Right-wing media and the pandemic: A toxic feedback loop that nurtured fascism

[marmar]

Right-wing media and the pandemic: A toxic feedback loop that nurtured fascism
American ignorance and paranoia were already there. Then Trump, Fox News and the virus exploited them to the max

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1, 2021 6:00AM


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America's fascist brew contains many ingredients. There is the white supremacy, gangster capitalism, consumerism, extreme wealth and income inequality, anti-intellectualism, a news media that cares more about "balance" than the truth, a societal crisis of existential meaning and value, anti-rationality, collective narcissism, a culture that rewards and fetishizes violence and cruelty, sexism and misogyny, widespread corruption, a broken commons, a bloated and dying empire, a corporate oligarchy, paralyzed and dysfunctional political and social institutions, the surveillance society, general loneliness, nihilism and despair. Nearly everyone in American society knows that something is fundamentally wrong, even if we lack the language to explain it.

America's fascist brew was already highly unstable, and then even more dangerous accelerants were added to the drum of political napalm: Donald Trump and his movement, the right-wing propaganda machine, "Christian" nationalism and other right-wing religious extremism, a Republican death cult with its attack on reality and truth, white anxiety about "demographic change" and, not least of all, the coronavirus pandemic.

New research by Dan Romer and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, featured in the December 2021 edition of the journal Social Science & Medicine, offers further insights into the combustible relationship between the right-wing propaganda and the "news" media, the spread of conspiracy theories and the coronavirus pandemic. As the site PsyPost summarizes, the research found "that conservative media in the United States is particularly appealing to people who are prone to conspiratorial thinking. The use of conservative media, in turn, is associated with increasing belief in COVID-19 conspiracies and reduced willingness to engage in behaviors to prevent the spread of the virus."

Romer, who is research director at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, explained: "We have found that belief in conspiracies about the pandemic is related to lower levels of social distancing and personal hygiene behaviors recommended by the CDC, as well as mask wearing, and intentions to vaccinate. Given the importance of these behaviors to ending the pandemic, we are interested in understanding the factors that encourage these conspiracies."

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The American people feel understandably exhausted by the Age of Trump, when the many crises besieging the country have come to seem insurmountable. That outcome is at least partly by design: Right-wing elites and other anti-democratic forces — especially the gangster capitalists at the top of the economic pyramid — have spent decades destroying the commons and undermining social democracy. Widespread despair is an excellent way to weaken public resolve and grease the downward slope into dystopia. ..........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/11/01/right-wing-media-and-the-pandemic-a-feedback-loop-that-nurtured-fascism/