GOP's Ugly Evolution -- Part Two
The
airwaves used by radio stations to broadcast their programs belong to
the public. Since 1934, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
has regulated radio and television. For a number of years, the FCC
imposed a “Fairness Doctrine” on broadcasters. Under this rule,
stations had to provide programs on public issues and also
opportunities for people with different views to be heard. The idea
was to promote free speech by encouraging diversity.
In 1987, however, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine, as part of the Reagan administration's drive to deregulate industries. The FCC stated that the doctrine was no longer necessary because technology had created many more stations, which provided diversity of opinions. The fairness doctrine, concluded the FCC, actually inhibited public discussion by intimidating broadcasters.
Since
then, the FCC has further eased its regulation of the broadcasting
industry except in the area of obscenity. Talk radio uses tape delay
to screen for this. During this period, talk radio has become a
national phenomenon (Talk 2).
The
Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base
of its own party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has
been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of
right-wing talk radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially
talk radio transposed onto television.
Just
think of all the right-wing “superstars” who spew messages of
anger and hate every single day throughout the land over this
enormous megaphone. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura
Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, Dana Loesch, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, to
name a few.
And
make no mistake, spewing hate has a significant impact upon society.
It is the equivalent of modern-day propaganda where the population is
barraged with a stream of consistent messaging. As ordinary people
go about their daily lives, they are exposed repeatedly, day in and
day out, to the same messages in numerous forms and by numerous
people. Pretty soon, these messages begin to sink in and take effect.
The audience begins to adopt a worldview consistent with these
messages, regardless of the degree of truth. It is a remarkable
phenomenon.
Propaganda
is powerful stuff. Many people are susceptible to it and can be
swayed by it, especially the less educated.
In
America today, right-wing media is engaged in this very same activity
through Fox News and extremist talk radio. This network is
constantly barraging its audience with a stream of consistent
messaging. And this messaging is overwhelmingly negative and
destructive.
The
messaging consists of common themes that recur in various forms. One
central theme is a fierce opposition to government, especially
so-called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms
as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington,
D.C., the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal
politicians.
Another
big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out because
government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are
about to take away your rights. Your freedom is about to disappear.
Your religious liberties will be stripped away. You won’t be able
to make your own healthcare decisions. Free choice will be gone.
Your children will suffer. Even though you are just an innocent
person minding your own business, you are about to be victimized!
Another
common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must protect
our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by those
who are a little bit different from us. The particular targeted
group changes with the times, but the concept remains the same.
And,
of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,”
is to blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is
powerful. If a Democrat is in the White House, then the president
becomes the favorite bullseye. Otherwise the demon is some other
Democratic politician, typically from Congress.
… politicians
in the Republican Party could not resist. The extremist right-wing
network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that
could easily be exploited for political support. Even though the
extremist media network was fomenting anger and hatred that is
disastrous for society overall, the network could also be used to
deliver political votes to Republican politicians.
An
unholy alliance was formed. The Republican Party would allow the
extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda
throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in
exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the
Republican Party.
So
for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed
out content full of anger, hate, and division. And Republican
politicians jumped on the bandwagon. They began preaching the same
destructive messages and appearing on the extremist right-wing
network all across the nation.
And
guess what? It worked.
The
base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry. Their
resentment against our very own government grew ever greater. Their
sense of victimization became ever more acute. Their fury at the
establishment boiled over (Cain 1-3).
Rush
Limbaugh is being held accountable for a business model that relies
on using sexist attacks, preying on racial anxieties, peddling hate,
and promoting downright lies to generate controversy and ratings. For
years, Limbaugh had a perverse incentive to bully, lie, and smear
because he knew he'd be rewarded. The more outrageous his show was,
the higher his ratings and revenues would climb.
Every
day, he takes to the airwaves to peddle remarkable new slurs, smears,
and conspiracy theories
(Join
1).
Having
spent half of my professional career as a radio host, I [Bill Press]
consider talk radio the most influential of all media platforms with
the power to entertain, to inform and to inspire. Unfortunately,
Limbaugh has used his bully pulpit to do nothing but bully.
Believe
me, I know. For years I followed Limbaugh on KFI-AM in Los Angeles.
He spewed so much bile, his personal attacks were so ugly, I felt
like the guy walking behind the elephants in the circus parade,
sweeping up the stink they left behind (Press
1).
