9 ms·

I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria

37 points by middleclick 13y ago

billyjobob 13y ago
From the perspective of the rest of the world, your Democrats and your Republicans seem so similar that it is bizarre these two had enough differences to argue over.
busterarm 13y ago
I lost my brother to this also, but he's only 40 and it started much longer ago and with talk radio (Limbaugh, Hannity, etc). I'm in the process of losing my 72 year old mother to it too. I remember as a family we listened to Bob Grant and he seems tame by comparison to the hosts of today. What a slippery slope... Thankfully, I saved myself from this sort of thinking, but it's sad to not really be able to talk to my family.
badman_ting 13y ago
Why was Fox News so able to induce such hysteria in these people, though? (Admittedly, that's less comfortable to think about than just complaining about what Fox does.)
- Carltonian 13y ago
  It leveraged the News's status as an integral part of the democratic process to undermine and influence that process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Poli... covers the how.
- gojomo 13y ago
  There's a human 'set point' for fear. If there aren't enough real things of which to be afraid, the mind will latch onto the next-most-credible things, even if relatively farfetched. With current long lives, lower crime, domestic peace, reasonable prosperity, and social insurance, there's a lot less to genuinely fear, in the US, than ever before. Without the challenges and stresses of full-time, market work, the retired are especially lacking in 'common project' or 'tribal team' fears (as opposed to say personal-health or relationship fears). Politics, among other industries, competes to answer this craving for objects-of-fear. The cable-news/permanent-political-campaign/crusading-government-busybodies nexus is an extremely efficient, low-cost, high-emotional-salience provider. Small staffs, recurring themes, and grandiose good-vs-evil narratives can be constantly redeployed, as a neverending modern fairy-tale with the added sheens of 'reality' and 'import'. Compare also: the hygiene hypothesis, for how an immune system unchallenged by real threats may tend towards misguided allergic or autoimmune overreactions.
  - glenra 13y ago
    I would just add that being overly afraid of Fox News, the Tea Party, and/or the Koch brothers is part of the exact same phenomenon.
jiggy2011 13y ago
Might this just be an example of someone who is getting old and cranky? As you get older things start to change and it's harder to move with the times and the world doesn't seem to make so much sense; so it's comforting to consume media that tells you that it isn't your fault but the rest of the world.
Carltonian 13y ago
Addiction really is the operating word here. It's what keeps you in front of the TV in the same way it keeps people in front of slot machines. The worst part is the thesis of conservative media; that while you do everything right, some nebulous liberal agenda is taking away everything that you hold dear, and are entitled to as a working person (ignoring all information regarding demographics and welfare recipients). Fox News makes good money off of convincing people who feel they are victims of the world at large that they are in fact autonomous conservatives/libertarians.
- Prophasi 13y ago
  "The worst part is the thesis of [...] media; that while you do everything right, some nebulous [...] agenda is taking away everything that you hold dear, and are entitled to as a working person" That's not particular to conservative media; it's the same tactic used to convince whole swaths of the population that the rich, the white, sexists, racists, jingoists, big corporations, government, etc. are keeping you down. Leveling it at only one side of a debate is falling into the trap polemicists set up. They all do this, from every angle and via all means possible. It's just propaganda, and one insidious aspect of it is that they convince people only the other side engages in it.
  - Carltonian 13y ago
    True, but Fox News is the best at it, so they get the flak. I'll give the other channels for convincing people Obama was going to change things, but those people already mostly wanted change (especially after the financial crisis). Fox News did more than that. They convinced people who had been Republicans for 30 years that they have been libertarians fo 30 years. That's just really scary.
    - logfromblammo 13y ago
      Meanwhile, people who have been actually libertarian for 30 years have to find another word to use for themselves. Again. If you want to be truly libertarian, guys, you also have to embrace open borders, support non-interventionist foreign policy, and desire that drug prohibitions cease. Defending gun rights and complaining about taxes and welfare is just a tiny part of the package. You can still oppose state-sanctioned gay marriage if you want, but only to the extent that you oppose government involvement in any kind of marriage. As I am a long-time libertard, the people who talk about freedom after watching Fox News make me laugh. They fill their heads with mass-media talking points all day, meet with like-minded people to create an echo chamber for the ideas they were force-fed, then worry about having adequate self-determination.
