The delusional news bubble and those who inhabit it

 By Hal Brown

Bonus: Links to websites I read

A couple of days ago I posted a blog with the title "The news bubble they live in vs. the bubble we live in."  I made a similar illustration to the one I made for this blog meant to depict the news bubble that viewers of Fox News and consumers of other far-right media reside in. 

It is encircled by a wall. It isn't exactly impermeable. It's made of some kind of amazing rubber that only allows certain news through while other news bounces off.

The simple dictionary definition of a delusion is "a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, occurring especially in mental conditions." This is outdated because of the part about mental conditions. While delusions are symptoms of some severe mental disorders the large majority of people that believe the outright lies and major distortions of the truth served up by the far-right media are not mentally ill as defined here:

Paranoia involves intense anxious or fearful feelings and thoughts often related to persecution, threat, or conspiracy. Paranoia can occur with many mental health conditions but is most often present in psychotic disorders. Paranoid thoughts can become delusions when irrational thoughts and beliefs become so fixed that nothing can convince a person that what they think or feel is not true. When a person has paranoia or delusions, but no other symptoms (like hearing or seeing things that aren't there), they might have what is called a delusional disorder. Because only thoughts are impacted, a person with delusional disorder can usually work and function in everyday life, however, their lives may be limited and isolated as a result of their delusions.

Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true. These beliefs may seem outlandish and impossible (bizarre) or fit within the realm of what is possible (non-bizarre). Symptoms must last for one month or longer in order for someone to be diagnosed with a delusional disorder. 

Reference

The key phrase in the dictionary definition above is despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. This presents a conundrum for a diagnostician such as myself. There is contradictory evidence readily available for anyone who wants to see it. It seems impossible that anyone misses it even if they immerse themselves in a media news bubble. 

We see people interviewed at Trump rallies. Jordon Kepler does many of these on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Here's a segment of him discussing a special he did (MSNBC). He is really providing an important service by giving us insights into how these people think.

Kepler is non-judgmental. He could be a clinician. Instead of having his patients come to him he goes to them. They are easy to find among the attendees at Trump rallies. They identify themselves by what they wear.

He presents the truth to them and allows his, dare I call them patients or subjects, to respond and they do often at great length. They are unwavering in their convictions. What they say is delusional but they don't seem, at least to me, to be otherwise behaving as if they are mentally ill. It may be that they suffer from a kind of permanent brain fog and were first infected by Donald Trump.

I don't think the people who hold these beliefs, whether those from QAnon or "merely" believe the lie that the election was stolen or J6 was just a bunch of tourists in the US Capitol, can be put on a simple bell curve from being psychotic to being willfully ignorant. It is more complex than that. We have to factor in intellectual capacity since some of these people may have a very low IQ. We also have to consider their peer group. If each and every person they interact with believes these lies there's nobody to say "yeah, but" and go on to present factual reporting.

Here are several examples to add to those in my blog below, those in the far-right media bubble will never see news about this, as reported in Raw Story:

Fox News sees its own viewers as 'uninformed simpletons': former right-wing operative

This is the top of the website story on HUFFPOST but how many MAGAs will read it?

Do you think Tucker Carlson is going to report on this?

Jan. 6 rioters trashed a GOP senator's office, and he hasn't acknowledged it

This Paul Waldman opinion essay requires a subscription to read so my hunch is that you can count on zero fingers the number of MAGAs who will read it:

Thank you, Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson

His conclusion:

Let’s summarize what the McCarthy-Carlson collaboration produced. First, it put Jan. 6 back on the top of the news agenda, reminding everyone of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his 2020 defeat, the violent reaction of his radical supporters and the craven response of Republican politicians who fed deranged conspiracy theories to their base to save their own political skins.

More important, it created an opportunity to revisit the actual events of that day. Some people watched Carlson’s fantasy depiction of Jan. 6 as a peaceful protest where Trump supporters strolled into the Capitol and took selfies while “milling around.” But a much larger audience likely saw multiple news reports on TV, newspapers and the internet in which both journalists and Republican leaders reiterated the ugly truth about that day’s attack on democracy.

