New documentary looks at how the media changed America
Everyone takes stock at the beginning of a new year. Successes and failures become focused, memories begin to fade into the collective of the past, and lessons learned begin to be applied towards the future. And this year, Donald Trump becomes President.
How did we get here?
It’s a common question, one that has been debated and investigated since the beginning of November. Frequently accompanied by hand wringing, folks on the left have done everything they can to explain away the result, challenge reality, and argue against the inevitable. A Trump Presidency seems like an impossibility, like dividing by zero or teaching a cat to speak French.
All the questioning and disbelief is too little, too late, however. The chess pieces for a Trump checkmate were placed decades ago. The Brainwashing of My Dad, a documentary from earlier this year, outlines these steps through the lens of what the filmmaker sees as a fundamental change in her father. It misses the seriousness of the topic, in certain respects, but provides an authentic accounting of how conservative media played a role in the arrival of Trumpism in American politics.
Filmmaker Jen Senko noticed a difference in her WWII vet father that started during her adulthood. As a child, she recalled her father as a fun, goofy man that was well liked by neighborhood children. He was kind, well meaning, and like many of his peers, a non-political Democrat interested mainly in raising his family and living his life.
But something happened after she left the house. Her father got a different job, one that required a longer commute. While driving to work, he discovered Rush Limbaugh. Over a period of years, his personality changed. He became angrier. He suddenly had a variety of conservative opinions never before expressed. Every conversation became political. He once threatened to leave her on the side of the highway over a slight disagreement.
Soon enough, all the media her father consumed was conservative, with his hero Rush leading the way. As Senko began researching the foundations of this movement, she heard similar stories from all over the country.
Family members suddenly finding their kin impossible to talk to, fathers and sisters and brothers angry at the world and lashing out at their friends, their neighbors, their mothers and daughters and sons.
Senko looks at the roots of conservative media linking folks like Limbaugh and Michael Savage to the more mainstream arm of conservatism, Fox News. She draws direct lines from the John Birch Society to Roger Ailes, outlining how Ailes put the Republican Party in the news and controlled the message to inflame a conservative base and draw in new members through emotional appeals rather than factual reporting.
She talks to former conservative operatives about how they framed issues. She discusses with Noam Chomsky the takeover of the media by the extreme right. She accompanies much of her discoveries with funny cartoons, in what appears to be a misguided attempt at lightening the mood.
But when she discusses the repeal of the FAIR Act during the Reagan administration, a law requiring news organizations to give time to opposing viewpoints, when she discusses the lengths conservative media personalities go to in order to anger their viewers by distorting the truth, and how alarm can become addictive, it’s hard to understand why she would include any tone in her film but grim reporting. When we see the fruits that have been borne by this approach to media, a divided country with a buffoon President-Elect, it’s hard to see any humor at all.
For Jen Senko’s dad, the solution turned out to be a simple one. One day his kitchen radio broke and he wasn’t able to hear anymore Rush. His wife unsubscribed him from all his conservative mailing lists and subscribed him to a few progressive ones. He stopped being angry and went back to being himself.
But Senko’s father might not be the best test subject. His age and frailty are more than evident in the film. The larger issue rests with a society that is free to choose its own facts. A society where objective truth no longer exists.
A solution is desperately needed. It appears there is no easy one to be found.