How Fox News Creates Its Own Insane Reality | Alternet
"This is how Fox News tricks itself. What begins as heated claims—a hyperbolic statement to hook a viewer, a vulnerable figure to be elevated to villain—is repeated and amplified until the outrage-inducing nonsense is churned into the network’s observed truth. Call it the revenge of the talking point.
Partisan news is a repetitive business, and a talking point is grown over the course of several days and weeks. An errant comment quoted by one show out of context is then repeated by the next fully devoid of that context, until it becomes a self-referential outrage lever pulled by the evening shows at will. By the next day, the offending comment or subject is reintroduced as a pre-formed scandal which the network hosts respond to as if it were a piece of the discourse that rudely shoved its way into the studio and now must be dealt with.
If you’re a Fox News watcher, this is how your political reality is generated.
A fine example was the “Hobby Lobby Sharia law” talking point that emerged last July following the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. One tweet goofing on the Sharia/Scalia rhyme (“The Supreme Court #HobbyLobby ruling proves once again that Scalia Law is a lot like Sharia Law”) was volleyed between shows until Bill O’Reilly was rolling his eyes at the dissenting justice’s Sharia comparison (one obviously never made in the arguments) and Greg Gutfeld was whining that “They were comparing a narrow ruling to Sharia Law.”
The idenity of “they” was purposefully left vague, because nobody had ever actually done it. Primed by hours of outrage bait, the viewer was left to interpret “they” as the entire shadowy cabal known as the left. It took Fox only 24 hours to convert a single jesting tweet into a fully functional and portable talking point."
