Ex-Reagan Adviser: ‘Brainwashing Bubble’ Hurting GOP
THIS IS JOSIE TO A "T"
Fox News is nothing more than a “brainwashing bubble” making conservatives destroy themselves. Who said that? A former top Ronald Reagan adviser.
During an interview on CNN with Brian Stelter on Sunday, economist Bruce Bartlett bashed Fox News for making conservatives drink a lot of Kool-Aid since it first went on the air. And that Kool-Aid is just poisoning the well.
Bartlett is perhaps best known as one of the top economic policy advisers to former President Ronald Reagan. But even though conservatives worship Reagan as a god, those who served in his inner circle are not impressed with the current state of the Republican Party and Bartlett blames Fox News for making it that way.
“Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people. When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily. And so, they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s brainwashing.”
Indeed, Fox News has become nothing more than an echo chamber of misinformation that is being used by the current crop of Republicans as a propaganda machine designed to indoctrinate viewers with falsehoods to scare them and make them hate anything that goes against the extreme conservative agenda. To Bartlett, once conservatives obtained their own personal media outlet, they all “drank heavily from the Fox waters.
Bartlett’s remarks are based on a paper he wrote titled “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics”. In the publication, Bartlett found that while Republicans have benefited from the “constant stream of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, paranoia and manufactured outrage, and that it does so with brazen disregard for what is factual,” it hurts the GOP in the long-term.
According to Bartlett, one of the problems is that “Fox now exercises such powerful control
over the GOP that it has become the party’s kingmaker in presidential primaries.”
Furthermore, Bartlett observes:
“Republican voters get so much of their news from Fox, which cheerleads whatever their candidates are doing or saying, that they suffer from wishful thinking and fail to see that they may not be doing as well as they imagine, or that their ideas are not connecting outside the narrow party base.”
Bartlett goes on to conclude that Fox has now become a problem for Republicans because it is making it incredibly difficult to move the party from the extreme right to the center where it can appeal to more moderate voters.
That means the GOP may be seeing gains in the short term, but will eventually lose the ability to compete in the future as the already aging conservative base made up of Fox viewers dies off and there is no one left for Fox News to make angry.
In other words, keep doing what you’re doing Fox News. It will be a true pleasure watching your network and the GOP you brainwash self-destruct. |
