I know I should be freewriting, but this Russia situation has me twisted. Not so much what Putin is doing–you expect a dog to be a dog. However, what Fox News is doing is straight up atrocious. Yes, I get that I just said you expect a dog to be a dog, but this dog has so much power in our sphere that it is causing a large number of Americans to rethink their reality. We have quite literally gone from worrying about Russian influence to ‘Why do we hate Putin?‘ He goes on to make some pretty damning remarks, one of which is as purely anti-American as it gets.
He says, “What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? “
First off, the ‘what is this really about’ is a trigger phrase. It indicates that we ought to be questioning the reasoning of everything and everyone BUT him. So, I ask you, dear reader, to question him. What is it really about? Why does he want to protect Putin and in such throw barbs at Americans or at the perception of so-called fringe Americans, or as they put it, ‘democrats’. I fear that Fox News is driving a divide into our nation because it fills their pockets and egos and quest for power and keeps those who listen afraid and docile and buying what they want them to buy and voting how they want them to vote and believing what they want them to believe and ONLY what they want them to believe to the exclusion of reality. It is more likely that a Fox News viewer believes that Clinton ran a sex ring than Trump cheated on his taxes. That level of confirmation bias driven logic is disturbing at best, criminally negligent at worst.
As a father and a partner and a citizen I am worried about our country. We can say over and again that ‘we’ve been here before’ or ‘it’s not as bad as it’s been in the past’ but we cannot neglect the power that technology has to reach people and provide them with an extremely closed off view of reality. It is easy to login to ONLY your apps and your newsfeeds and decide on your reality and when someone not from that sphere challenges that reality they INSTANTLY become the enemy. Add to that the power to generate law at the local level and we are struggling to maintain a nation that is, in fact, democratic and not Autocratic and that one who controls many tends to be the corporation with the most power to manipulate perspective.