GauntletWizard 13y ago
Some of us are terrified of an ever-more invasive government, welfare progams that only ever seem to be welfare for corporations, and the destruction of the important american myth of hard work == success. Some of us keep listening to lies and dreams from an increasingly despotic asshole while american prosperity drifts away. You've lost yourself in fantasyland, not the other way around.
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  Your diet must be very Fox News heavy.
- Carltonian 13y ago
  And those of you that think this believe Fox News has your interests in mind? Where does them making money off of selling subscriptions and political campaign ads at ridiculous markup come into this? What a coincidence. They're not only one of the most expensive channels a cable company has to pay for, but they're also heroes.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  And some are also terrified of increasingly consolidated broadcasters that choose to have an obvious political bias. Fox News is part of the problem, as part of News Corp. As is ABC/ESPN/Disney/Touchstone/Pixar, and CBS/Viacom/Columbia/Tristar/Paramount, and NBC/Comcast/USA/Universal, and Time Warner/CNN/HBO/AOL/Castle Rock/New Line, and Clear Channel/Bain. And those same companies own newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, too. On top of that, investigative journalism has been in a death spiral ever since CNN debuted and inaugurated the 24 hour news-entertainment cycle. You're more likely to find something interesting in niche blogs and foreign media than on television.
mcphilip 13y ago
Fox News is a reasonable focal point for this piece, but it's only one small contributing factor. The sad thing is that purveyors of fear and distrust are all over the internet. I lost my dad to some combination of Glen Beck, Fox News, and the "Gold, Guns, and God" crowd. I caught glimpses of it via his emails from time to time. The first major one being links to radiation pills after Fukushima. Then the obsession with silver hit -- no one in my family knows how much or where he has buried his stashes in our two acre yard, but we know there are at least 4. Then the fear of drones hit, evidenced by my dad saying he was mowing the lawn as a "dog and pony show" for the eyes in the sky. Then the internet had to be disconnected because neighbors might be hacking him. Then the telephone was unplugged because it was bugged. Then he started making my mom write messages to him on paper in the house since the house was bugged. Then he had a restraining order put on him by a preacher who was so unnerved by his ranting. During this whole process he was convinced he was being led by the Holy Spirit and threatened my mom if she told anyone about it. Things went down hill so fast that I'm still shaken by it. I had to work with my family to get him committed on Christmas Eve. Maybe this is TMI, but hopefully some will see it as a warning. If you see someone you love going down that slippery slope of paranoia, don't hesitate to talk to them about it at first, and get advice from a trained psychologists if things get worse. Love the person, ignore the content of their ideas... maybe you can help prevent a breakdown.
- onli 13y ago
  I don't know if that is common knowledge (or how old your father is), but there is a specific kind of paranoia which is quite common after a specific age. In Germany it's called Altersparanoia, informally (which translates to paranoia of the old). What you describes doesn't sound like the radicalization caused by manipulating (and fascist?) propaganda, but more like that (maybe triggered or fortified by that thought environment, might be possible. We still don't know enough about stuff like that). Though the holy spirit should make it a different thing, a schizophrenic attack. I'm sorry, good luck to you and your family.
  - brg 13y ago
    Interesting that it is being attributed to the old and conservative. From 2002 to 2006 this kind of hysteria strongly affected the youth in the US beyond what I would consider reasonable measure. In 2004 I couldn't have a political discussion without someone talking about the inevitability of the draft, and in 2006 it was about how one party was obviously more corrupt than the other. From a foreign perspective, these views were obviously false, but were held by some with hysterical strength.
forgotAgain 13y ago
I find the father and the writer to be insufferable. The father for, as portrayed, his clutching ignorance, the writer for being a born-again snob.
- DanielStraight 13y ago
  Indeed. If he lost his father to Fox news, then his father lost his son to self-righteousness and a willingness to throw family under the bus for the sake of attention.
