This is how the clowns took over: The sad history leading to the spectacle of a Fox News debate
The road to Fox and Trump was paved by decades of right-wing loathing of the media, facts and reality
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Fox News will air the first Republican presidential debates this week, choosing 10 out of 17 current candidates according to unspecified polls and permitting each candidate just one minute to answer questions. Donald Trump will hold center stage. This scenario, where a TV network calls the shots in a presidential debate and a consummate brand maker is the leading candidate, is the culmination of Movement Conservatism. Politics is no longer about policy or nuance, or even reality. It is simply a storyline designed to appeal to voters’ emotions.
Movement Conservatives began their corruption of American politics in the 1950s. Faced with opposing the New Deal reforms that regulated business and provided a social safety net, they had the terrible problem that those reforms were enormously popular. When voters weighed policies based on facts, they backed the New Deal and, later, Eisenhower’s similar Middle Way. To sell Movement Conservatives’ unpopular ideology, the young William F. Buckley Jr. attacked the idea that voters should engage with facts, openly debated in public. Since such debates had created the New Deal government, which was, to his mind, godless and communistic, they must be the wrong approach. Instead, he urged Movement Conservatives to push a worldview that inculcated their principles of religion and a free market economy. He illustrated how this was done in his 1951 “God and Man at Yale,” cherry-picking quotations, misrepresenting his opponents, and posing as a persecuted victim. In place of reality-based argument, Buckley substituted a narrative based in fear and outrage.
At first, Buckley’s approach to political engagement went nowhere. Americans were firmly committed to fact-based debate. In the late nineteenth century, America had had a viciously partisan press that had deliberately whipped up political passions. Partisanship ran so high that newspaper stories led directly to lynchings and riots and even to the assassination of President James Garfield. When this so-called yellow journalism helped push the country into the Spanish-American War, which led to a quagmire and subsequent atrocities in the Philippines, Americans pushed back. They demanded news that adhered to fact without editorializing, so readers could make up their own minds about how to interpret those facts.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, publishers deliberately moved away from partisanship and created newspapers designed to present the news without a partisan slant. The move toward news that presented facts rather than pushing an agenda exposed uncomfortable realities, including the extraordinary power of wealthy businessmen and the dangers of unregulated industries, which sold contaminated food, polluted water supplies and abused workers with impunity. The era’s journalists led the way to the popular reforms of the Progressive Era.
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http://www.salon.com/2015/08/02/this_is_how_the_clowns_took_over_the_sad_history_leading_to_the_spectacle_of_a_fox_news_debate_starring_front_runner_donald_trump/
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