The episode has also further discredited Fox News as it reels from extraordinary revelations showing network executives and personalities privately acknowledging in emails and texts that claims of a stolen election were preposterous even as they amplified those claims on the air. It’s long been argued that Fox News is in no real sense a news organization but is instead a propaganda machine that advances the interests of the Republican Party. That’s never been more clear than it is today.

McCarthy probably thought it was shrewd to give Carlson access to the surveillance footage. Instead, his decision helped reinforce an accurate understanding of Jan. 6, undermined the status of the right’s most important media outlet and reminded the electorate of the rotten core at the heart of the GOP. It’s quite an accomplishment.

On the lighter side, something else the MAGA morons won't read, is the hilarious column by Alexandra Petri in today's Washington Post

Opinion Tucker Carlson has proof the dinosaurs were not killed by a meteorite

Excerpts:

Here are hundreds — indeed, thousands of hours of dinosaurs walking around, browsing through foliage. The occasional T. rex attack. Not a meteorite in sight. Nor, I should add, a meteor, as these so-called scientists would have you call the same object when it’s burning up in the atmosphere. Two names for the same thing? Seems fishy to me. And speaking of fishy, here is a plesiosaurus. You will notice that it is just swimming around, definitely not extinct. This is what the mainstream media doesn’t want you to see. Pretty clear proof that this so-called meteorite is vastly overblown. If this meteorite really did hit, then why do I have so much footage of dinosaurs just walking around, eating leaves and, frankly, boring me to tears?

….

Next, we will observe footage that reveals Abraham Lincoln was mostly not assassinated — I have almost an hour of footage of him enjoying a theater performance without incident! And footage showing that for the overwhelming majority of his life, Elvis was alive. Next, lots of footage of the Hindenburg flying without a single problem! Makes you wonder who stood to gain by painting it as a disaster! We will be following this with footage of people eating lead paint and going “Mm, delicious!” and ... absolutely nothing happening to them, as far as we can tell! Here is someone jumping out of a building using a MyPillow as a parachute and — it seems to be working, for the part of the footage that matters! 

Also, here is some footage of people counting ballots — when they were counting, Donald Trump was ahead, and I think that says it all.

How many Fox News viewers even subscribe to The Washington Post which features this?

This is the blog from the other day comparing the two news bubbles:

It's like a segment of the population is wearing hearing aides and eye glasses that filter out everything they don't want to hear or see.   Call it living in a bubble. There is a major difference between the news "bubbles" we live in. Ours has a permeable membrane. The boundary of the bubbles they are ensconced in is rigid.

The news bubble they live in vs. the bubble we live in

 By Hal Brown

Bonus: Links to websites I read

It's like a segment of the population is wearing hearing aides and eye glasses that filter out everything they don't want to hear or see.   Call it living in a bubble. There is a major difference between the news "bubbles" we live in. Ours has a permeable membrane. The boundary of the bubbles they are ensconced in is rigid.

I'm not even going to address the Dominion lawsuit in particular here. Fox News isn't even covering it. This is from Raw Story:

What has been revealed about the abject cynicism about how Murdoch and his minions manipulated their audience for money comes from what the lawsuit has revealed. 

Those of us who follow the news on MSNBC, CNN, Raw Story, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media that don't lie are well aware of what Fox News is.

Just this morning on MSNBC:

Fox News viewers don't read articles like this in Politico:

Or like this from CNN Business:

You can probably count on the fingers of your hands the number of people who are regular Fox News viewers who will read these articles today:

My hunch is that FoxNew viewers think a salon is a place where cowboys used to drink and cavort with prostitutes.

Click above to read

Here's another from Salon:

Fox News caught editing out Trump’s brag that he would have let Putin “take over” parts of Ukraine

"I could’ve made a deal to take over something, there are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly"

How many Tucker Carlson fans will read this? 

Do I hear silence?

Of course all of the above articles require that one have an inclination to get their news by reading and having the ability to actually read at above a sixth grade level. I totally forgot I wrote this in Daily Kos until I did a Web search and found this blog:

Fox News is now guided not just by having popular personalities, all news networks do, but it is dependent on having hosts who hysterically promote lies. 

It may be instructive to look at the actual Fox News building in New York City and see how it has changed over time so their "stars" are now featured on the exterior.