- SavvyGuard 13y ago
  What's important is you found a way to be superior to both of them [1] [1] https://xkcd.com/774/ https://xkcd.com/774/
  - sov 13y ago
    And you (and I, in turn) to be superior to him.
    - ld00d 13y ago
      It's only good for one conversation. Read the hover.
  - forgotAgain 13y ago
    Indeed! And in much fewer words I may say.
Buntraceable 13y ago
I highly recommend anyone in a similar situation read Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion." Haidt is a psychologist who studies moral development, and while I don't believe everything he puts forth in the book to be gospel, he makes many good points about how people come to moral conclusions (which may not be logical conclusions, but nonetheless are based on what the person uses their senses to believe is true). You can hear a summary of Haidt's theory or moral matrices, as well as an example of how the theory has been employed to talk to people across the "political divide": http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/2013/06/04/what-on-earth-is-happening-to-us-polarization-demonization-and-paralysis-in-american-politics/ http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/2013/06/04/what-on-earth-is...
greglindahl 13y ago
I lost my dad to the weather channel.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- happyscrappy 13y ago
  This is the only reasonable comment in this thread.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  Too right. The next person to refer to a winter storm by name in my presence is likely to be uninvited from all future family gatherings.
johndevor 13y ago
I think this article is writing about symptoms, not underlying causes. The vast majority of people do not fall prey to sensationalist media.
swframe 13y ago
I lost my Mom to Fox News for a while but after talking with her, she has come back. I didn't actually expect her to return but it is so easy to point out the holes in the Fox News arguments. I'm atheist but I know the bible well enough to use it to refute any argument she has heard on Fox. The wonderful thing about the bible is that you can quote it to defend or defeat just about any point of view.
sentientmachine 13y ago
From my perspective, the faulty programming being pumped into the older white guys (my dad included) is not the content of the message, but the methods of how to manipulate ideas to transform them into other ideas, and transform those into actions. For example, in my dad it started out around age 67 as the "bird people", the "green weenies", or the "save the whales" people. How they were ruining everything, stopping the corporations (of which he has no part in), stopping some business or something, and how it was such a travesty that someone could be so bold as to place the convenience of humans over the lives of critters we eat for lunch and dinner every day. So far so good, but the disturbing part I found was in how he responds to a rebuttal or a devils advocate. Even if I were to go out of my way and say several times: "I am not opposing your conclusion that your conclusion is absolutely right, I am simply offering the opposing view as a way to zoom in on the issue". Even if I ought right tell him that he can't get angry when I tell him that I'm about to disagree with him for purpose of having a debate. It's like those words don't have any meaning anymore. The opposition to his view causes anger like pushing down on a lever causes the other end to go up. He was not always like this. The faulty programmed response is one where the fox viewer should immediately sabotage, attack and oppose anyone taking up the alternate view. If I offer up an argument that tries to track in toward when animal protection is bad, and when it is good, immediately the anger kicks in. How can you be in bed with Them? How have you given up your soul to the enemies? It's THEM vs US and we have to protect what little we have. He's set in his ways, he's found the answer to everything in life, and the only thing left undone in the universe is to conform the universe to those structures. I would bring in hypotheticals, like what if mankind grows to 200 billion people, should we focus more on stopping corporations? It doesn't matter, the argument is not one that sparks discussion, it's one that reveals the position of the enemy. Things may be offered up to resist the opposing view. But I'm not opposing, I'm trying to clarify. I think its the Anterior cingulate gyrus that is responsible for causing pain when you hold two contradictory ideas in mind at once. As we age, this ability to juggle opposing views is reduced to nothing. And brains become like hashmaps, all we can do is map our universe onto predefined outputs. It's a descent from there down to other serious psychological and neurological problems, and when the damage spreads to necessary system functions, the person dies.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
sprockincat 13y ago
I can't tell if the title is ironic or just overly dramatic.

