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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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I mean, you really have to hand it to Fox and the right-wing propaganda machine for so successfully turning such a stupid non-issue into the top priority for a bunch of people.
I mean it's wrenchingly sick, but they've pulled it off so well.
From the outside, I think Fox News was only able to do that because in US culture, TV and movies are more revered than anywhere else, and therefore people's opinions, when voiced on TV, are taken way more seriously than they should be.
It's hard to explain what I mean but it's a feeling of "if it's on TV, there must be something to it" which is very strong in US culture, and this enables the worst and most evil people to influence public opinion, even if they spew nothing but lies or phantasies.
As for movies, I am always totally in awe of how many movies a person in the US watches - going to the movies once or even twice a week is widespread, which is odd because most movies aren't worth watching. The rest of the days they watch even more movies and TV shows at home. I always wonder what they get from that.
Listening to Knowledge Fight (the Alex Jones analysis podcast), I learned that Jones frequently uses the plot of Hollywood movies as a source for his insane conspiracy theories about "the globalists". So it seems like he knows that many dumb Americans aren't able to differentiate between movies and reality, because they watch more movies than interact with people and matters IRL.
Don't get me wrong, I love movies and TV shows too, but nobody can tell me there's enough good ones out there to fill every damn evening of the week. I go to the cinema maybe once a year, and watch the odd TV shows maybe every 3-4 years (because I don't want to spend my time watching crap).
You got this crap all over the world, the US is just a bit further along the way. People love to get absolved of all responsibilities and the political right gives them exactly that. They are also better at information exchange, just copying propaganda techniques, that worked somewhere else.
It started before Fox, with Hate Radio. And a few other things.
But I really don't think it's a "TV is God in the US" thing at all. It's extremely normal for people to have trusted information sources. And purported news organizations have been a standard source across the world for 150+ years.
In the US (and several other places) news has become increasingly propagandized, particularly towards the far-right. People increasingly also don't care about actual truth, but what they want to be true (often based on the propaganda)
There's probably several cultural things that make Americans more succeptable to some of this manipulation, but a lot of that culture is the product of DECADES of very hard, specific work (which also led very directly to Fox News). Starting almost immediately after the Watergate scandal.
But it's also not like propaganda, and falling for propaganda, is unique to the US or throughout history. At all. Or because of TV and movies or whatever.
It's just impressive that with the US's relatively strong, free press (and freedom laws) and low government propaganda (again - relatively) that a right wing propaganda machine has been able to so massively corrupt things. And fucking scary.