One of those, "welcome to the club" and "better late than never" stories, but The Gadfly is always humbly grateful to receive validation of some of his dirty hippie views from his ideological counterparts:
Eonomist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warned over the weekend that Fox News had damaged the Republican Party by creating a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves.
In his paper “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics” published earlier this month, Bartlett theorized that watching the network was essentially “self-brainwashing” for viewers, making them believe that the United States was a more conservative nation than it actually was. And so the Republican Party had responded by running radical conservatives that representative Fox News viewers, but not the true state of the electorate.
“Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people,” Bartlett told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday. “When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily.”
“And so, they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s brainwashing.”http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/ex-reagan-adviser-fox-news-is-self-brainwashing-republicans-into-a-radical-fringe-party/
Bruce Bartlett's conservative credentials are at the St. Ronaldus Magnus level. If he says Fox "News" is brainwashing it's viewers, who is The Gadfly to argue with him?
None of this is new information to The Gadfly it must be noted. One can peruse the past 5 years of The Gadfly's postings and and find numerous instances where The Gadfly presented unimpeachable evidence as to Fox's use of it's airwaves to unethically manipulate the ideological views of their audience.
And not only that -- the fact that study, after study, after study has shown that people who get all of their "news" and information from Fox are some of the least informed people around, just simply cements the reality of what it is that they are all about.
Nonetheless - thank you Mr. Bruce Bartlett for being honest enough to identify controlled, mass ignorance when you see it.
----TFG
No comments:
Post a Comment