Is FOX News a cult?
Clinical psychologist and attorney Bryant Welch says yes. Here's an excerpt from an article of his about it.
Fox News is Not Just Biased -- It's a Cult
For cults, like Fox News, their objective is total control of the victim's mind so that the viewer becomes the easily manipulated pawn of the cult. The cult leadership is not satisfied to merely convince the listener of a particular point of view. The cult wants to effectively pull the levers inside the listener's mind, and direct that mind lock, stock and barrel. The cult will measure its own success by the relative ease with which it is able to do this.
As with any successful vehicle of thought control in a democratic society, overtly coercive tools of domination are not available as they are in more traditionally authoritarian regimes. People must not only join the cult voluntarily, they must also join without any awareness they have joined a cult.
Fox succeeds in both of these tasks in large part because they successfully penetrates their viewers' minds in such a way that the viewers do not experience Fox News as telling them what to believe, what to do or, for that matter, even as advocating for what Fox News believes.
Instead, the Fox viewer has the experience of hearing something they believe they have already known or felt before, whether they have or have not, not unlike a déjà vu experience. The difference between psychological suggestion and independent thought is lost on the person succumbing to psychological suggestion.
Similarly, on an emotional level, Fox News elicits feelings of resentment from people, feelings which may be there to some extent, but which become far more pronounced by the time the extensive Fox commentary is over. Fox cleverly mirrors and amplifies these feelings explaining why any "sane" person would have the same feelings. The most common emotions in these cases are anger, disgust, and contempt. Humanistic emotions of compassion, love, and humor are almost totally lacking.
Many of the rest of us, the "non-adherents," if you will, cannot understand how people can stand to listen to Fox News with its non-stop onslaught of what we experience as invective. What we don't allow for in our assessment, because we don't experience it, is the extraordinary relief Fox "commentary" provides to the minds of its adherents. It keeps listeners feeling certain, justified, and stimulated all day long, 24-7. This is no trivial psychological service.
Fox appears to provide a 24/7 fortification of people's "own" political beliefs. And it is presented in a manner that ostensibly justifies a badly felt need for an emotional catharsis, especially rage, generated by the confusion people feel over the complexity of modern political and cultural issues. Helping people organize a suitable target for this rage requires creativity, good organizational skills and an interest in domination.
These psychological "services" make Fox a Trojan Horse ostensibly bearing psychological gifts that give Fox free entry to the mind of its listeners and enabling it to surreptitiously exercise longstanding Orwellian techniques of thought control. Well orchestrated, repetitive talking points, limited to a very few key "loaded words," to borrow Orwell's term, take on great psychological effectiveness. The words become mental implants, not arguments or policy justifications.
In this and other ways, the mind is gradually seduced into letting Fox have its way with the subjects' psyche with remarkably little resistance. People display a robotic acquiescence to positions and attitudes that heretofore had never been of concern to them.
We have all experienced this striking transition with our own friends and acquaintances, and many of us have even experienced it with loved ones. It is as if one day they are there and reachable and the next they are shut off from us, unreachable by rational discussion. Some literally have a faraway look in their eyes. These are like the terrifying encounters that families of young people confront when their child has been "captured" by a cult. The Fox News cult is one that appeals to "children of all ages."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bryant-welch/fox-news-is-not-just-bias_b_337961...
Glenn Beck You r a regular man that loves his country, and is willing 2 stand up 4 wut he believes in!!!! Without u Beck Americans wouldn't kno half of the evilness goin on in the Obama Administration!!! The stuff i'm hearin that goes on is unbeliavable!!! I OVE FOX NEWS THE NETWORK THAT STATES THE FACTS AND HAS BOT REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS ON THE SHOW!!! AND GLENN BECK YOU R GOD SENT IN MY OPINION I WISH MORE PEOPLE WAS WILLING 2 DO WUT U DO!!! TELLING AMERICANS TRUTH AND EXPOSING THE CORRUP
daisylover93 1 year ago
@daisylover93 I hope you are joking. Did you watch the video?
starone091705 1 year ago