I'm 55, my Mom is 82, I'm a Democrat, my Mom is a Republican who thinks O'Reilly is just right on and the President is the best thing since Froot Loops. I am writing this in a motel on my way home from a lovely week long visit with her and my brother and family after too many months apart. (If you guys read this ....great trip huh? What fun! Love you so much!)
Staying with Mom allows for near constant exposure to Fox News, so after a week of observation sprinkled with a few exchanges, I have a lot to chew on.
The following comments aren't long, but if you have a Republican Mom, maybe we can help each other with some ideas.
Mom's steadfast, recurring theme is that the left is the primary merchant of hate. Here's the quote: "That's all they do, they just hate and hate and hate".
What perplexes me to no end is that she is an active, intelligent, educated and loving woman. She's socially liberal on many issues, she has a long history of thoughtful, two sided political discourse, and she's very much against any behavior that one would look upon as mean or hateful. Yet she still thinks that there is nothing hateful or even disingenuous in Bill O'Reilly's delivery. Ann Coulter doesn't alarm her. She has been this way since 911. Fox News is some powerful stuff.
I come at this observation through pretty clean eyes in that I don't watch TV at home. I'm exposed at work so I do catch glimpses of these characters and I listen to them on the radio from time to time, and I get feeds from MediaMatters on the latest lies. But none of that prepared me for the shock of constant exposure to Fox News on live television.
It is so sophisticated. Every turn of a phrase, every raised eyebrow, every "both sides", serves to supplant everything real. It's amazing. It really feels unnatural, the way my Mom just eases into the embrace of this propaganda and pulls stuff right out of the bag about the recent WMD find (aka Santorum Lite) or a "No, they've cleared Halibuton of all that". She follows that with the "How dare Teddy Kennedy say anything after he killed that girl", and then delivers the sucker punch with "And what Clinton did with that poor girl"! Damn.
One thing is clear. There is a real disconnect between what is real and what propaganda is doing to my Mom. Thanks for listening.