With
a handful of other big national names, and hundreds more on local AM
talk stations across the US, they spew forth a daily diet of real and
manufactured anger at those accused of wrecking America. The primary
targets are Democrats and anyone liberal on immigration, race or
abortion, or taking seriously global warming.
"They claim
that they're just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of
pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes,"
said Rory O'Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk
Radio. "It's all bound together so when it's convenient for
them to be entertainers they say, hey, it's all just a joke. But when
it's not, they say they're giving you information that you need."
O'Connor
says conservative talk radio taps in to a disaffected but vocal
minority. "This movement was born 20 years ago out of a sense of
victimization
and voicelessness by a reasonably large segment of the population,
and clearly Limbaugh and the people who followed him tapped in to
some real sentiments of people who felt they weren't being heard,"
he said. "There is a minority of the American populace which is
angry about these issues. [Michael]
Savage
has 8 million listeners but we are a country of 300 million people.
It's a large niche audience but there is no way a majority of the
people agree with him. But does it make a difference? Yes. They
succeeded so widely that the conservatives they backed ended up
controlling the [Bush] presidency, both houses of Congress and the
supreme court" (McGriel
2).
When
Fox News was founded in 1996, the ostensible goal was to create a
conservative-leaning cable news network that
would counteract the perceived left-wing bias in existing televised
news sources. The creator of Fox News was Rupert Murdoch, the
Australian media mogul and billionaire, who, like most rich people,
wanted to keep his money instead of giving it to the government. Fox
News, in part, was borne out of a mogul’s desire to help advance
policies that would work to that effect.
The
man in charge of Fox News from 1996 until his harassment-related
departure two decades later was Roger Ailes, a television executive
and former Republican campaign operative. Ailes came by his
conservative leanings honestly, but he was also a propagandist par
excellence. As a young man, he had worked on Richard Nixon’s 1968
presidential campaign, producing TV spots designed to make the
fulminating, beetle-browed Nixon seem not just palatable but
benevolent. Over the course of his tenure at Fox News, Ailes worked
to perform the same magic trick on countless conservative policies
and personalities that primarily served the interests of a very
wealthy few (Peters 3).
The
purpose of Fox News, aside from the billions it brings in for
Murdoch, is to push a right-wing agenda. To take just one example,
nearly every Murdoch property—but especially Fox News—amplified
and exaggerated the dishonest case that George W. Bush’s
administration made for its allegedly preemptive war against Iraq in
2003. Back then, The
New York Times
reported
that “Mr. Murdoch’s creation of the Fox News Channel has shifted
the entire spectrum of American cable news to the right.” Two years
later, political scientist Jonathan
S. Morris analyzed
the data from the Pew Research Center’s Biennial Media Consumption
surveys in order to “identify demographic and behavioral factors
that predict Americans’ exposure to cable and broadcast nightly
news.” Alarmingly, he found that Fox News viewers were “more
likely than non-watchers
to underestimate rather than overestimate the number of American
casualties in Iraq.”
…
Fox
News’ dishonesty has been crucial in shaping our politics.
Examining the voting data for 9,256 towns in the 2000 elections,
Stefano
DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan found
that Republicans did better in places where the network was carried
by cable providers. They discovered “a significant effect of Fox
News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. [The] estimates imply
that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote
Republican.” And that was just the beginning: A more recent study
by Gregory
Martin and Ali Yurukoglu showed
that Fox News increased Republican support by 3.59 points in 2004 and
6.34 points in 2008 (Alterman
2-3).
Dean
Lacy, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, traces America’s
political rearrangement as far back as the emergence of “Reagan
Democrats” in the 1980s — working-class whites who switched to
the Republican Party largely because of social issues like
affirmative action and abortion. But he also notes that to the
Democrats’ old working-class base, the Clinton administration’s
embrace of international trade eventually felt like a sellout.
At
the same time, the Democratic Party increasingly presented itself as
the vanguard of a “knowledge economy” premised on the advent of a
postindustrial age. That new order held rewards for the well
educated, but little future for the manufacturing jobs that had long
been a path to economic security.
“It
is not one cause but a series of events that have moved the
Democratic Party to win white college-educated voters that might have
voted for the Republican Party 30 years ago,” Professor Lacy said.
