Jen Senko interviewed Edward S. Herman for her film The Brainwashing of my Dad. Herman had written a very influential book with Noam Chomsky a saint of the Left-Wing. The book was called Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.  In the interview Hermann explained how Fox News had made its right-wing views explicit without any pretext anymore of objectivity. With the withering of the Fairness Doctrine, it had a license to do exactly that. And Fox did not pull any punches. People loved the fact that it did not pull punches. Americans were ready for extreme right-wing views on television as it had already demonstrated in right-wing talk radio.

According to Herman, Fox was “blatantly biased.” Claims that it was fair and balanced were mere camouflage for the real Fox News. According to Herman it had a political agenda and it was the agenda of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Herman said Fox “had an effect on the media. It was already pretty fair to right, but it drove the media even further to the right.”

David Brock, the author of The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine agreed with Herman that the most important effect of Fox was the effect it had on the rest of the American media. It did not just influence its own viewers, frequently its false claims and highly biased stories “bled over into the mainstream media.”

Brock explained that media was in an ecosystem where one media source would affect other media within the ecosystem. So, if Fox got it wrong, a lot of media got it wrong too and hence the American public was strongly influenced by the right-wing bias on Fox.

Although Fox News had mainly older viewers many of those oldsters introduced their children and even grand children to Fox as well. As a result, the influence of Fox was growing exponentially in America. And with that growth, went right-wing views. Right-wing views were exploding as Fox News popularity exploded.

This was wonderful—for the right-wing.

For the rest of us, not so much.