37 points by middleclick 13y ago

From the perspective of the rest of the world, your Democrats and your Republicans seem so similar that it is bizarre these two had enough differences to argue over.

busterarm 13y ago

I lost my brother to this also, but he's only 40 and it started much longer ago and with talk radio (Limbaugh, Hannity, etc). I'm in the process of losing my 72 year old mother to it too. I remember as a family we listened to Bob Grant and he seems tame by comparison to the hosts of today. What a slippery slope... Thankfully, I saved myself from this sort of thinking, but it's sad to not really be able to talk to my family.

badman_ting 13y ago

Why was Fox News so able to induce such hysteria in these people, though? (Admittedly, that's less comfortable to think about than just complaining about what Fox does.)

Carltonian 13y ago
It leveraged the News's status as an integral part of the democratic process to undermine and influence that process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Poli... covers the how.
gojomo 13y ago
There's a human 'set point' for fear. If there aren't enough real things of which to be afraid, the mind will latch onto the next-most-credible things, even if relatively farfetched. With current long lives, lower crime, domestic peace, reasonable prosperity, and social insurance, there's a lot less to genuinely fear, in the US, than ever before. Without the challenges and stresses of full-time, market work, the retired are especially lacking in 'common project' or 'tribal team' fears (as opposed to say personal-health or relationship fears). Politics, among other industries, competes to answer this craving for objects-of-fear. The cable-news/permanent-political-campaign/crusading-government-busybodies nexus is an extremely efficient, low-cost, high-emotional-salience provider. Small staffs, recurring themes, and grandiose good-vs-evil narratives can be constantly redeployed, as a neverending modern fairy-tale with the added sheens of 'reality' and 'import'. Compare also: the hygiene hypothesis, for how an immune system unchallenged by real threats may tend towards misguided allergic or autoimmune overreactions.
- glenra 13y ago
  I would just add that being overly afraid of Fox News, the Tea Party, and/or the Koch brothers is part of the exact same phenomenon.

jiggy2011 13y ago

Might this just be an example of someone who is getting old and cranky? As you get older things start to change and it's harder to move with the times and the world doesn't seem to make so much sense; so it's comforting to consume media that tells you that it isn't your fault but the rest of the world.

Carltonian 13y ago

Addiction really is the operating word here. It's what keeps you in front of the TV in the same way it keeps people in front of slot machines. The worst part is the thesis of conservative media; that while you do everything right, some nebulous liberal agenda is taking away everything that you hold dear, and are entitled to as a working person (ignoring all information regarding demographics and welfare recipients). Fox News makes good money off of convincing people who feel they are victims of the world at large that they are in fact autonomous conservatives/libertarians.

Prophasi 13y ago
"The worst part is the thesis of [...] media; that while you do everything right, some nebulous [...] agenda is taking away everything that you hold dear, and are entitled to as a working person" That's not particular to conservative media; it's the same tactic used to convince whole swaths of the population that the rich, the white, sexists, racists, jingoists, big corporations, government, etc. are keeping you down. Leveling it at only one side of a debate is falling into the trap polemicists set up. They all do this, from every angle and via all means possible. It's just propaganda, and one insidious aspect of it is that they convince people only the other side engages in it.
- Carltonian 13y ago
  True, but Fox News is the best at it, so they get the flak. I'll give the other channels for convincing people Obama was going to change things, but those people already mostly wanted change (especially after the financial crisis). Fox News did more than that. They convinced people who had been Republicans for 30 years that they have been libertarians fo 30 years. That's just really scary.
  - logfromblammo 13y ago
    Meanwhile, people who have been actually libertarian for 30 years have to find another word to use for themselves. Again. If you want to be truly libertarian, guys, you also have to embrace open borders, support non-interventionist foreign policy, and desire that drug prohibitions cease. Defending gun rights and complaining about taxes and welfare is just a tiny part of the package. You can still oppose state-sanctioned gay marriage if you want, but only to the extent that you oppose government involvement in any kind of marriage. As I am a long-time libertard, the people who talk about freedom after watching Fox News make me laugh. They fill their heads with mass-media talking points all day, meet with like-minded people to create an echo chamber for the ideas they were force-fed, then worry about having adequate self-determination.

