Monday, May 25, 2015

Ex-Reagan Official: Fox News is Brainwashing Republicans into a Fringe Group


Fox News - or Faux News as I call it on this blog - is first and foremost a propaganda machine that seemingly thrives in a universe detached from objective reality and which is moving the GOP towards becoming a lunatic fringe group.  Or so says economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.  Candidly, I agree with his assessment and continue to believe that the GOP is headed toward long term oblivion unless and until it throws off control of the Christofascists and their Tea Party first cousins.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at Bartlett's assessment.  Here are highlights:
Economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warned over the weekend that Fox News had damaged the Republican Party by creating a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves.

In his paperHow Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics” published earlier this month, Bartlett theorized that watching the network was essentially “self-brainwashing” for viewers, making them believe that the United States was a more conservative nation than it actually was. And so the Republican Party had responded by running radical conservatives that representative Fox News viewers, but not the true state of the electorate.

“Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people,” Bartlett told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday. “When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily.”

“And so, they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s brainwashing.” 

Bartlett asserted that it was a bigger problem for conservatives than liberals because they did not have their own network for a long time, and then they “drank very heavily from the Fox waters.”

Sadly, some of my once upon a time Republican colleagues fit within Bartlett's description and have become so brainwashed that it is impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.  Ironically, they claim that I am the one who has been brainwashed when, in fact, they need to look in the mirror at themselves.  Yes Karen, I am talking about you!!

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