Related:

About one-fifth of Democrats and Republicans get political news in a kind of media bubble

Are You Trapped in a News Bubble?

The news filtered to you might leave out important things you need to know. But how can you tell?

------------------------------------------

Addendum:

Thanks to loyal readers and new readers on my blog after readership languished between 700 and 800 a week for months it has finally broken the 1000 readers per week mark:

Quite a contrast: Biden visits Kyiv,, Trump used a Pence visit to blackmail Zelensky

 By Hal Brown

There was a commercial on MSNBC so when I sat down this morning with my cup of coffee I clicked on HUFFPOST to see what their lead story was.

I want to share the third thing I thought about when I read the following:

This was the main page of the BBC website:

I read these articles before I saw the news on MSNBC:

 The first things I thought were a mixture of "good on him" feelings about being proud that the United States had president like him. Next, I thought briefly about how stringent the secrecy and security had to have been. Then, third, I thought about this:

Excerpt:

President Trump repeatedly involved Vice President Pence in efforts to exert pressure on the leader of Ukraine at a time when the president was using other channels to solicit information that he hoped would be damaging to a Democratic rival, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump instructed Pence not to attend the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May — an event White House officials had pushed to put on the vice president’s calendar — when Ukraine’s new leader was seeking recognition and support from Washington, the officials said.

The last president to visit a war zone was George W. Bush who visited Iraq in 2003. This was probably a high point in his dismal presidency (see last paragraph here). Biden joins Bush, Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower, and LBJ on the list of presidents who have visited war zones.

The logistics of the trip are now being reported including the fact the Russia was notified about it in advance:

Excerpt:

The trip that Biden made into Kyiv was “bold” and “risky,” and done after months of planning for a range of security concerns, according to several White House officials.

The logistics were coordinated with a range of different government agencies, which included threat assessments to determine if Biden could safely enter and exit the war-torn country. It was made more challenging, officials said, because there is no U.S. military presence in Ukraine.

“This was a historic visit unprecedented in modern times to have the president of the United States visit the capital of a country at war where the us military doesn’t control the critical infrastructure,” said Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser.

There's a video here of an air raid siren going off as Biden and Zelensky visit the historic St. Micahel's Cathedral. I don't think anything in presidential history compares with this.

Watch the video (below) here:

 

. .

.

Watching the President of the United States walk down the line of Ukrainian officials and shake hands with each of them was inspiring enough but then this happened with one of them:

........

Update: I wasn't the only one to think along these lines. This is from David Rothkopf.

Excerpt:

In sending this message, Biden pointedly evoked without mentioning his name yet another American president in a visit to the Eastern edges of Europe: Donald Trump during his 2018 Helsinki meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Biden went to Europe to send Putin a message of American and allied strength. Trump went to grovel before Putin. Biden stood up for American values and our allies. Trump said he trusted Putin more than America’s own intelligence and law enforcement services. Biden embodied America’s strength. Trump illustrated and represented our greatest weakness.

A year after Trump embarrassed the country in Helsinki, he compounded the offense by withholding aid from Ukraine in an attempt to extort Zelensky into doing political dirty work against Biden to help Trump’s reelection efforts. It was an illegal act that ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. At the same time and throughout the following year according to reports from Trump’s own top advisors, he was actively advocating to withdraw American troops from Europe.

There is no doubt that had Trump been re-elected, today we would be witnessing an American president standing alongside his Russian counterpart not Zelensky, marking the weakening of the West, not its enduring strength. Perhaps that prospect, the sense that America was weak and divided and did not care about Ukraine, would not lead the fight to preserve democracy, encouraged Putin to undertake his ill-fated, hugely costly, profoundly ill-considered invasion last February. It seems likely it had an effect leading to that disastrous miscalculation.

Noon update:

From Fox Business:

'Bold move': Fox Business host gushes over Biden's 'game-changer' Ukraine visit

Fox Business host Stuart Varney praised President Joe Biden on Monday for a surprise visit to the war zone in Ukraine.

Varney reacted on his Fox Business program just hours after Biden visited Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. 