GauntletWizard 13y ago

Some of us are terrified of an ever-more invasive government, welfare progams that only ever seem to be welfare for corporations, and the destruction of the important american myth of hard work == success. Some of us keep listening to lies and dreams from an increasingly despotic asshole while american prosperity drifts away. You've lost yourself in fantasyland, not the other way around.

res0nat0r 13y ago
Your diet must be very Fox News heavy.
Carltonian 13y ago
And those of you that think this believe Fox News has your interests in mind? Where does them making money off of selling subscriptions and political campaign ads at ridiculous markup come into this? What a coincidence. They're not only one of the most expensive channels a cable company has to pay for, but they're also heroes.
logfromblammo 13y ago
And some are also terrified of increasingly consolidated broadcasters that choose to have an obvious political bias. Fox News is part of the problem, as part of News Corp. As is ABC/ESPN/Disney/Touchstone/Pixar, and CBS/Viacom/Columbia/Tristar/Paramount, and NBC/Comcast/USA/Universal, and Time Warner/CNN/HBO/AOL/Castle Rock/New Line, and Clear Channel/Bain. And those same companies own newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, too. On top of that, investigative journalism has been in a death spiral ever since CNN debuted and inaugurated the 24 hour news-entertainment cycle. You're more likely to find something interesting in niche blogs and foreign media than on television.

mcphilip 13y ago

Fox News is a reasonable focal point for this piece, but it's only one small contributing factor. The sad thing is that purveyors of fear and distrust are all over the internet. I lost my dad to some combination of Glen Beck, Fox News, and the "Gold, Guns, and God" crowd. I caught glimpses of it via his emails from time to time. The first major one being links to radiation pills after Fukushima. Then the obsession with silver hit -- no one in my family knows how much or where he has buried his stashes in our two acre yard, but we know there are at least 4. Then the fear of drones hit, evidenced by my dad saying he was mowing the lawn as a "dog and pony show" for the eyes in the sky. Then the internet had to be disconnected because neighbors might be hacking him. Then the telephone was unplugged because it was bugged. Then he started making my mom write messages to him on paper in the house since the house was bugged. Then he had a restraining order put on him by a preacher who was so unnerved by his ranting. During this whole process he was convinced he was being led by the Holy Spirit and threatened my mom if she told anyone about it. Things went down hill so fast that I'm still shaken by it. I had to work with my family to get him committed on Christmas Eve. Maybe this is TMI, but hopefully some will see it as a warning. If you see someone you love going down that slippery slope of paranoia, don't hesitate to talk to them about it at first, and get advice from a trained psychologists if things get worse. Love the person, ignore the content of their ideas... maybe you can help prevent a breakdown.

onli 13y ago
I don't know if that is common knowledge (or how old your father is), but there is a specific kind of paranoia which is quite common after a specific age. In Germany it's called Altersparanoia, informally (which translates to paranoia of the old). What you describes doesn't sound like the radicalization caused by manipulating (and fascist?) propaganda, but more like that (maybe triggered or fortified by that thought environment, might be possible. We still don't know enough about stuff like that). Though the holy spirit should make it a different thing, a schizophrenic attack. I'm sorry, good luck to you and your family.
- brg 13y ago
  Interesting that it is being attributed to the old and conservative. From 2002 to 2006 this kind of hysteria strongly affected the youth in the US beyond what I would consider reasonable measure. In 2004 I couldn't have a political discussion without someone talking about the inevitability of the draft, and in 2006 it was about how one party was obviously more corrupt than the other. From a foreign perspective, these views were obviously false, but were held by some with hysterical strength.

forgotAgain 13y ago

I find the father and the writer to be insufferable. The father for, as portrayed, his clutching ignorance, the writer for being a born-again snob.

