1984
Fox ‘News’ and the Trump Contagion
I remember heaving a sigh of relief when the year 1984 was over, so literally did I take George Orwell’s novel in my childish mind—but for the rest of my life, I would watch the unfolding of a similar dystopia. It was 1985 when Rupert Murdoch gave up his Australian citizenship to become a U.S. citizen, in order to satisfy the legal requirement for owning a U.S. television network.
The phenomenon of psychic contagion is what I and other mental health experts have tried to warn against since our 2017 public-service publication, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. The rhetoric of the corrupted American Psychiatric Association and the “Goldwater rule” noise aside, I made clear in the introduction: “the main point of … this book is not about [Trump]. It is about the larger context.”
The larger context is what Murdoch created over decades through Fox “News”—the soil on which the Trump seed would grow and metastasize. First, calling anti-news propaganda “News” is already manipulation and, with its magnitude, psychological violence. Psychological violence then paves the way for economic, political, and eventually physical violence, as has happened with the deadly January 6 insurrection to overturn American democracy.
Some of that psychological violence recently came into view with Dominion’s 1.6 billion-dollar defamation lawsuit, which has exposed the degree to which Fox News personalities were willing to lie. Tucker Carlson was privately calling Donald Trump a “demonic force,” and Laura Ingraham called Trump’s lawyers “complete nut[s].” Sean Hannity later admitted he “did not believe [the lies he told] for one second.” Even Murdoch was calling Trump’s obsession with trying to prove election fraud “really crazy stuff” and “terrible stuff damaging everybody.”
However, when asked whether he could have done something about it, Murdoch replied: “I could have. But I didn’t.”
Just as what is legal is not necessarily ethical, what is legal is not necessarily psychologically healthy. We would not tolerate poisonous water from our faucets, or deliberately contaminated food served on our plates; why should we accept toxins for the mind as “news” or even as “free speech”? Here is a situation where changing the law may help to preserve our health and survival, since “freedom” that impinges on others’ freedom of mind should not be the permitted kind.
Do you seriously think that a country that spends more on defense than China, Russia, India, UK, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea combined is going to make a serious effort to curb physical or psychological violence? Narcissists don’t care who they destroy, including their own friends and family.
It’s going to take a MAJOR movement to change course.
There are so many ways to look at Dr Lee’s argument about ethics and legality. Would we fail to throw a bucket of water on a fire and leave it to burn? That’s basically what Trump did at the beginning of the pandemic. Even knowing how contagious and severe it was, they refused to give Governors life support machines for the hospitals.