"This could be a game-changer," Varney announced. "President Biden makes a surprise visit to Ukraine. It was a very well-kept secret. He took a train from the Polish border to Kyiv. And even as air raid sirens were sounding, he was meeting with President Zelensky. And then, walking the streets in a war zone! Highly symbolic."

........

Unrelated to the visit per se I noted that story was headline news on major media websites like The New York Times ... 

... and even the partisan Fox News had it on the opening page so you didn't have to scroll down to see it...

... but the supposedly nonpartisan CNN website had it so far down the page you had to scroll down twice to see it:

Perhaps this is another sign that under new leadership CNN has moved closer to being like Fox News. Consider: 

The changes at CNN look politically motivated. That should concern us all. By Robert Reich.

This article is more than 5 months old

What would our country be like without Fox News?

 What would our country be like without Fox News?

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Posting now on Mastodon (see right column there) 

I read this story in The Guardian:

When I looked at RawStory it was the top article:

Several hours later it was the number one trending story:

This got me into a flight of fancy about what it would be like if Fox News was forced off the air. 

Since I never watch the channel I don't know where their various hosts stand on Donald Trump's candidacy for president but I do know there are signs the network may no longer be a reliable mouthpiece for him. For example this story:

Regardless of whether or not they lavish praise on a particular candidate as long as they are on the air they will promote right-wing, often far-right candidates, and the far-right agenda and with the likes of Tucker Carlson give air to conspiracy theories. 

While other networks aren't likely to broadcast the various House committee hearings like the attempt to hang Hunter Biden, I expect Fox News will do so as long as the ratings are good.

I don't know any, but I know people who know people including family members who get all of their news and commentary from Fox News. They tell me they never discuss politics with them. If it went off the air what would they and others do?

First, there would be a cable TV vacuum since there is no current alternative. They might turn to CNN which is now under the new leadership of its president Chris Licht who is promising changes might try to pick up former Fox News viewers by adding more right, but not far-right, commentary.

The only way MSNBC could pick up any of these viewers would be to create a show with, oh, this is a hard one, a convincing Elvis impersonator interviewing other far-right dead (John Wayne) or alive heroes (91 year old Clint Eastwood perhaps) and using subtle but not too subtle humor getting viewers to question their beliefs. I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect some people thought Jon Stewart was really a Republican and they didn't "get" what he was trying to do with satire.

The only other way for those who relying on a daily far-right fix is to switch from television to their computer so they can look at sites like Breitbart.

My sense is that not too many people will do this. 

I think some people who aren't really political junkies, so to speak, and just turned on their television to be entertained will fill the void by watching more free or subscription series and movies. There might even be an uptick in subscribers to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

The crucial question is what will happen down the road towards the elections to decide whether the country becomes a fascistic white-makes-right dystopia?

The answer to this question really seems to me to rest in human nature and how open people are to being influenced to reassess and change their deeply-held beliefs, their fears of being disenfranchised (the great replacement theory), and in an unfortunately large number of people, prejudices they have had most of their lives.

I have a few, albeit not well thought out, ideas about how to influence these people. We can't kidnap then and reprogram them as if they were in a cult (this was done in the 1970's) and we can't round them up and send them to China-type reeducation camps.  The literature on cults does inform us about their personalities. See, for example: 

Experts In Cult Deprogramming Step In To Help Believers In Conspiracy Theories

One thing that can be done is to find out through surveys how they are spending the time they previously devoted to watching Fox News. If they are online there's no way to reach them. If they are watching streaming video they can't be gotten to that way. If they are watching free television they can be reached. This is where they can be influenced both through advertising and programming which is aimed at leading them to engage in self-reflection and introspection. 

We do have one thing going for us, or put another way, one person: Donald Trump. Because he is the leader of a cult, who even Mary Trump on MSNBC this morning called charismatic with a grimace when she said the word, has a luster which is fast fading. His DumptyHumpty fall which was now famously depicted on the cover of the Murdoch owned New York Post, should it occur so all the kings horses and all the kings men can't put him together again, may open a window where believers are vulnerable. These windows don't stay open forever. Even a dead despot can come back from his grave and be the figurehead for a movement.

Changing a significant number of people wouldn't be easy. People with fears and prejudices they've had reinforced repeatedly by their peer group and the media are exceedingly difficult to change.