It is well known around these parts that Fox and Friends is the lead paint of news. It is where the network talking points of the day are first introduced, and where they are dumbed down to their most simplistic, guttural forms. It is where the network's stand-ins for all of society's ills are presented—a man who receives food aid despite not really needing it, or a single criminal immigrant, by name—and declared to be representative of the whole. The latest conspiracy theories are presented, as the glassy-eyed hosts nod approvingly. Psychologists of dubious merit are brought on to explain why non-conservative opponents are, alas, diseased individuals. Fox and Friends is the show for viewers who find the rest of the Fox lineup too taxing on the brain.
It was probably inevitable that the dumbest man in Washington would gravitate to it. The show's primate chest-thumping, its giggly sexism and casual racism is precisely to news what Trump is to conservatism. It is the id, unchained.
Psychology suggests that the program’s particular trappings have effects on viewers that go beyond ego stroking. The fast pace, the cheerfulness and the breezy confidence are a combination tailor-made for maximum persuasion, experts say. “If I tuned in to watch that show, I would feel simultaneously happy, reassured and smart,” says Dannagal Young, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies the way people process political information. “When we are feeling happy and people are smiling around us, it ignites a primal response that is, ‘Things are good! Things are great! I don’t have to be careful. I don’t have to think carefully.’” The show is a ticket to a kind of self-perpetuating state of complacency, where its 1.7 million viewers become less likely to question their own beliefs and more likely to come back for more. [...]
To occupy a world this rose-colored, you have to willfully ignore certain news events, and even entire subjects, such as climate change. You also have to be ready with a rationale for everything the president does. Doocy, in particular, always seems on the verge of leaping from the couch to translate one of Trump’s cryptic statements—or, as he did throughout the March health care debate, to reassure viewers that Trump is a brilliant negotiator, that he’s in command and that everything will work out.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Improving the situation for low-wage workers requires, first of all, a commitment to full employment:
For employers, a large reservoir of out-of-work people instills fear in those who still have a job: Don't ask for more money, do whatever the boss says even if it's wrong or unfair, don't talk about starting a union and do put up with all kinds of impositions nobody should put up with because there is always a hungry guy ready to take your place if you get too uppity.
Despite the official end of the recession, the situation for workers remains tough. At last count, there was an average of 3.7 job-seekers for every job opening and some 25 million Americans were unemployed or underemployed. That's the acute problem. But one of the chronic problems underlying it is the tremendous number of workers who earn low wages who have seen their benefits ever more reduced over the past couple decades and who have no collective bargaining power with which to change these two facts of life. Those low wages aren't just low; their buying power is less than it was four-and-a-half decades ago.