No news to those of us who have been guerilla fighting against the vast right wing lie machine.
The rise of Trump would be impossible without the GOP’s alternative media-verse.
Documentarian Jen Senko never knew her father Frank to be a cigarette smoker — so it was a little stunning when she witnessed him walk up to a group of smokers sitting outside a family favorite restaurant, take a generous inhale of their second-hand smoke, and boast, “I love the smell of cigarette smoke!”
It may have had something to do with the fact that Rush Limbaugh — Dad’s “hero” — had been inveighing against the whole notion of harmful second-hand smoke, which he mocked as a liberal fantasy. Frank Senko wasn’t having any of that hokum.
This was also during the same period when he refused to wear seat belts (another Limbaugh scourge) and railed against “feminazis” — a period Senko described as “the height of his Limbaugh lunch days.” His daily habit of listening to Rush during his commute to work and at lunch, then at night via a portable radio, blossomed into a full-bore multi-media diet of right-wing news and commentary coming at him via Fox, talk radio, and a glut of email newsletters, which he forwarded to his increasingly disconcerted family. It was, Senko says “almost like he joined a cult or joined a new religion.”
UPDATE: Trevor Noah is relevant here:
Senko’s new film The Brainwashing of My Dad is about the media apparatus that, in her words, “changed a father and divided a nation.” It’s an inquiry into how her amicable, “Kennedy Democrat” father, who was never particularly strident in his political views, became unrecognizably, caustically partisan, as well as hateful, angry, and intolerant of basically anyone who wasn’t white, male, middle class, and straight.
Using her father’s transformation as a starting point, Senko, who also co-directed 2009’s The Vanishing City, began making the film three years ago. Brainwashing was funded in part by Kickstarter backers who recognized Senko’s alienation from her father in their own family. Some of these backers appear in the movie as talking heads punctuating the film with descriptions of their own similar experiences: a chorus of exasperated sons, daughters, siblings, husbands, wives estranged from relatives who consume right-wing media and seem to inhabit an entirely different reality. “It hit me,” Senko said, “this is a phenomenon.”
The personal stories come through loud and clear and are hard to argue with. Where I suspect the film will court objection is in its ambition to unravel the history of the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” (The film airs, and seeks to vindicate, those eternal words from the current Democratic frontrunner.)
The particulars may be familiar to anyone who has a passing interest in these matters or who watched Rob Greenwald‘s 2004 documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. In an economical 90 minutes, Senko deftly weaves her family history with an American cultural history — a five-decade saga of how establishment conservatives created a propaganda apparatus of think tanks, lobbying groups, publishing houses, and of course Fox News, with the goal — as articulated by Senko — of redirecting the “insecurity of aging white men” into righteous anger at social movements.
“A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News” — a memo from the Nixon-era White House, which Gawker reported on in 2011 — is treated like a smoking gun. The memo’s authorship is unclear, but it comes riddled with handwritten notes by Nixon’s television consultant Roger Ailes, the master of the young medium who would go on to be CEO of Fox News. The memo reads in part:
Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.
Senko draws a straight line from the once-fringe ideology of the John Birch Society to the Tea Party currently championed by Fox and taking up residence in the Party of Lincoln. We are told that agendas are pieced together weekly from a patchwork of conservative interests at Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meetings. That buzzwords (like “death tax”) are incubated in Frank Luntz focus groups and grow up to become broadcasted relentlessly to inculcate popular support for elite opinions. That talking points from Ailes cascade from early-morning memos down to the primetime arias of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.
Reblogged this on A Green Road Daily News.
I wrote an extensive post explaining how anyone surprised at Donald Trump’s rise to the top of the GOP should have seen it coming as FOX News and the rest of conservative media created Trump’s audience for him. Everything Trump is saying is what the conservative media has been telling their audiences for years.
Donald Trump is not the cause of the problem in the Republican party – he is the symptom of the problem; he is the personification of the FOX News’ization of the Republican party.
http://waitiseesomething.com/2016/03/13/explaining-donald-trump-fox-newsization-of-the-republican-party/
For those who want to dig deeper into this vast right-wing conspiracy, I highly recommend Jane Mayer’s new book, “Dark Money”. She covers the capture of “Dad’s mind” in an extraordinary tale of manipulation, cunning and deceit, courtesy of America’s billionaires.
