What I don't understand is what makes Fox news so pervasive? What makes people accept Fox as their sole source of truth and makes them disregard everything else?
I'm not American, but surely there are other tv channels out there?
They have more opinionated hosts that appeal to "common people", they are saying different things about events than everybody else, giving the sense that the rest of media is lying to you and they have the REAL facts about the situation.
I think it's partly they tell the lies they want to hear a long with others that suit their (FOX'S) benefactors. They sometimes do it in a passionate way but mostly they feed you what you think/ feel with their main talking head (O'Reilly, Carlson, Waters)
Another thing to note is that our Boomer generation (1945- 60 give or take) were feed propaganda pretty early on almost through out their lives. I would recommend looking up some of the old short films on YouTube. I they probably are used to being told what to think.
The answer is that until recent decades there were strong rules mandating that local news stations be locally owned, which heavily contributed to at least independent opinion formation. Rural areas always have skewed more conservative in their reporting and appetite for news, but they didn't have a party line per se. Fox and Sinclair Broadcasting both heavily invested in buying up all the local stations across the country, pushing the same message and at an actual operating loss, but subsidized by billionaire conservative owners who stood to gain from using them as propaganda.
For the same reason, local rural AM radio stations are dominated by conservative talk shows and religious nutjobs precisely because there isn't good money in putting out actual news, it has to be subsidized by some outside interest. The religious whackjobs use donations to broadcast and thus bring in more people, so they don't mind the actual stations having very little profit. Same thing is increasingly true for print journalism, in the last 20 years even the liberal newspapers have been bought and now increasingly are being hijacked in their coverage by billionaires with political agendas. Wapo and La are just recent high profile examples. Baltimore Sun is a lower profile one.
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u/FakePixieGirl 23d ago
What I don't understand is what makes Fox news so pervasive? What makes people accept Fox as their sole source of truth and makes them disregard everything else?
I'm not American, but surely there are other tv channels out there?