The title makes it sound like maybe a horror comedy… but while there’s plenty scary here, none of it is funny. Award-winning documentarian Jen Senko noticed with sadness how her once kind, apolitical father, who never had a bad word to say about anyone, turned into an angry, hateful Republican rage monster once he started listening to talk radio (which, as we learn here, is almost 100 percent given over to right-wing hatemongers). So she set up a Kickstarter to fund a film to look into the rise of the right-wing media in the U.S., and had barely begun her crowdfunding campaign when she started hearing similar stories from lots of people who had seen the same transformation in their friends and family.
With that as her frame (and with those Kickstarter funds behind her), Senko explores how we ended up with the likes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh setting the agenda for what passes for journalism in the United States. Brainwashing doesn’t break any new ground: from the roots of the present environment in the commie hunts of the 1950s, through Nixon’s successful “Southern Strategy” in the late 1960s and early 70s to engage the anger of poor white people, to the bipartisan cooperation in the 1990s that transformed American broadcasting from a public trust to a for-profit business and removed the barriers to corporate consolidation, nothing here will be shocking to anyone who has been paying attention… and who has been getting their news from independent sources. But it’s a smart, entertaining synthesis that will be useful to those just getting their feet wet, and as a tool, perhaps, for deprogramming adherents of Fox News.
“Brainwashing” isn’t too strong a term for what has happened to Senko’s father, as we see here, and neither is “deprogramming.” Interviews with lots of big intellectuals — Noam Chomsky is here of course — and former insiders of that “vast right-wing conspiracy” (as Hillary Clinton once correctly deemed it) shed much-needed light on how insidious the impact of our poisonous mediascape is. But it’s Senko’s father who is perhaps the most important character, as frail and as comparatively powerless as he appears to be. Because this is the year of Donald Trump running a campaign for President that is, in hindsight, the inevitable product of the festering demagoguery that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have been fostering for decades. And people like Senko’s father vote. I suspect The Brainwashing of My Dad is a bit too optimistic that there can be any mass countering of the right-wing media. It looks as if that, at best, it can happen only one-on-one. But at least that’s something.
That would explain a lot about the talk radio situation in the South, especially here in North Carolina. My parents listen to Talk Radio 680 when they go to work (and occasionally switch on Fox News) and it definitely skews right. One local talk persona uses a lot of ugly innuendos, and they even interviewed Trump’s daughter in law the other day. It’s a scary thing, the monopoly on these radio stations.
My kind, apolitical maternal grandmother saw absolutely no contradiction between virtually worshiping JFK on one hand (because as a Catholic, he was “one of us”) and disliking blacks, Jews and Italians. And this was in the days before anyone ever heard of Fox News.
“Kind apolitical” people have supported dubious causes long before Fox News came along. They went along with segregation, they went along with anti-Semitism and they went along with McCarthyism.
I can understand Ms. Senko’s need to blame Fox News for her father’s change in temperament. I would like to think the best of my kinfolk too and given a choice between believing they were “hypnotized” by the media and believing that they were genuinely attracted to something negative in the media, I’d want to choose the former option as well.
But if you go that route, you can’t help but ask… what is it about that stuff that attracts people who are supposedly against it? How do you fight it? Do you try to come up with a better and louder message or do you just try to censor it? And if you go the second route, how long before you become a mirror image of the very mentality you’re allegedly fighting against?
Very true. And they went along with slavery, and with the massacre of the First Americans, and with the exclusion of the Chinese, and with the internment of Japanese Americans, and with the silencing and sidelining of women, and with the invisibility and erasure of any gender or sexual orientation that didn’t fit into their tidy little boxes. MLK’s frustration with “white moderates” in his Letter from Birmingham Jail comes to mind, as does Elie Wiesel naming indifference as “the epitome of evil”:
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that’s being dead.”
We can’t afford to be “merely” apolitical any longer.
We have to be careful with the “censorship” charge. If it’s raining and a bunch of loud people insist that it’s sunny, it’s not censorship to refuse to give their opinion serious consideration or exposure; it’s responsible journalism. If lots of potential customers express displeasure at companies that advertise on a hateful show, and the show loses nervous advertisers as a result, that’s not censorship; that’s the free market. No one is throwing Limbaugh or Hannity in prison for exercising their right to express idiocy.
True.
Well, she wasn’t very kind, then, was she? And she *did* have bad words to say about people, unlike the man this documentary is about.
Also too: Your example has absolutely nothing to do with what is under discussion.
Fair enough.
But I’ve known enough people who seemed kind in public and not so kind in public (for example, the former acquaintance who liked progressive shows like The Closer but who also threatened to throw her bisexual daughter out of the house more than a few times) to know that it’s more complicated than that.
After all, I can’t help wondering why if the man this documentary was so kind, why was he so attracted to this site? After all, it’s one thing to be curious about how the other side thinks. It’s another thing to keep going there after you’ve had the opportunity to satisfy your curiosity.
I guess this thread disturbs me because for years, it was common for conservatives to accuse liberals of “hypnotizing” young people into agreeing with them. And they would blame this on TV, music, academia, and of course, Hollywood.
Now it seems like the shoe is on the other foot and instead of telling people to just change the channel and so forth, we invent conspiracy theories of our own.
Have you seen the movie?
No.
And due to personal and financial issues, it might be a while before I have a chance to see it.
However, I have read similar accounts on conservative sites and experienced the same skepticism. Mostly because of the parallels I’ve noted above (“my kids were just fine when they went off to college and thanks to those liberal college profs, they no longer vote Republican”; “my kids were just fine growing up and thanks to that rock music/rap music/heavy metal/ hiphop/whatever, they’re all no-account drug addicts”, etc.)
And mostly because of my own experiences. (I once spent several weeks confined to a hospital bed and had little to do save watch TV all day. Fox News was one of the few channels available to me and I could have watched it 24/7 if I wished. But I did not — which prompts some very obvious questions on my part about those folk who chose differently than myself.)
Perhaps that will change after I had a chance to see the movie. We’ll see.
Okay, but you cannot discuss the content of a movie if you haven’t seen the movie.
I have seen the movie. It is easily summed up as this:
Conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Fox news are the enemy.
The self proclaimed anarchist/socialist Noam Chomsky and the criminal Email destroyer/BlackBerry smasher/illegal government server in her basement during an investigation that wanted to see this evidence, Hillary Clinton, are the heros.
Shame on this woman for using her obviously aging and frail father as the scapegoat in this liberal piece of propaganda in the run-up to the 2016 election. She makes it seem like her father was “brainwashed” much earlier in life.
This politically motivated documentary is all over the board in time sequences. And it’s curious to me that it was timed with the 2016 election. Her subsequent speeches pushing the movie well into 2017 and the impeachment hoax is also telling.
The most disturbing take away from the movie is the notion that there is no left wing media. Radical or otherwise. It seems to me that my son is a victim of this liberal media, as well as a huge number of people on social media. Just switch from Fox to MSNBC or CNN and you will hear two completely opposite takes on the same issues. Hearing that people get their news from obviously liberal biased late night talk shows and entertainment like SNL, is also troubling.
As an aside, on the Kickstarter website, several benefactors to Ms. Senko’s movie express regret at helping fund it.
The whole premise that her father was brainwashed by Fox news is ludicrous.
Looks like the brainwashing worked on you, too.