Fox News and Conservative media have done a lot more damage to our country than I thought

[cprise]

36. I may be tempting Godwin's law with this

but I think the comparison is appropriate:

The great majority of Nazis and other "good Germans" who were living and working within their comfort zone / familiar environment were said to be very nice, decent people... a pleasure to be around. Nazi authorities were purposely manipulating the population's perceptions through their emotions (and furiously talking out both sides of their mouths, mollifying people even as they escalated the atrocities). It's one of the tenets of fascism to cultivate order by expunging critical thinking / intellectuals from the general population, and getting them to respond purely on an emotional level.

Sad as it seems, your family are probably ignoring some extremely odd goings on in today's world because it doesn't fit the narrative purveyed by the people they unconsciously identify with (I'm guessing that your family is white Anglo-Saxon, Irish or Italian). And that narrative is given primacy in today's mass media because it meshes with the methods of an unfettered commercial press (corporate marketing and PR are constantly working on us psychologically to be impulsive and avoid discerning real facts so that decisions become more like unthinking reactions).

Also consider that anyone who commutes in a car for long hours each day (a very white, suburban routine) especially in crappy traffic will find at least the tone of the RW talk radio hosts to be appealing (i.e. they're at risk of becoming "roid ragers" because RW radio exploits drivers' general state of frustration in rush hour traffic, turning it into anger directed at scapegoats). Just about the only alternative in most places is NPR, which has the sort of content and presentation that tries to avoid clear messages and emotion.

Lastly, if your family really watches and likes Fox news it may be time to consider that much of what seems "nice" is actually the opposite of good.

All in all, I hope that most of the people reading this thread will agree that we need media reform in this country. They are leading us down a very dark path.