GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Powered by Genesis

The Perspective Gap and Fox News

March 2, 2014 by Kurt

My long absence from GayPatriot, has been brought on by a few factors, chief among them that I’ve been taking some classes in the evenings and haven’t had much time for blogging, and what little time I have had to spare has been consumed by more going on socially than in the recent past.  But beyond that, there has been my general sense of what I wrote about in this post, and called either Obamalaise or Obamanomie, that feeling of depression and listlessness that comes when I consider the sad state of a country that elected Obama not once, but twice and seems more interested in bread and circuses than in seeking actual, workable solutions to the difficult problems that face our country.

Naturally the online leftist rag Salon can’t understand why anyone would feel upset or bothered by the direction of the country in the era of the glorious Obama, and so one of its contributors, Edwin Lyngar, has written a laughable piece about “elderly white rage” which places the blame on that favorite bogeyman of the contemporary left, Fox News.   I learned of the article when various liberals and leftists I know–including one I’ve taken to calling a MINO (a moderate in name only)–linked to it on social media.  I just glanced past it until one of them approvingly quoted one of the more ridiculous passages from the article.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I am not elderly, nor am I viewer of Fox News.   I mostly avoid the whole TV news genre, preferring to get my information from other sources.  The full title of the article reads: “I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria.”  The author, who describes himself as “overeducated in the humanities” with both an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University (not exactly a bastion of conservative thinkers) and an MA in Writing from the University of Nevada, Reno unwittingly demonstrates the way shallow generalizations count as somehow being deep thought by those who advocate a politically correct perspective.

As I don’t care to be guilty of the same intellectual offense, I’d like to highlight and  unpack a few of the article’s more ridiculous claims and observations.  Let’s start with the opening paragraph:

Old, white, wrinkled and angry, they are slipping from polite society in alarming numbers. We’re losing much of a generation.  They often sport hats or other clothing, some marking their status as veterans, Tea Partyers or “patriots” of some kind or another. They have yellow flags, bumper stickers and an unquenchable rage. They used to be the brave men and women who took on America’s challenges, tackling the ’60s, the Cold War and the Reagan years — but now many are terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare and a very moderate Democrat in the White House.

Of course GayPatriot readers can see what he’s doing there, but just for the sake of argument, let’s illustrate that he opens by offering a caricature and a generalization about elderly Fox News viewers, conflates Fox News viewers with the Tea Party, accuses them of being filled with “rage,” and then ends by trying to ridicule them as being “terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare and a very moderate Democrat in the White House.”  Say what?  That last clause is contains so many misrepresentations and non-sequiturs that it is really rather stunning.  Barack Obama is only a moderate Democrat if you are so far to the left already that you can’t see how far his administration has shifted the political status quo towards statist goals.  And just because Obamacare was given the Orwellian title “the Affordable Care Act,” doesn’t mean it has anything to do with making healthcare more affordable.  Far from it, just ask the many people dropped from insurance who find that their health insurance costs have gone up and their deductibles are now much higher than they were previously.  Even those who haven’t had to change insurance are getting less for more costs.

The article continues with an anecdote about the author’s father and an exchange where the writer tells him he shouldn’t watch Fox News:

I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.

When I finally pulled the handle for Obama in 2012, my father could not believe how far I’d fallen. I have avoided talking politics with him as much as possible ever since. Last week, I invited him to my house for dinner with the express purpose of talking about po

litics and most especially his Fox News addiction. Since he retired, he only watches Fox. As we started chatting up politics, I repeated one mantra over and over: “Please, please, consume another source of information.” I repeated my plea a dozen times. He defended with stridency his choices, citing his favorites, like Stuart Varney, “The Five” and the great Charles Krauthammer.  When it came to any other source of information he was emphatic.

“I don’t care to see any more of that liberal bullshit,” he said in one form or another all night.

Note that the first paragraph is intended to somehow give him credibility as “a libertarian and frequent Republican voter,” though from the way he describes his political evolution–“as I drifted left…”–it seems clear that he was never the sort of libertarian or conservative who believes in the virtues of a limited, constitutional republic, or else he would have found it unconscionable to ever “pull the handle” for Obama.

Note, as well, that he represents his role in this discussion with his father mainly through the “mantra” he repeated “over and over”: “Please, please, consume another source of information.”  In other words, because he seems incapable of discussing or debating with his father using things like facts, logic, or the analysis of evidence, the “source of information” is the problem.

