Dr. Cynthia Boaz describes on Truthout how Fox News brainwashes its viewers. Much of it we’ve written about before in bits and pieces, but she has identified 14 propaganda techniques used by Fox News:
1. Panic Mongering. “From Muslims to swine flu to recession to homosexuals to immigrants to the rapture itself, the belief over at Fox seems to be that if your fight-or-flight reflexes aren’t activated, you aren’t alive.”
2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. “…go after the person’s credibility, motives, intelligence, character, or, if necessary, sanity. No category of character assassination is off the table and no offense is beneath them.”
3. Projection/Flipping. “It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you’re using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first.”
4. Rewriting History. “A recent case in point is Palin’s mangling of the Paul Revere ride, which Fox reporters have bent over backward to validate.”
5. Scapegoating/Othering. “The simple idea is that if you can find a group to blame for social or economic problems, you can then go on to a) justify violence/dehumanization of them, and b) subvert responsibility for any harm that may befall them as a result.”
6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness. “This is more of what I’d call a “meta-frame” (a deeply held belief) than a media technique, but it is manifested in the ways news is reported constantly. For example, terms like “show of strength” are often used to describe acts of repression, such as those by the Iranian regime against the protesters in the summer of 2009.”
7. Bullying. “Bullying and yelling works best on people who come to the conversation with a lack of confidence, either in themselves or their grasp of the subject being discussed. The bully exploits this lack of confidence by berating the guest into submission or compliance.”
8. Confusion. “The idea is to deliberately confuse the argument, but insist that the logic is airtight and imply that anyone who disagrees is either too dumb or too fanatical to follow along.”
9. Populism. “The speakers identifies themselves as one of “the people” and the target of their ire as an enemy of the people. The opponent is always “elitist” or a “bureaucrat” or a “government insider” or some other category that is not the people.”
10. Invoking the Christian God. “Because the speaker has been benedicted by God to speak on behalf of all Americans, any challenge is perceived as immoral.”
11. Saturation. “The message must be repeated cover and over, it must be everywhere and it must be shared across commentators: e.g. “Saddam has WMD.”
12. Disparaging Education. “The disdain for education and other evidence of being trained in critical thinking are direct threats to a hive-mind mentality, which is why they are so viscerally demeaned.”
13. Guilt by Association. “This is a favorite of Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart, both of whom have used it to decimate the careers and lives of many good people. Here’s how it works: if your cousin’s college roommate’s uncle’s ex-wife attended a dinner party back in 1984 with Gorbachev’s niece’s ex-boyfriend’s sister, then you, by extension are a communist set on destroying America. Period.”
14. Diversion. “This is where, when on the ropes, the media commentator suddenly takes the debate in a weird but predictable direction to avoid accountability.”