Jen Senko, the director and producer and narrator of the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, found some scientists and doctors who identified some of the tactics of the right-wing that could result in profound changes in people.
One tactic she called “Lie and Skew.” This is based on an insight of the German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. This is what the history scholar, now in Canada, Timothy Snyder, called “The Big Lie.” Hitler told such lies. So did Donald Trump. The bigger the lie the better it worked.
Another example was the claim by George W. Bush and his cronies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when they invaded in 2003. Such weapons were never found no matter how many years they occupied Iraq. Many conservatives so strongly believed this lie that many years later they still believed, entirely without evidence of course, that Saddam Hussein just kept moving the weapons to keep them out of sight of the occupying American army. George W. Bush, to his credit eventually admitted that they never found them. More recently, Donald Trump has claimed the 2020 presidential election in the US was stolen fraudulently by the Democrats. He has never provided evidence to support that claim. He just repeats it over and over again as if that is enough. And many Republicans believe it even though they don’t have any credible evidence for it either.
Jonathan Schroeder professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology pointed out that often news media will claim a statistic that they cite out of thin air without saying who said it or where it came from. You have to know these things so you can tell if it is independent, created by recognized experts in the field and has been peer reviewed
Fairleigh Dickenson University’s Public Minds survey asked 1,185 people nation wide what their news services were and then asked them about events in the US and abroad. Those news services were then evaluated on the basis of how many of the viewers of various sources got the right answer. The result were incredibly interesting: Here is the order from good to bad of those news services’ viewers:
NPR
Sunday Show,
Daily Show,
CNN,
MSNBC,
No News,
Fox News
You got it. Fox News viewers came last even behind viewers who watched no news at all!
I more or less would rank the news services in the same order though Comedy News is a comedy show.
Of course, to many on the right in America the only source they trust is Fox News and, of course, their own independent research on the Internet. I have watched it too, but find their opinions usually far- fetched. But I admit I don’t watch it often. I am referring particularly to the version of Fox News that includes their pundits like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Trump seems to believe everything he hears there and has in fact appointed a number of their pundits to his Cabinet or panel of advisors.
I know that others disagree, but Fox News, in my opinion, based admittedly on very limited experience, is addicted to the Big lie because it sells. It gets people angry. And anger is the basis of their widespread support among the American right-wing. For what it’s worth that is my opinion