We get another glimpse of his argumentative technique when he summarizes his discussion with his father about global warming (apparently Mr. Lyngar failed to get the memo that the preferred terminology these days is the more ambiguous “climate change”):

I’m overeducated in the humanities, so I’m an imperfect ambassador for science. I respect scholarship, peer review and the scientific method. When I tell my dad he should believe the experts in climate science, he gets really mad.

“Global warming is your religion,” he says. Because I’m an atheist, calling me religious is the worst insult he can summon, so he uses it often.

My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist. He supports the use of force without question, as long as it’s aimed at foreigners. He thinks liberals are all stupid, ignorant fucks who hate America.

The line about being “an imperfect ambassador for science” serves as his inoculation against having to take any sort of critical perspective towards the questionable science about global warming.  Evidently he failed to learn about the whole Climategate e-mail scandal, which revealed climate scientists using the peer-review process as a way of preventing dissenting voices from being published in certain climate journals.  Evidently, he also failed to learn that computer models are not scientifically valid if their predictions keep being disproved by subsequent experience.

So instead of admitting that his father might have a point in suggesting that, to him, the global warmists are like high priests who need to be believed rather than questioned, he instead choses once again to caricature his father: “My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist.”  This last sentence demonstrates one of the left’s favorite political strategies; that of trying to quiet dissent by making it sound ridiculous and extreme, as if to say, no “sane” person could ever believe that, or, to put it another way, “you can’t possibly mean that.”  Once again, we don’t get to hear the father’s reasons for his beliefs, we only must appreciate that they fall too far from the political orthodoxy to merit anything other than sneering contempt.

The article then turns to offering an analysis of how his father changed over time, and it posits the following explanation:

What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. He has for a decade or more. He has no email account and doesn’t watch sports. He refuses to so much as touch a keyboard and has never been on the Internet, ever. He thinks higher education destroys people, not only because of Fox News, but also because I drifted left during and after graduate school.

I do not blame or condemn my father for his opinions. If you consumed a daily diet of right-wing fury, erroneously labeled “news,” you could very likely end up in the same place. Again, this is all by design. Let’s call it the Fox News effect. Take sweet, kindly senior citizens and feed them a steady stream of demagoguery and repetition, all wrapped in the laughable slogan of “fair and balanced.” Even watching the commercials on Fox, one is treated to sales pitches for gold and emergency food rations, the product cornerstones of the paranoid. To some people the idea of retirees yelling at the television all day may seem funny, but this isn’t a joke. We’re losing the nation’s grandparents, and it’s an American tragedy.

Note how, in typical leftist fashion, even the writer’s conservative father can only be appreciated or understood by him as a victim, not as someone who considers information and makes up his own mind.  And the culprit is the “evil” Fox News, since he represents his father as being tuned out from the world at large.

Note, as well,  how he can only generalize about the content on Fox News, talking more about the meaning of the commercials than the actual reporting. It doesn’t occur to him that the problems being reported on by Fox News are, in fact, real problems, and that most competing media outlets prefer to whitewash them, to brush them under the rug, or not to report on them at all.

In other words, this article doesn’t amount to an attack on Fox News so much as a navel-gazing exercise in leftist theorizing about why some people have a different perspective on things than he does.  He admits to “drifting left” during graduate school, but, contra his father, he won’t acknowledge that the leftist environment in academia no doubt played a part in that.  On the basis of this article, he seems to lack the self-awareness to admit that he has his own biases and that they impact his ability to offer any sort of “fair and balanced” assessment of what he sees on Fox News, or even on the situations of individuals like his father.  That he cites the unhinged Frank Rich several times throughout the article tells us more than a little bit about his underlying biases;  that he doesn’t cite any specific stories, reports, reporters, or details about things he has ever seen on Fox News that give him cause for concern tells us that he either doesn’t engage with the network, or seems incapable of doing so with any sort of critical perspective other than telling us it is “a cash-cow for exploitative right-wing commentators.”

The greatest problem illustrated by this article is not with Fox News, but it is with the massive perspective gap that exists on the left.   The writer’s father may or may not be skilled at argumentation, but he isn’t writing an article about his views.  On the basis of this article, though, the writer is no more capable of understanding his own Fox News Derangement Syndrome than in knowing how to engage in civil and reasoned discourse with those who believe different things than he does without mocking them or blaming the disagreement on shadowy outside forces.

