Fox News had millions of devotees. Many of them were not just fans, they were zealots for Fox. In her effort to understand her father whom she had felt had been brain-washed, Jen Senko interviewed a bunch of them in her film. And the interviews were telling.
One young man Matthew Saccaro author of I was a Teenage Fox Robot. He had been a fan of CNN until his grandfather turned him on to Fox. His grandfather explained to him that CNN and CNBC were just liberal propaganda. He saw Bill O’Reilly as the champion on the rights for little people. Now he considers that “totally ridiculous.” According to Saccaro O’Reilly taught him that the American Civil Liberties Association, (the “ACLU”) was a terrorist organization that was trying to take away all their rights. If you think this is an exaggeration, consider this headline to one of O’Reilly’s stories: “The ACLU aiding Al Qaeda. This is an amazing story that you most likely won’t see anywhere else.’ Well of course you won’t see it anywhere else because most media outlets have journalistic standards, and don’t just offer far-fetched right-wing propaganda uncritically. It was like saying the January 6th riot at the capital was just a bunch of tourists.
Saccaro now knows this was “as big a lie as you can get,” but at the time he was convinced that finally there was someone on TV who “gets it.” He also thought “if we can’t say merry Christmas we are as bad as the terrorists.” Now Saccaro says, “this is the insane kind of bullshit that Fox News gets people to believe.”
Fox had another ratings ploy that garnered a lot of attention. This was the alleged “War on Christmas” by the Left-wing in America. Roger Ailes told his people, “Let me think. 90% of people love Christmas. So CBS, CNN, and MSNBC can take the other 10% and we’ll say ‘Merry Christmas’ and make all the money.” Of course, the so-called “war on Christmas” was pretty tame stuff, typically hyped and exaggerated by Fox in order to enrage their own viewers. And it worked. Americans on the right loved it. That is a common tactic on Fox. Get the viewers enraged.
Steve from Paris found his father acting in similar ways after he got hooked on Rush Limbaugh. He said, “It doesn’t make any difference how many facts you put out there, it’s all about the emotions of anger, hate and fear.” Those are the emotions that get one’s attention engaged. The more engagement, the more revenue for right-wing media. Hate sells.
One interviewee named Chuck explained how he had dated a nice loveable woman. He called her a “sweet lady,” but after they broke up, she started watching Fox News around 2004 during the presidential election and got a steady diet of right-wing propaganda. In his view it was propaganda. And then
“that sweet loveable likeable person was gone and was replaced by Fox and corrupted by Fox into this intolerant willfully ignorant compassionless individual. I tried to steer her away from Fox to anything else but Fox and she got sucked into that fox hole and now that sweet little person I once knew is gone. And I miss my friend and wish she would come back.”
As Bill Reilly said, “He was not going to say Happy Holiday. He would say Merry Christmas to everyone even if they were standing by a synagogue.” Those wicked liberals were not going to steal Christmas from him and his family.
Merry Christmas.