Fox News delivers Anxiety on an Information Platter. It ads the hot sauce of dread so that the viewers believes there is an evil Left Conspiracy that is bent of destroying America.
Having decided the American body politic into a Good versus Bad wrestling match…well there go go…Fox stages news like WWW stage moral contests between its gladiators. Fox is a secular religion in that it presents the news in a moral lens. This creates a very simple world view of black and white. Liberals wear black hats and Republicans wear white hats….The clear moral universe of our old movie westerns.
The modern world is ambiguous, grey, confusing, and constantly changing….Fox gives stability to the fearful mind.
At what point did the “mainstream” media deliberated bias itself? When Fox said it did? Was Fox the one who pointed out that the whole media was biased and it wasn’t? Which came first, the chicken or the fox? Before Fox was the young CNN Cable News, and before Cable news there were three networks that came on for a half hour at 6:30. They all presented the news of the day with one viewpoint; the difference was a preference for anchors personality. But the TV News and the Print Media was one viewpoint.
With cable this monolithic view was fragmented and Fox carved out a moral view point. Liberal or Left and its Media was bad and Fox and Conservatives are good. This is seeing reality through a moral lens, but Fox being a secular news outlet framed reality in moral terms without religion. Fox would run the 700 Club in the mornings. So you have juxtaposed the Fox secular moral view and the Christian moral view, and they created a perfect set of binoculars, one lens secular and one lens religion, but both focused on reality from the same view point. Religious or secular, you found a pulpit in Fox.
Fox created this moral viewpoint be defining the media, of which it is apart, as biased, therefore because the mainstream media was going away from truth, Fox was the only river going to the ocean of truth.
This creates a sense of security and moral certainty in its viewers, the same sense of security you get in church. The Evangelicals called Secular Humanism the Great Evil; Fox calls Liberalism the Great Evil. Same monster on the bedroom wall for the fearful minds lost in the storm of Modernity.
The more we look at this from our Wide Angle lens, the clearer the Shadow on the Wall that is Fox News becomes. Trump—a lover of WWW and its mythic dimension of Good and Bad fighting it out in a ring, a Cosmic War against darkness made flesh and blood—plays right into the Fox Wrestling Ring where Good and Bad forces wrestle for the soul of America.
America has been divided into two incompatible realities: A secular world where science is the priest, and a religious world where Fox and Pat Robinson share the priesthood, one secular and one with Bible robes. We all know what happens in families when one member judges the rest of the family in moral terms. Moral reality is a reality divided into absolute categories of Good and Evil, and this is always a cosmic war that has no peace because you can’t make peace with Evil.
In the Liberal Universe there is a promised land where good and bad lie down together in better conditions; in the Moral Universe of the Right there is no promised land until the Liberals have been destroyed. Only the Good shall remain. And since Liberals are more than half the nation, this is insanity. A Moral Bias exists by having an Evil Bias to combat, so it can never get rid of Evil, for that would get rid of the Good.
Leave a Reply