Filed Under: Arrogance of the Liberal Elites, Big Journalism, Civil Discourse, Climate Change (Global Warming), FDS (Fox Derangement Syndrome), Liberals, Media Bias, Misrepresenting the Right Tagged With: Arrogance of the Liberal Elites, Big Journalism, civil discourse, Climate Change, fox news, Liberals, media bias, Misrepresenting Conservatives, Misrepresenting Republicans, Misrepresenting the Tea Party

Comments

  1. Richard Bell says

    March 2, 2014 at 10:46 pm - March 2, 2014

    Hilarious.

  2. Sean L says

    March 2, 2014 at 10:51 pm - March 2, 2014

    The world that Salon writers and readers dwell in makes Wonderland look drab and logical.

  3. Eddie says

    March 2, 2014 at 11:51 pm - March 2, 2014

    Wonderful piece! Reminds of the oft-repeated accusation that Rush Limbaugh listeners are uneducated middle-America sheep, even though a study proved his listeners to be quite well-educated and well-to-do in comparison to other comparable radio/TV hosts audiences.

  4. John says

    March 3, 2014 at 12:16 am - March 3, 2014

    The author is like many on the left who think that what they believe is not only true (we all do that) but that what they believe is OBVIOUSLY true. If it is obvious then if you don’t agree there must be something wrong with you, and that is what needs to be explained.

    On another point I have some friends who do the whole eye-rolling thing, calling it Faux news, not a real news organization, etc. I ask “give me an example of something you’ve seen on Fox that supports your point.” I never get an answer.

  5. Kurt says

    March 3, 2014 at 12:55 am - March 3, 2014

    Thanks, Eddie, and I like your point about that study of Rush Limbaugh listeners.

    It reminds me of a point I had considered making, but didn’t get to, about an older woman I know. She’s a conservative and a Fox News watcher, and she’s involved with a group called the lifelong learning institute at the nearby community college. They have a monthly discussion about current events, and she is one of the few conservatives who attends. There are so many liberals and leftists in the group, that they have tried all sorts of tricks to silence the conservatives or to get them not to show up, but she won’t give up.

    And every month, she researches the topics and shows up well-prepared to the meetings. She’s probably the most prepared person at any of the meetings. She’s always bringing up points that the liberals who attend never know anything about, and of course they hate that.

  6. ILoveCapitalism says

    March 3, 2014 at 2:38 am - March 3, 2014

    “terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare…” Say what?

    Indeed. I haven’t heard of any individuals or companies who pay for health insurance, whose premiums have not gone up – because of Obamacare.

  7. ILoveCapitalism says

    March 3, 2014 at 2:41 am - March 3, 2014

    P.S. Raise your hand if you change MSDNC to Fox News on the gym TVs, whenever you happen to notice it. 🙂

    Though living in a Blue area, people at my gym spontaneously put on Fox far more than they put on MSDNC – so I don’t really have to do it often.

  8. Sean L says

    March 3, 2014 at 8:20 am - March 3, 2014

    ILC, let me guess: you live in a state where every county but the one that holds the biggest city in your state is Republican, but because that one other county is Democrat, the voters in the city crowd out everybody else in the state.

    There really needs to be a system where, for electoral purposes, counties or areas with a certain population are treated as their own separate electoral votes, without any bearing on the rest of the state they are in, especially if the city has a different voting track than the rest of the state.

  9. davinci says

    March 3, 2014 at 9:12 am - March 3, 2014

    The author received two, not one, useless degrees where he cannot land a decent job, and then he blames others. Perhaps if he had a STEM degree and was earning a good 80K a year, he might not be so bitter. But Nancy Pelosi wants people to find their dream job as someone doing something worthless in the arts and collecting cheap health insurance.

  10. V the K says

    March 3, 2014 at 9:35 am - March 3, 2014

    Once again, lefties desperately try to reassure each other that they are “the cool kids.”

  11. ILoveCapitalism says

    March 3, 2014 at 10:02 am - March 3, 2014

    Sean L – A reasonable inference; but actually I live in CA. Silicon Valley area.

    V, funny you should mention that aspect. I recently glanced over the blogs of a couple of “I’m libertarian, except I side with the Left!” GayPatriot ex-pats. (I do it rarely; first time in 7+ months.) Sadly, post after post from these two closeted leftists amounted to “I say I’m cool! See how cool I am! Because I’m the only one who understands anything, ever!”

  12. heliotrope says

    March 3, 2014 at 10:13 am - March 3, 2014

    The lefty frames the argument and then examines the deficiencies of the opponent who has been set up. It is a no-brainer when the opponent is not even allowed to speak for himself.