NY Times review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/books/review/dark-money-by-jane-mayer.html
Pretty important stuff. I hope the film doesn’t go so glitzo as to lose credibility to those who’s minds might be open to change. Really important to do documentaries like this carefully.
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/23/america_has_abandoned_the_90_percent_partner/
If neither does, our nation faces a massive crisis provoked by the loss of democratic representation of the majority of the American electorate. Neither party today does much of anything for the bottom 90% of Americans, as so clearly demonstrated by a recent study out of Princeton that showed that the likelihood of legislation passing that represents the interest of that bottom 90% was equivalent, statistically, to white noise.
Thomas Frank’s new book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? offers the fascinating premise that starting with the McGovern Commission of 1972 (which largely excommunicated Labor from having a large role in Democratic Party decision-making) and going into a full-out embrace of the “professional class” – i.e. the top 10% economically – the Democratic Party has largely abandoned the American working and middle class – the bottom 90%.
And the mention of the Republican answer as their constituency was poached
While Thomas Frank details brilliantly the reinvention (and, probably, destruction) of the modern Democratic Party, in my book The Crash of 2016, I detail the parallel rise of the modern Republican Party, starting with the Powell Memo within a year of the McGovern Commission.
Prior to the 1970s, business in America had been largely apolitical, preferring to focus instead on making money and running companies. But Powell convinced the Chamber of Commerce and a group of wealthy ideologues to change all that, and a group of billionaires and foundations rose to the call and created the huge and well-funded “conservative” infrastructure of think-tanks, media arms (hate radio and Fox News), and the Koch Network.
Within a generation, the Party elites relied almost entirely on Big Business and Big Money to get elected, only throwing rhetorical bones to the bottom 90% with their cynical “god, guns, and gays” strategy.
The authors book
http://www.amazon.com/The-Crash-2016-Destroy-America/dp/0446584835
The United States is more vulnerable today than ever before-including during the Great Depression and the Civil War-because the pillars of democracy that once supported a booming middle class have been corrupted, and without them, America teeters on the verge of the next Great Crash.
The United States is in the midst of an economic implosion that could make the Great Depression look like child’s play. In THE CRASH OF 2016, Thom Hartmann argues that the facade of our once-great United States will soon disintegrate to reveal the rotting core where corporate and billionaire power and greed have replaced democratic infrastructure and governance. Our once-enlightened political and economic systems have been manipulated to ensure the success of only a fraction of the population at the expense of the rest of us.
The result is a “for the rich, by the rich” scheme leading to policies that only benefit the highest bidders. Hartmann outlines the destructive forces-planted by Lewis Powell in 1971 and come to fruition with the “Reagan Revolution”-that have looted our nation over the past decade, and how their actions fit into a cycle of American history that lets such forces rise to power every four generations.
However, a backlash is now palpable against the “economic royalists”-a term coined by FDR to describe those hoarding power and wealth-including the banksters, oligarchs, and politicians who have plunged our nation into economic chaos and social instability.
Although we are in the midst of what could become the most catastrophic economic crash in American History, a way forward is emerging, just as it did in the previous great crashes of the 1760s, 1856, and 1929. The choices we make now will redefine American culture. Before us stands a genuine opportunity to embrace the moral motive over the profit motive-and to rebuild the American economic model that once yielded great success.
Even the pessimists got it wrong.
https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
What I want to know is why the video about this is forbidden to be seen in my country. In my country we have an extremely similar social thing in which Tim Hortons, preferred for decades, is being subsumed by Starbucks but we are not permitting you to see our videos about it.
It’s all part of the conspiracy by the Koch brothers to distract us from James Hansen’s paper and ISIS infiltration of Belgian nuclear power plants. And Obama does nothing – Thanks, Obama!
If ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad’ is of interest, you may also wish to see ‘Shadows of Liberty‘.
Another recent book that complements the others mentioned here is “The Age of Acquiescence: The life and death of American Resistance to wealth and power” by Steve Fraser, Little Brown, February 2016. Does an excellent job of going back to the Gilded Age, reviewing the history, and tying it all together.
Right-wing propaganda can be very subtle. I was watching Fixed News the other day where they commented that the recent killing of ISIS senior leader ‘Haji Iman’ was part of “our military’s plan to step-up the war against ISIS”. Suppose several US service-members had died in that attack? Well, THEN it would be “Obama’s plan…”. Obama will only be recognized as Commander-in-Chief if something goes wrong.