DanielStraight 13y ago
Indeed. If he lost his father to Fox news, then his father lost his son to self-righteousness and a willingness to throw family under the bus for the sake of attention.
SavvyGuard 13y ago
What's important is you found a way to be superior to both of them [1] [1] https://xkcd.com/774/ https://xkcd.com/774/
- sov 13y ago
  And you (and I, in turn) to be superior to him.
  - ld00d 13y ago
    It's only good for one conversation. Read the hover.
- forgotAgain 13y ago
  Indeed! And in much fewer words I may say.

Buntraceable 13y ago

I highly recommend anyone in a similar situation read Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion." Haidt is a psychologist who studies moral development, and while I don't believe everything he puts forth in the book to be gospel, he makes many good points about how people come to moral conclusions (which may not be logical conclusions, but nonetheless are based on what the person uses their senses to believe is true). You can hear a summary of Haidt's theory or moral matrices, as well as an example of how the theory has been employed to talk to people across the "political divide": http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/2013/06/04/what-on-earth-is-happening-to-us-polarization-demonization-and-paralysis-in-american-politics/ http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/2013/06/04/what-on-earth-is...

greglindahl 13y ago

I lost my dad to the weather channel.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
happyscrappy 13y ago
This is the only reasonable comment in this thread.
logfromblammo 13y ago
Too right. The next person to refer to a winter storm by name in my presence is likely to be uninvited from all future family gatherings.

johndevor 13y ago

I think this article is writing about symptoms, not underlying causes. The vast majority of people do not fall prey to sensationalist media.

swframe 13y ago

I lost my Mom to Fox News for a while but after talking with her, she has come back. I didn't actually expect her to return but it is so easy to point out the holes in the Fox News arguments. I'm atheist but I know the bible well enough to use it to refute any argument she has heard on Fox. The wonderful thing about the bible is that you can quote it to defend or defeat just about any point of view.

sentientmachine 13y ago

From my perspective, the faulty programming being pumped into the older white guys (my dad included) is not the content of the message, but the methods of how to manipulate ideas to transform them into other ideas, and transform those into actions. For example, in my dad it started out around age 67 as the "bird people", the "green weenies", or the "save the whales" people. How they were ruining everything, stopping the corporations (of which he has no part in), stopping some business or something, and how it was such a travesty that someone could be so bold as to place the convenience of humans over the lives of critters we eat for lunch and dinner every day. So far so good, but the disturbing part I found was in how he responds to a rebuttal or a devils advocate. Even if I were to go out of my way and say several times: "I am not opposing your conclusion that your conclusion is absolutely right, I am simply offering the opposing view as a way to zoom in on the issue". Even if I ought right tell him that he can't get angry when I tell him that I'm about to disagree with him for purpose of having a debate. It's like those words don't have any meaning anymore. The opposition to his view causes anger like pushing down on a lever causes the other end to go up. He was not always like this. The faulty programmed response is one where the fox viewer should immediately sabotage, attack and oppose anyone taking up the alternate view. If I offer up an argument that tries to track in toward when animal protection is bad, and when it is good, immediately the anger kicks in. How can you be in bed with Them? How have you given up your soul to the enemies? It's THEM vs US and we have to protect what little we have. He's set in his ways, he's found the answer to everything in life, and the only thing left undone in the universe is to conform the universe to those structures. I would bring in hypotheticals, like what if mankind grows to 200 billion people, should we focus more on stopping corporations? It doesn't matter, the argument is not one that sparks discussion, it's one that reveals the position of the enemy. Things may be offered up to resist the opposing view. But I'm not opposing, I'm trying to clarify. I think its the Anterior cingulate gyrus that is responsible for causing pain when you hold two contradictory ideas in mind at once. As we age, this ability to juggle opposing views is reduced to nothing. And brains become like hashmaps, all we can do is map our universe onto predefined outputs. It's a descent from there down to other serious psychological and neurological problems, and when the damage spreads to necessary system functions, the person dies.

logfromblammo 13y ago

sprockincat 13y ago

I can't tell if the title is ironic or just overly dramatic.