State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (Revised) by Bryant Welch

Author:Bryant Welch [Welch, Bryant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Sciences, Media Studies, Psychology, Politics, United States, Non-Fiction, Propaganda
ISBN: 9781982957667
Google: wh31uQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1982957662
Goodreads: 40219076
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 2018-05-20T23:00:00+00:00

9. FOX NEWS: Speaking Power to Truth

“She knows what you need, but I know what you want.”

― Bob Dylan

The first CEO of Fox News was the late Roger Ailes—the same Roger Ailes of Willie Horton fame. The owner of Fox News is arch conservative Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul whose communications empire reaches four and a half billion people worldwide. Between the two of them, they created a new tripartite media creature that is part infotainment, part news channel, and to an ever-increasing extent instrument of political gaslighting. The three components combined created a powerful force in American politics shaping how many Americans form their political reality: Fox News.

The most dangerous aspect of American politics began with the 1988 presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush when a few strategically placed neoconservatives recognized that with the right set of circumstances they could manipulate and even create people’s reality sense to an extent never before dreamed possible. The tail could now wag the dog.

Symbols, manufactured feeling states, repetition, and associational reasoning are the four primary tools of Fox News. They have put Fox News on the cutting edge of transforming the news into a massive system of subliminal communications that are very much at odds with what their listeners understand to be taking place as they listen to their nightly news. It is gaslighting, pure and simple.

Advertising succeeds on the basis of repetition. Assert the reality you want over and over again. Be absolute and never tentative. Tentativeness encourages independent thinking. The more people think independently, the less malleable they are. If there is a gap between your position and common sense, simply rewire the connection with “associational logic” that obscures the gap. Associational logic, described more fully below, creates the illusion of logical connections where there are none. This is where the unique talents of Roger Ailes came into play.

After leaving the Bush campaign in the late 1980s, Ailes participated in efforts on behalf of the tobacco industry to thwart the success of antismoking and anti-tobacco measures.1 Understandably, advertising for tobacco products took on unique difficulties after the increasingly devastating research on the health hazards of smoking with the imposition of health warnings, in-creased sales taxes, state regulations, and consumer lawsuits. For the tobacco industry, these created a public relations nightmare. I was working in Washington during this period. One of my tasks was to establish a public relations and marketing program to promote psychology and mental health services. In this time of great upheaval in the public relations programs of tobacco, many tobacco marketers applied for our open positions, and, as a result, I unexpectedly wound up meeting with a number of tobacco public relations workers. They were by far the most unusual public relations thinkers I encountered.

When I asked them to describe their work, they went into great detail on many of the messages they had developed for tobacco. Most strikingly, there were no pro-tobacco themes in the ads. Instead, there were carefully constructed, but nonsensical, messages that amounted to intellectual gibberish for anyone who really tried to follow the content.

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