What's the opposite of rose-colored glasses? Chartreuse?

Sorry this is so late. It’s been a long day, but I don’t think tomorrow will be as bad.

We left off on how Fox is not only extremely popular, but also extremely misleading. There was an interesting documentary on how they did it: “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004)”

The key was repetition of information prefaced with “Some say” or “Sources say”, or I guess you could do “Some sources say”. The sources would be people in the newsroom who decided what the message was.

When you watch the clips of it being said over and over again, it shouldn’t work. Without having a source, someone on tape, some respected name giving the information, it should not work. However, there were things working to their advantage. First of all, people expected newscasters to tell the truth. Look at Walter Cronkite. Look at Woodward and Bernstein. Yes, there had been a press tradition of muckraking and yellow journalism and bias, but I don’t think anyone was prepared to expect that kind of chicanery being delivered as a straight newscast.

The other thing that is helpful is human psychology. The Illusory Truth effect was first reported in the ‘70s, and maybe it figured into the network planning. In simplest terms, the more you hear something, the more likely you are to believe. Therefore, repetition makes something sound more plausible. For more details, there is a good explanation here:

http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2007/09/18/the-truth-effect-and-other-pro/

Obviously, there are ways to get around this. If you know the statement is false, that should help. If you research it and find out it is false, that should help. Ultimately though, with so much information in the world, and given how easy it is to be overloaded, it is wisest to not repeatedly expose yourself to a source of bad information.

This carries over to areas beyond news. Consider the impact of spending time with someone who is verbally abusive. Everything they say makes it seem more plausible that you really are bad and worthless. Yes, you can do things to steel yourself against the attacks, but it is preferable to avoid the abuse altogether. It’s not even just garbage in, garbage out; it’s that garbage in means you have garbage on the inside, and that’s no good.

I know that last paragraph seems like a digression, but it’s an important concept. The messages we take in matter, because we matter and because others matter.

In the case of Fox, we covered some of the perils of the disconnect from reality Friday. I think the one that was most obvious was the shell-shocked state some people are feeling at Romney’s loss. They were so confident.

Actually, that is one of the more interesting aspects lately, because there were little breaks here and there, with the most notable being Megyn Kelly’s walk to the Decision Desk after they called the election for Obama while Karl Rove was still in denial. That was gripping television. (No, I was not watching it live; I viewed the clip later. I do not stay tuned to Fox. Ever.)

That walk was the most notable, but there were other little ripples in the week leading up to the election where I am not sure what they meant. Are Fox news personalities getting rebellious? Was there a certain amount of hedging, with a growing desire to not look completely stupid and out of touch? I don’t know. Rupert Murdock himself is very conservative, but he also has a certain amount of pragmatism, and if it becomes too obvious that you are consistently wrong, that can negatively affect the ratings. So I don’t know what’s going on there or how it will play out going forward, but it’s interesting.

It is not the most important thing though. I think the most important thing is the negative human emotion it has wrought. There is a lot of anger over the election and the fate of America and how awful the majority of the of electorate is, but also there is real fear. Yes, my first thought is to mock it and be frustrated with it, but then my better nature wins out, and I have sympathy for it. It doesn’t feel good to be afraid. So, I’m going to turn to another documentary, Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine (2002)”.

(Yes, I know some people consider Moore more of a polemicist than a documentarian, and I get that, but he’s not exactly claiming to be unbiased.)

If you haven’t seen it, Moore goes over America’s love of guns and history of violence, and yet while there are certainly less violent countries with less guns, there are also countries with non-gun violence, and our neighbor Canada has lots of guns, but not as much violence, and he was trying to explore the difference.

Yes, he also stopped to mock some things, and it is more emotional than academic, but his takeway was that there were two primary differences between us and Canada, that could relate to why we are more likely to shoot each other even though they have more guns per capita.

One is that the Canadians have a system where society cares for each other. Much of this is through the healthcare system, though I imagine other social services apply as well. The other was in the news. Our news focuses on crime and violence more than theirs.

I’m not sure that this is intentionally evil. A lot of the decisions are made on getting ratings. At the same time, there might be other things going on that are for more newsworthy. Sometimes I see previews for a story of something that seems quite shocking, and I have to watch, and it happened in Ohio. It has no relation locally to us, but they successfully got me to watch.

Even if that was not initially intentional, and that emphasis on violent crime to the repeated message from the Republicans that people who vote for Obama are moochers, living off of hardworking Republicans, because they are choosing Santa Clause over hard work, and yes, that is a scary world. It is also not true.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/the-gop-is-the-food-stamp-party/

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/10/100-wrong-about-47.html

You know why a lot of voter suppression efforts focused on eliminating early voting? Because these people who were so likely to vote for Obama have jobs. They like the early voting because they don’t have to miss work.

As it is, the divide and conquer strategy has a time-honored legacy, and even though it did not work to give Romney the election, and it’s hold on Congress is slipping as many Tea Party candidates fell, but it is still working to make people miserable. And in their misery they say things that are stupid and hateful, and it is easy to think of the people as stupid and hateful, but it is not all that they are, and once I start seeing that as the only thing that matters about them, then it is easy for me to become stupid and hateful too. So, I’m trying to not do that.