Comments by "Rob McCune" (@robm6645) on "How Fox News Brainwashed Her Dad" video.

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  20. ***** Systematic manipulation is part of brainwashing but it is not synonymous with brainwashing. Brainwashing would best be described as a subset of systematic manipulation. The term brainwashing should not be watered down as you seem to be doing here.  Boiling it down to left wing and right wing is too broad a term, because there are counter-examples with-in each subset. A counter example on the right would be the wall street journal, at least before it was taken over by Rupert Murdock, because it tried more often then not to be a real journalistic organization. A counter example where the left borders if not engages in brain washing would be Cenk Uygur of TYT who is constantly giving an over the top performance akin to talk radio or Fox News on many stories which have about as much substance. The goal is to influence people with the emotions created by the performance rather than the substance of the story.  To prevent this from being watered down I'm just going to say notice how when I cited Cenk Uygur as an example I was comparing one man to an entire genre of radio with at least hundreds if not thousand of hosts and a multi-billion dollar media empire that gets it's reporters invited to the white house. This is what allows me to generalize about the left and the right in the way I do.  Now to get more into the substantive details as I have already pointed out right wing media depends on theatricality to influence the viewer more than the substance. Compare the presentation of Bill O'reilly who is usually angry and upset and yells at guests, to David Pakman who is very calm and serene, and does not yell and interrupt his guests. Even though both shows focus on a reaction to current events one, namely O'reilly is designed to provoke emotion, namely anger, fear, and aggression. This is there to shut down reasoning and make discussion hostile, and needless to say these kind of tactics impede reasoned debate.  Beyond provoking emotion, there is also misinformation. While it is true that there are plenty of examples of both sides using misinformation, the cumulative effect of right wing media has been demonstrated to actually reduce it's audiences understanding of current events. Studies have shown for instance that Fox News viewers are less informed than people who watch no news at all. Another aspect of this that is largely, but not totally absent on the left is the outrage machine. A good example of this would be the war on christmas, where a disproportionate amount of time is taken for Fox hosts to be angry at David Silverman trying move nativity scenes off public property. It is petty slights that are blown out of proportion and portrayed as an attack on the viewer. Another example of the outrage machine is given in the video where the woman said feminists might have a point about hooters and was threatened with being left on the side of the road. It is highly unlikely a Rush Limbaugh listener would do the same thing about a Christian opposition to Hooters. Another difference between left and right wing media is the attempt to isolate the viewer, using demonization of both liberals and a "liberal media" to make viewers dependent. Again, Fox viewers have been shown to be less informed than people who watch no news at all. It is reasonable to infer that they this would not be as much of a problem if their audience were watching other news sources as well as Fox. The study also included news programs that aren't on dedicated news channels so the study could conceivably measure people who left Fox to watch network news and then switched back. There is more to it, but I think these three work as good triad for starters, right wing media isolates it's viewers in ways left wing media does not, then constantly seeks to anger and outrage them rather than informing them and getting them to think. Again, this is far, far more true of a much larger entity on the right than it is in isolated instances on the left. 
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