenstein's letter authorizing the Mueller's investigation. Also known as collusion- lovingly embraced by the CNN, NYT, WaPo and the rest.

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