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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jen Senko
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December 13 - December 20, 2021
to me once, “He is n...
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She did not find Limbaugh entertaining or even remotely interesting.
Me
Many older White men like my dad found a hero in Rush Limbaugh. He made them feel understood and validated, so they trusted him completely.
He claimed any media that didn’t espouse his extreme views was liberal media, inherently biased and unreliable.
Cultural changes made some of these older White men feel inadequate or unsure of what their role in society was going to be. Limbaugh exploited that and so turned those feelings of inadequacy to anger that they were supposed to change to keep up with the times. Limbaugh exploited their feelings of vulnerability.
The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error: Over 100 Outrageously False and Foolish Statements from America’s Most Powerful Radio and TV Host, which lists many of Limbaugh’s blatant and sometimes ridiculous lies.
Limbaugh blatantly said things he knew to be untrue simply because they would appeal to his listenership.
Which is why I hear stuff from my person's lips and I'm like, "What the actual f*ck are you talking about???"
His biggest lie of all was when he would say “I’m not making this stuff up, folks!” He was indeed making stuff up. Yet my father bought all of it and swore on the bible of Rush.
“Most people don’t think about this, but talk radio is something, unlike a lot of other media, that’s almost always done alone. People almost always listen to it alone.
Which, IMO, is why retirees and tradespeople are so likely to get sucked in. They are not necessarily working in an office or other place where people would temper the information they receive.
My dad’s Limbaugh lunches were bad enough, but it turned out that talk radio was merely a gateway for the far-right ideologies to reach my father. In the years that followed, he fell down a rabbit hole that completely took over his life and hammered home the realities of how the media we consume impacts the way we think and how we see the world.
Clinton, our country was going to go to hell in a handbasket.
Any group that wanted support for their issue had to sign the “no tax pledge” and had to be against abortion rights and for gun rights. Then
After that, people would call the Norquist meetings the headquarters of the vast right-wing conspiracy.”
This doesn’t work because the abuser isn’t acting abusive because of their partner’s actions. The abuser is abusing because of their own issues—for
One of the times I visited my parents and stayed overnight, I got up in the morning and saw my father bent over in his easy chair, reading. It was unusual to see him reading in the morning. He rarely read books at all anymore. I noticed he was holding a book about Bill Clinton. I believe it had “Slick Willie” in the title. Dad’s face was screwed up in concentration, and he didn’t even notice me.
But I was too scared to do that. I didn’t want to hear him rage. I felt helpless and worried.
And Rush Limbaugh was breathlessly telling his listeners fantastic lies about both Clintons.
Rush Limbaugh’s flock believed him because he was the determiner of their facts. This was the beginning of the end of facts mattering, or the start of “alternative facts,” a term Kellyanne Conway, who served as Donald Trump’s campaign manager in the 2016 election, would coin years later.
dad could not speak about President Clinton rationally.
Experienced, with regards to Obama
didn’t appreciate my father bashing them in front of her. She just wanted him to respect her opinion. After many explosive arguments, she tried to just avoid talking politics with him. But this was difficult because my dad ate and slept his new politics, all day every day.
I feel that
Not because he didn’t agree with me but because he seemed to be getting sucked into something that was literally changing his personality. The constant rage he exhibited was exhausting, and I couldn’t imagine it being healthy for him. It felt like I was watching my father disappear into a cult.
This is why we have only five or six corporations controlling almost all the media today.
Ailes recycled the slogan he had crafted for TVN decades before as Fox News’s tagline—“Fair and Balanced.”
Murdoch, who financed the early years of Fox, and Ailes were passionate about getting the network off the ground for different reasons. Ailes wanted to be able to push the country to the right by providing news that would facilitate that and that was presented the way he wanted it to be interpreted.
set itself up as the group that exclusively represented the outraged victim. Once a victim, the viewer would get the desired effect: fear turned to self-righteous anger and hatred against anything liberal or Democratic.
Ailes said, was “riling up the crazies” by making them angry and paranoid.
It sometimes makes statements suggesting that it’s being fair, but it’s blatantly biased,
Many conservative media outlets employ psychological operations (psyops) and propaganda-type tactics to a chillingly effective degree.
glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth.
They just cite it out of thin air. Who put this statistic out? Is this scientifically proven? Was
peer reviewed? Who paid for it?
It’s the deliberate dissemination of misinformation in order to confuse the viewers and news consumers and get them all riled up.
presenting deliberately vague generalities so the audience can fill in the blank with the messages they’ve already received about people who have already been othered. It’s talking around an idea with willful ambiguousness for the purpose of obscuring facts.”
This is how “Hunter Biden’s laptop” was.
What right-wing media has done so successfully is to create doubt about an issue, then give their audience an alternative answer that only they can provide. The messaging then becomes: All other media is not to be trusted. You can only trust us. Come to us for the answers, and you will belong.
The blame-and-divide tactic works by getting people so mad at one another that they don’t notice who is really causing their problems and won’t join together to oust the truly guilty parties.
The purpose of blame and division is to create an enemy, which is why so much of right-wing media frames the world in terms of “us” versus “them.”
The listener, watcher, or reader feels special and privileged to belong to the in-group: These people are like me.
This is why I listened to Dr. Laura for a few years. It stroked my pride that I was “my kid’s mom”.
Branding works by creating an image that will stick in a consumer’s mind.55 Whether the image created is accurate or not doesn’t matter.
The Far Right’s ability to use branding to their advantage is clearly on display in how they have convinced millions of people that mainstream media is inherently liberal. The opposite is true, actually—all major news outlets tilt slightly conservative,56 simply because they need to appeal to the broadest audience possible.
And when it comes to viewership, fear and anger are by far the most powerful emotions, so that is what almost all Fox News programing tries to incite in its audience.
Absolutely, 100% true. Somehow this dawned on me at some point. Same kinds of stories, over and over and over again: “Be outraged! This school removed the nativity from their Christmas display!” Same crap over and over and over again.
When people are afraid, they don’t think rationally. And when they can’t think rationally, they’ll believe anything.”
If a news anchor acts angry, it makes them seem really sincere—especially if they act like they can barely contain themselves.
And BTW, I see this a lot with Don Lemon too, so it’s not just RWNJ news.
the viewer often starts to mirror the anchor’s emotions, getting riled up in their living room thousands of miles away from the location of the Fox News broadcast.
Yeah! They’re mad as hell, just like I am!
Perhaps the guest is making some good points, causing the viewer some discomfort and fear that their own views might be wrong.
Fox News and other conservative media outlets have masterfully set themselves up as the group that exclusively represents the outraged victim,
then the feeling of safety by being part of an in-group that speaks for them.
but later radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin refined the approach, often hanging up on or humiliating and interrupting callers they disagree with.
Dr Laura did this too
being constantly used in anti-Democratic right-wing media today, and Donald Trump was a particular fan of it, often accusing his rivals of doing the very thing he had just done himself.
cousin of the “accuse them first” tactic is deflection. Take the Republicans’ accusation of Democrats committing voter fraud. There is more of a chance to be struck by lightning than for a person to impersonate someone else at the polls, reports the Brennan Center of Justice.
