this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
737 points (97.2% liked)

Not The Onion

12348 readers
165 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Thrashy@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago

Courtesy of Roger Ailes and the invention of political talk radio, The United States was the breeding ground for media manipulation tactics that later arrived in Europe, and those have been most heavily utilized by right-wing actors -- think Sky News/The Daily Mail/The Sun in the UK, or instance. When you poll most people about what they want out of government here in the US, they tend to be in alignment with "liberal" values in the US or center-left parties in Europe, but when you ask them if they support implementations of those values by name (i.e., "Social Security" or "Medicaid" or "food stamps" instead of just asking "should the government help needy people stay fed and healthy?" people who consume right-wing media suddenly flip to be against those policies, because they are brainwashed by their media diet to oppose them even though in principle they express support for them.

Bottom line, after almost forty years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and thirty years of Fox News deliberately manipulating the American right to become hateful and reactionary in spite of their own natural impulses, the gap between left and right has become incredibly difficult to bridge in any meaningful way. IMO, the only hope for reconciliation is to push those extreme voices out of the mainstream in order to limit their ability to influence the gullible, and there's just not many viable mechanisms to do that.