My friend Randy turns Fox News off at hotels. For years his daughters played travel ball, so they stayed in a lot of hotels. When he came down in the morning for the continental breakfast, he told me, Fox News was on, blaring and blatting and farting and failing on the TV hanging in the corner opposite the fruity cereal.
“Always on,” he told me once. “Every fricking time.”
So in hotels all across Arkansas and Oklahoma and into Kansas and Missouri, real red state rural areas, heart of the country, salt of the earth type places, he goes to the front desk and asks for the remote. And while the bleary-eyed travelers lean over scrambled eggs in the hotel light, Randy marches across the lobby with the remote held out like a flashlight. He says he makes a point of walking up close to the TV, so everyone knows what he’s doing. He aims the remote deliberately.
Most of the time he changes it to the Weather Channel. Everyone loves the Weather Channel, especially middle-aged men like myself, the kind who find themselves in a hotel outside Oklahoma City for the weekend—there’s always weather outside Oklahoma City.
One day he turned the TV off. Or maybe I am making that up, but I like to imagine silent continental breakfasts in hotel lobbies. Travelers staring into their styrofoam bowls filled with Fruit Loops, taking tentative bites of burnt toast. I like to imagine people looking up at the sudden silence and nodding to themselves that this is, in fact, much better, the silence.
Who doesn’t prefer the silence? I do not like TVs turned on in hotel breakfasts unless some grizzled old man or perky young woman is telling me to expect rain showers. I do not need constant noise. I certainly do not need the gibbering buffoons of Fox performing some new outrage for me. No one needs Fox News in hotel lobbies early in the morning. No one needs that anger and antagonism and acrimony. Sean Hannity’s giant forehead and dumb pumpkin face raises my blood pressure before I even get out on the interstate, and no one needs more angry white men out there driving.
For a long time I’ve been telling people there are two Americas. There is normal America and there is Fox News America. Heritage Foundation America, Truth Social America, rightwing talk radio America, where the outrage machine runs like a hundred thousand data centers. Normal America is the America in which Jesus loved the little children and Fox News America is the America in which Jesus hates immigrants. In Normal America Jesus fed the multitudes with the loaves and fishes, and in Fox News America we vote to cut school lunches for elementary school kids who can’t afford to eat.
In Fox News America Rene Good deserved to be shot. In Fox News America John Ross was just doing his job and Good shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
In Fox News America everyone is your enemy. Immigrants are just here to take your money but billionaires are benevolent investors looking out for our well-being, as long as we wait for their money to trickle down.
In Fox News America everything is upside down. We are protecting freedom when we bomb little fishing boats. We are protecting freedom when we bomb Iran. We are protecting freedom when we take your freedoms away because freedom.
And maybe none of this would be a problem if we still had spears we poked each other with when we got angry, but now that we have nuclear weapons this is beginning to be a problem, because Fox News has created a lot of dumb people. This is not a joke. If you watch Fox News you are actually dumber than if you didn’t watch any news at all.
But, please, don’t take my word for it:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/race-and-beyond-dumbing-it-down-on-fox-news/
Let’s break this down so we can all consume it. Two major points here:
Fox News viewers are less informed than those who watch no news at all.
Fox viewers were deliberately manipulated, misled, and misinformed.
This isn’t about politics. This is about Fox News lying to America for 40 years, moving us further and further right, into fascism. Into an America where armed men in masks patrol the streets shooting people with impunity, throwing people in cages with no due process. Where we’re stuck in a stinking quagmire of a war we can’t seem to end. Where we bombs boats with no evidence of wrongdoing. Where we give tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy while the rest of us struggle to pay our healthcare. Where Exxon posts record profits while we all pay at the pump. While the rich get richer and the rightwing radio hosts blame the liberals and trans people for wanting to exist.
But I hate to leave you without hope. The first bit of hope is that the effects of being exposed to Fox can be reversed:
According to Broockman and Kalla, when these Fox viewers watched CNN, they heard about all sorts of things Fox wasn’t telling them. They processed that information. They took it in. They became more knowledgeable about what was really going on in the United States.
The experiment didn’t change their political preferences — certainly not in just one month. But it slightly altered their perceptions of certain key issues and political candidates.
The study authors differentiated between “traditionally emphasized forms of media influence,” like agenda setting and framing, and what they call “partisan coverage filtering”: the choice to selectively report information about selective topics, based on what’s favorable to the network’s partisan side, and ignore everything else.
One lesson here is that Fox viewers are reachable with real news. While fact-checks have been known to get people to believe falsehoods even more strongly, plain news — and even opinionated news — still registers.
And the second bit of hope is this:
In those middle-of-America hotels, those red state places radiating anger, here’s what happens when Randy turns the TV off of Fox News: no one says a fucking word. Maybe it’s because Randy is 6’2” and goes about 190, but I bet it’s more likely that most Americans aren’t all that angry. Not at other Americans. They don’t really hate trans people. They don’t really hate immigrants, they don’t hate Black and Brown people, they don’t think Somalis in Springfield Ohio are eating the dawgs and they don’t think Rene Good was a terrorist. They don’t believe the world is on the verge of breaking down, they don’t believe white people are being replaced in some great world theory.
They are just told all these things, every election cycle, and the time between. Over and over and over, ad infinitum, as the rage machine rumbles on, making money for Fox millionaires.
But what Americans really hate is being left behind, and our government has left them behind. No wonder people are angry. Wages have stagnated for the working class, we have war at every turn, and healthcare and housing costs are continually rising, all so the rich can get filthy richer.
That’s why I’m Team Randy. Turn off Fox News in hotels. On the highways and byways, on the great big interstates, on the radio airwaves and internets of America.
Turn it off, and talk to one another.
Or just watch the damn weather.
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