Part of Fox' formula is to take a critique of the right by the left and flip it. For example, fake news was a term originally coined (at least in my recollection) by Jon Stewart about Fox a decade ago; but the term was picked up by Fox (and then by Trump) and leveled at the mainstream media.
The latest example is "banana republic"; it's a term many on the left have used to characterize Trump's efforts to subvert democracy and disenfranchise Biden voters, both before and after the election. Yet today, Fox is using the very same term to attack those states which legally altered their voting procedures in the light of the covid pandemic for doing something nefarious.
What makes the appropriation of terms and their "mirrored" application so insidious is that for Trump supporters it creates confusion and, for any who had been paying attention, a false equivalence. Now when Fox viewers hear the term fake news they probably don't realize that it was their favorite channel that is actually fake news. And they may even believe that their attempted coup wasn't what made the country look like a banana republic but a perfectly legal process to make voting easier.
No comments:
Post a Comment