    When lefties come to GayPatriot to debate they do much of the same with a major twist. They frame the argument and examine the deficiencies of the opponent they have selected to examine. When the opponent responds with facts and logic, the lefties shift the topic, thus reframing the argument and examine the opponent for what he didn’t cover under the newly framed argument.

    These people do not accept anything that resembles the loss of a pawn. They simply start the game over again.

    Lefties only express opinions and their opinions are sacrosanct. Any effort to dent the armor of their opinion is, to them, an effort to damage the person for expressing an opinion.

    The “son” clown invited dear old dad over to get his mind right. “Dad” apparently listened to the “son’s” psychobabble and likely told him to get his head out of the clouds and do a little research to back up his opinions. That is not a happy, happy, happy son/father heart-to-heart.

    Lefty opinions are matters of their hearts and their minds are infatuated with what they feel. They so quickly resort to victimization, oppression, unfairness, doom and gloom that they can only express positiveness through sloganeering and domination.

  13. V the K says

    March 3, 2014 at 12:36 pm - March 3, 2014

    Every progressive thinks he’s Lisa Simpson; a smart know-it-all kid surrounded by oafs who can’t appreciate his intellect. Every prog really is Brian Griffin, a pseudointellectual closet racist who only barely impresses the dumb bimbos he dates and is too insecure to date or be friends with anyone smarter than he is.

  14. Ignatius says

    March 3, 2014 at 1:35 pm - March 3, 2014

    I’ve never met a Libertarian whose politics were formed by way of modern liberalism. Never.

  15. ILoveCapitalism says

    March 3, 2014 at 2:42 pm - March 3, 2014

    “Libertarian” is what lefties like to call themselves when they’re concern-trolling. “Oh, I’m totally sympathetic to you righties, but *even I, despite* my powerful sympathy, must now declare your hateful resistance to The Great Mother-Father State hateful, you haterz!!!”

    I say that as a real believer in liberty which, in America, makes me kind of a rightie. I’m not afraid to ally with conservatives (social or otherwise), for liberty’s sake. And that’s one way to tell the genuine lovers of liberty from the posers.

  16. Ignatius says

    March 3, 2014 at 3:04 pm - March 3, 2014

    When someone has to point out that what they’re about to say isn’t from a particular ideology, it’s probably because it is. Anyone who claims to be libertarian/Libertarian, then expresses an implicit support for a government takeover of a nation’s medical delivery system because they’re in favor of “lowering the cost of health care” (as if any consumer — i.e. anyone who needs medical care for any reason, i.e. any individual who is living and wants to remain so — has a reason to be against more affordable, more accessible medical care and as if ‘liberty’ is, in their mind, equated with the freedom from the necessity of earning anything) confesses either ignorance or dishonesty or contempt for their target’s intelligence and most likely all three.

  17. acairfearann says

    March 3, 2014 at 5:07 pm - March 3, 2014

    On Bread and Circuses: I couldn’t help but notice the section headings of the BBC website today: for the UK and Europe: the Ukraine/Russia crisis; for Asia: the knife attack (which almost certainly had terrorist elements) and a trade issue; for Africa: a murder trial and trade….for the US…..the Oscars.
    I thought that summed up everyone’s priorities rather unfortunately if correctly.

  18. Tim in MT says

    March 3, 2014 at 5:18 pm - March 3, 2014

    Good post. Thanks for taking the time to put this together and respond to his points.

  19. Jman1961 says

    March 3, 2014 at 7:23 pm - March 3, 2014

    I recently glanced over the blogs of a couple of “I’m libertarian, except I side with the Left!” GayPatriot ex-pats.

    This is a real dome scratcher.

    I wonder which ‘couple of GP ex-pats’ you could be referring to?
    Hmmmmm.
    I’ll have to think about this for a while.

  20. pst314 says

    March 12, 2014 at 11:42 am - March 12, 2014

    “I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left…”

    Almost certainly a lie: that writer was never a liberatarian, never voted for a Republican, never believed the the virtues of small, limited government.

    I have known many leftists who pretended to be libertarians, but who revealed their true ideology when they went beyond talking about limiting police powers and came out for all sorts of socialist programs and defended school policies designed to punish dissent.

  21. pst314 says

    March 12, 2014 at 11:45 am - March 12, 2014

    “…his Fox News addiction…rage…white…wrinkled…”

    It is a virtually universal trait of leftists that they must tell lies about those they disagree with.

    And this little shite is, in his way, worse than most because he defames his own father in print. Here’s hoping he gets cut out of Dad’s will as a reward for his cruel defamation.

Categories

Archives