I think, on some level, we all have a similar presumption about the current wave of right-wing protesters. We see them as hypocrites, either willful or not. We see them as people who sat through eight years of Bush terrorizing, economic obliteration, and war crimes and now that a Democrat is in office suddenly they give a shit about things like executive overreach and fiscal responsibility.
Brad Friedman over at the Guardian has another perspective. It’s not that they saw and ignored Bush’s transgressions, they just didn’t know about them.
By contrast, Fox presents an alternative reality where Republican hypocrisy, scandals and abuses of power are either spun into something they are not or, more frequently, simply not mentioned at all. As such, the depths of the historically unprecedented failure that was George Bush’s presidency remain virtually unknown to Fox viewers. In the bargain, as the young Obama administration moves forward, attempting to deal with countless disasters they’ve inherited, issue after issue now comes as a complete surprise to the majority of Fox’s audience.
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The list goes on and on, but the frothing teabaggers protest as if the last eight years never happened. Rather, these poor saps were presented with a phony version of reality produced with Hollywood-style special effects and distractions (missing blonds, steroids in baseball, terrorists around every corner, non-existent voter fraud). Now these confused souls roam the streets, town halls and email lists as clueless zombies, unaware of who and what they are fighting for (government-supported corporatocracy) or against (their own self-interest).
We’ve all been hit with a moment where, after combing through more ideologically tilted news outlets, we’re caught in the headlights by a pretty dang important story that didn’t get mentioned anywhere you were looking. Now, most of us have some diversity in where we get the news, and so such stories are cases of “falling through the cracks” that don’t happen all that often.
Imagine, though, living as someone who gets all of their news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. Literally, all of it. The way you’ve heard, Bush was a steadfast and courageous man of God whose presidency was plagued with evil liberals attempting to destroy his good works. The war was always justified, and always successful, thanks to the brave Republicans fighting off Democrats who tried to ruin it. The economy was doing great under Bush until the Democrats started screwing it up, and the bailouts and such were all Obama’s ideas.
This is why these people are willing to follow Glenn Beck unquestioningly, despite his tenure on CNN as a republican cheerleader who wholly endorsed just about everything he’s now calling a threat to the United States’ soul: they never watched him on CNN. Having never branched beyond the FOX/Limbaugh sphere, they’re unaware of anything that may have happened out there, be it news items or massive cognitive dissonance in their heroes.
Consider the O’Reilly strategy of dealing with criticism: cite nothing and attack viciously. This gives the appearance of covering “the other side” without ever making his poor, fragile viewers actually have to see it. So sure, Factor viewers are aware OF some sort of row between himself and Olbermann over something, but not having seen any of it, they’re left taking Bill-O’s word that the spat was because O’Reilly said something Keith didn’t like and so KO threw an ideology-based fit.
Welcome to the right-wing media mold. Spin everything, deflect criticism, ignore stories that muck with your narrative. Is it any wonder that people are up in arms?
