The reason everybody was so surprised at the election of Trump was that they hadn't noticed that, under their noses for four decades, the right-wing propaganda campaign was laying the groundwork. Fox News is only the most prominent today, but Rush Limbaugh is arguably the centrepiece of it. And then there are the links to the Republican Party itself. And then there is the demonisation of any dissenting views - the 'poisoning the well' aimed at the 'mainstream media' or 'liberal media'. What you have here is a direct route going from Party to media to the public.
It is difficult to quantify how the right-wing media has shifted the national mood because not everything felt can be empirically analysed. It comes in the form of underlying narratives, interpretive frames, rather than outright speech. It's meta-narrative is that conservatives are virtuous and liberals are evil and want to destroy America. This colours the interpretation of words more than it changes actual words' meanings. Yet it has, for instance, in turning 'liberal' itself into a pejorative. And even where it is speech, its home is the barroom conversations rather than the press.
But this does not mean it's not happening. Far from it. It has been happening for nearly 40 years and the election of Trump is proof that it has been effective.
As a human being, I'm deeply disturbed. As a social scientist, I wish I had the methodological tools to analyse broad-sweep interpretive shifts in the public.
It is difficult to quantify how the right-wing media has shifted the national mood because not everything felt can be empirically analysed. It comes in the form of underlying narratives, interpretive frames, rather than outright speech. It's meta-narrative is that conservatives are virtuous and liberals are evil and want to destroy America. This colours the interpretation of words more than it changes actual words' meanings. Yet it has, for instance, in turning 'liberal' itself into a pejorative. And even where it is speech, its home is the barroom conversations rather than the press.
But this does not mean it's not happening. Far from it. It has been happening for nearly 40 years and the election of Trump is proof that it has been effective.
As a human being, I'm deeply disturbed. As a social scientist, I wish I had the methodological tools to analyse broad-sweep interpretive shifts in the public.
