NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S HORROR: INVASION OF THE FOX NEWS BODY SNATCHERS.
New York Magazine published an article on Tuesday by Luke O’Neil, writing from a very dark place. It’s titled “What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News” to the extent that it comes off as a parody of itself that could be called “Invasion of the Fox News Body Snatchers.” [Scary Hannity image is theirs.]
He tweeted “I asked a bunch of people how it felt watching their family members be stolen from them by Fox News over the years”. Read O’Neil’s sad but unintentionally hilarious tale of loved ones who supposedly became mind-numbed robots (or pod people) due to watching Fox News and I guarantee you will burst out laughing.
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Something about the piece struck a chord. It had gone viral, and wave after wave of frustrated and saddened Fox News orphans began to commiserate with me and with each other on Twitter and in my messages. Others wrote of similar phenomenon in Australia with the television channel Sky or in the U.K. with the tabloid Daily Mail. I heard from more than a hundred people who felt like they could relate to what they all seemed to think of as a kind of ideological brain poisoning. They chose Fox News over their family, people told me. They chose Fox News over me.
There was the one reader who wrote of his Puerto Rican uncle becoming a Fox News junkie, and turning on his own people, as he put it, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. “He was literally sitting in the dark and still defending Trump,” he said, which seemed a metaphor almost too on the nose. Hearing stories like that over and over again all weekend wasn’t pretty.
Hmmm… Could it have been because his uncle realized that a lot of the hurricane aide was mishandled by corrupt politicians on the island? Just to be aware of such well-known corruption qualifies you as a mindless Fox News pod person. Right, Luke?
The end of O’Neil’s piece is a classic case of projection:
Because the truth is, Fox News didn’t invent racism, and many of our family members would’ve believed in it on their own. This may have been the hardest thing I learned from the stories I heard: Fox didn’t necessarily change anyone’s mind, so much as it seems to have supercharged and weaponized a politics that was otherwise easy for white Americans to overlook in their loved ones. “Maybe he was always like this, but lacked the exhaust chamber to say out loud what he was thinking. I’ll never know,” one person told me. “It just sucks because I know the people he hates so much are basically the same people as me.”
Would that O’Neil took his own advice. As William F. Buckley wrote nearly 60 years ago, “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”