No, not my dad.
The Brainwashing of my Dad is the title of a 2016
documentary written and directed by Jen Senko. It explores the rise of
right-wing media and the “hardening” of conservative opinion, starting with the
John Birch Society to the Ronald Reagan administration to the rise of Rush
Limbaugh and Fox News and up to the “present” at the time the film was made.
Senko relates these broad topics through the lens of watching her own father
gradually change from what she describes as a kind, generous, loving person
into a much angrier, hostile person as he embraced Rush Limbaugh and Fox News
in the 90s.
What was remarkable to me when I first saw it was that I remember
a lot of that. I wasn’t nearly as engaged with news or politics then as I am
now, but I remember listening to Rush in my dad’s car on the way to school in
the mornings and deeply, deeply disliking the man. Even to my young
self, he sounded like someone who got out of bed every morning and actively looked
for something to be outraged about, and I found that repulsive. Why would
anyone want to live like that? The adult me answers: because it makes money.
Fast forward a few years. By 1999, I was married and had my
first child with a second on the way. (Yes, my first was born when I was 19
years old; that’s a subject for another time.) I was in college taking courses in
(among other things) history and political science. I had also become a news
junkie, and in an effort to be as objective as I could I flipped back and forth
between the three major cable news channels at the time: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox
News. Over the course of about a year, something became very clear to me: one
of those channels consistently made me angrier than the other two, but for me
it wasn’t because anyone told me to be outraged or angry or fed up with
anything, it was because as I took more and more history and political science
courses I recognized the flat-out lies coming from commentators on Fox News. I
almost fell out of my chair a few times when I recognized complete fabrications
presented as fact. That’s not to say I always agreed with commentators on CNN
or MSNBC, but it was rare for me to hear anyone on those networks being just
plain dishonest or deceitful. I couldn’t say the same thing about Fox.
It was then that my now-ex-wife gave me possibly the only
good piece of advice she ever did. “If it makes you so angry,” she asked, “why
do you keep watching it?”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have a good answer. I
was trying so hard to be “objective” and “fair” and “balanced” that I was going
to give myself a coronary. I had bought into the conservative argument that to
find the truth I had to give both sides equal amounts of my attention, even if
one side’s argument was patently ridiculous or unworthy of attention. The real
truth is that if 1,400 scientists in a poll all agree that climate change is
real and man-made, while only 4 disagree, I’m not actually obligated to give “both
sides” equal space in my brain, particularly if the arguments put forth by the 4
sound incredibly ignorant. The real truth is that no one is entitled to my time
or attention, and arguments to the effect that I’m obligated to listen to fools
are predatory and manipulative.
Today, right-wing media is not only plentiful and pervasive,
but it’s also highly profitable. As Senko points out, it taps into emotion
rather than reason, outrage instead of rational thought. It’s an easy pill to swallow
for many because it doesn’t require much effort: the media has explicitly done
all the thinking for the viewer and provided an easy scapegoat in the
process.
I’m grateful my dad never fully bought into Rush Limbaugh,
and I’m grateful we can still have discussions on politics where we can find
common ground. That’s not to say we agree on everything, but we do live in the
same world of facts and reason. I know not everyone can say the same.
Personally, I was never drawn into those emotional appeals, and any outrage I
felt because of them was because of the deceit and dishonesty I saw in them,
along with the blatant manipulation. I think there’s an argument to be made
that I felt that way because two of the earliest influences I can remember in
my life were Star Trek and comic book superheroes, neither of which are
conservative concepts, but for whatever reason I count myself lucky that I
escaped the rise of right-wing media with barely a scratch. Even more
fortunately, all three of my kids did, too.