White
blue-collar voters were left without an economic champion. “They
don’t know who is on their side on economic issues, so they look
for who is on their side on guns and other cultural issues,” he
added.
As
blue-collar union jobs disappeared, the institutional glue that
unions provided, tying the party to the working class, lost its hold
(Porter 1-3).
…
one
of the most consistent political science findings is that few
Americans are actually ideologues.
A narrow slice of high-information elites (maybe
15 to 20 percent of the population overall ...)
has a consistent set of political principles that come ahead of
partisan identity. But most people don’t pay as close attention to
politics. For most people, partisanship is the cue to help them
figure out where they stand on the issues.
It
would be exhausting to evaluate all policy proposals independently by
reading extensively on all sides of the argument and then formulating
your own unique set of issue positions and choosing candidates based
on which ones agree with you more. Most sensible people have better
things to do with their time. And this is precisely why political
parties exist in the first place — so that people who have real
jobs and families and other interests don’t have to master the
intricacies of health care policy in order to figure out whether a
single-payer system (for example) is going to work well for them or
not.
At
heart, when we vote, we ask the question: “Who represents people
like me?”
We
support candidates who we think share our values. And here, party is
a very strong cue.
We
vote Republican or Democrat because at some point in our lives, we
decided that either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party was
our
party,
and it became part
of our self-identity.
Or maybe we didn’t even decide. Most partisan identities are
inherited.
…
The
stickiness of these identities gives partisan elites an incredible
amount of power to shape
and define
what
it means to be a Republican or a Democrat. Most Republicans and most
Democrats will support the positions their party leaders advise. Give
voters something to chant and they’ll chant it. This gives partisan
leaders incredible power — power they can easily abuse when not
checked by other mediating forces (Drutman
1-4).
A
recent study out of Belgium scientifically
supports the notion that people who scored lower on emotional ability
tests tend to have right-wing and racist views.
Emotional
intelligence is the capability of individuals to recognize their own
emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and
label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking
and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to
environments or achieve one's goal.
The
results of the study found that those who scored lower on the
emotional ability tests also scored higher on measures of right-wing
authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.
People
who have a right-wing authoritarian disposition are especially
willing to subject themselves to authority figures (political
leaders, police, religious leaders) and have hostility towards those
who are outside of their in-groups.
This
type of person is attracted to authoritarian leaders like Donald
Trump.
Psychologist
Erich Fromm, author of the seminal book on authoritarianism, "Escape
From Freedom," explains
the orientation:
The
passive-authoritarian, or in other words, the masochistic and
submissive character aims — at least subconsciously — to become a
part of a larger unit, a pendant, a particle, at least a small one,
of this "great" person, this "great" institution,
or this "great" idea. The person, institution, or idea may
actually be significant, powerful, or just incredibly inflated by the
individual believing in them. What is necessary, is that — in a
subjective manner — the individual is convinced that "his"
leader, party, state, or idea is all-powerful and supreme, that he
himself is strong and great, that he is a part of something
"greater." The paradox of this passive form of the
authoritarian character is: the individual belittles himself so that
he can — as part of something greater — become great himself. The
individual wants to receive commands, so that he does not have the
necessity to make decisions and carry responsibility.
According
to the study, those who scored lower on emotional intelligence also
scored high in social dominance orientation [SDO]. People with these
qualities prefer inequality and are uncomfortable with
egalitarianism.
…
"The
results of this study were univocal. People who endorse authority and
strong leaders and who do not mind inequality — the two basic
dimensions underlying right-wing political ideology — show lower
levels of emotional abilities," study author Alain Van Hiel, a
professor at the University of Ghent told
PsyPost
(Perry
1-3).
There
was a recent article
in
the Guardian
titled, “What
does it mean to be a liberal?”
in which liberalism is described as adaptability
to a changing environment.
If you look at liberalism
as adaptability, and conservativism as stability,
the party reactions to various events such as gay marriage (liberals
want acceptance and change to new ways of thinking, conservatives
want stability of previously held values), war (liberals are willing
to adapt to shifting world views, while conservatives see war as a
means of “preserving the stability of the homeland”), or even the
current financial crisis—all make perfect sense.
Liberals
… would be likely to engage in more flexible thinking, working
through alternate possibilities before committing to a choice. Even
after committing, if alternate contradicting data comes along, they
would be more likely to consider it.
Conservatives
… would tend to process information initially using emotion ...,
…
Conservatives
respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do
liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions.
This heightened sensitivity to emotional faces suggests that
individuals with conservative orientation might exhibit differences
in brain structures associated with emotional processing such as the
amygdala.
So,
when faced with an ambiguous situation, conservatives would tend to
process the information initially with a strong emotional response.
This would make them less likely to lean towards change, and more
likely to prefer stability. Stability means more predictability,
which means more expected outcomes, and less of a trigger for
anxiety.
In
order for a person to embrace a cause or idea, it needs to be
meaningful for them. Each type of person has a different way that
they assign meaning and relevance to ideas. Let’s take liberals and
conservatives, since we are theorizing that they are two distinct
thinking styles: liberals would be more flexible and reliant on data,
proof, and analytic reasoning, and conservatives are more inflexible
(prefer stability), emotion-driven, and connect themselves intimately
with their ideas, making those beliefs a crucial part of their
identity (we see this in more high-empathy-expressing individuals).
This fits in with the whole “family values” platform of the
conservative party, and also why we see more religious folks that
identify as conservatives, and more skeptics, agnostics, and atheists
that are liberal. Religious people are more unshakable in their
belief of a higher power, and non-religious people are more open to
alternate explanations, i.e., don’t rely on faith alone.
So—for
liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with
data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if
all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to
ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their
primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in
validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more
likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and
factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals
can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually
not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.
…
When
we speak of “liberal and conservative thinking styles” the most
important thing to keep in mind: we are talking about group
differences, not
individual differences. The people that fit into this two-category
model described here are generally the most active and hard core
members of the parties. This doesn’t account for moderates, nor
does it take into account extreme fanatics of both wings, where we
start to see mental instability confounding the group traits. Both
sides have a little extremity and their fair share of imbalanced
individuals in the fringes, so don’t assume any one party is immune
(Mooney
1-4).
Works
cited:
Alterman,
Eric, “Fox
News Has Always Been
Propaganda.”
The
Nation, March
14, 2019. Web.
Cain,
Cody, “Spreading Hate Has Backfired on Right-Wing Media: How Fox
News Unwittingly Destroyed the Republican Party.” Salon, April
9, 2016. Web.
https://www.salon.com/2016/04/08/spreading_hate_has_backfired_on_right_wing_media_how_fox_news_unwittingly_destroyed_the_republican_party/
Drutman,
Lee, “Yes, the
Republican Party Has
Become
Pathological.
But Why?
We’re
Not Going to Fix American Democracy until We Can Explain Why the GOP
Went Crazy.” Vox, September 22, 2017. Web. https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2017/9/22/16345194/republican-party-pathological
“Join
the
Fight to Stop Rush,” Media
Matters. Web.
https://www.mediamatters.org/join-fight-stop-rush
McGriel,
Chris, “Shock
Jocks:
Voice
of America or Voice
of Hate?”
US
News, May
8, 2009. Web.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/may/08/michael-savage-usa-radio-shock-jock
Mooney,
Chris, “Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of
Liberals and Conservatives.” Discover, September 7, 2011.
Web.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives
Perry,
Ted,
“People
with Low Emotional Intelligence Are More Likely To Vote Republican.”
Good,
September 12, 2019. Web.
https://www.good.is/a-new-study-shows-that-people-with-low-emotional-intelligence-are-more-likely-to-vote-republican
Peters,
Justin, “Fox
News Set the Stage for America’s Poor Coronavirus Response.”
Slate,
April 9, 2020. Web.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/fox-news-coronavirus-crisis-donald-trump-hydroxychloroquine.html
Porter,
Eduardo, “How
the G.O.P. Became the Party of the Left Behind.” New
York Times,
January 27, 2020. Web.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/27/business/economy/republican-party-voters-income.html
Press,
Bill, “Press: Rush Limbaugh Is
the Worst
of America.” The
Hill, February 11, 2020. Web.
https://thehill.com/opinion/bill-press/482442-pressrush-limbaugh-is-the-worst-of-america
“Talk
Radio: Playground for Free Speech or a Forum for Hate?”
Constitutional
Rights Foundation.
Web.
https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-11-4-d-talk-radio-playground-for-free-speech-or-a-forum-for-hate
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