[quote=livinincali]
Oh really let’s see here. Fox news reaches it’s highest primetime viewership ever of 3.5 million viewers in February 2020. https://www.foxnews.com/media/highest-viewership-network-history-msnbc-cnn-2020. I think we can agree to be brainwashed you’d probably need to watch that far right media a lot. You’d probably need to be in that group of 3.5 million average primetime viewers to even be considered brainwashed.
So how many people voted in the 2016 presidential election? About 139 million. So how much is 3.5 million of 139 million? About 3%. So was the bulk of the electorate influenced by right wing brainwashing? No, but it’s a convenient excuse for not actually understanding how other people live their life and why they vote the way they do. Most importantly it doesn’t explain why Trump beat Hillary.[/quote]
First of all, “Primetime viewership” of fox news has very little to do with how many people watch or trust fox news.
According to the Suffolk poll, of the 31 percent of Americans who believe Trump is honest and trustworthy, nearly two-thirds of them say Fox is their favorite news source. Among Fox-first viewers — who comprise about 25 percent of Americans in the survey — 78 percent say Trump is honest and trustworthy, while just 15 percent disagree.
So right there you can see that 25 percent of Americans say Fox is their favorite news.
You can also see how much of an effect it has on their view of trump (although they were most likely also influenced by other right-wing propaganda). Of people who didn’t watch fox news, 15% thought trump was honest and trustworthy and 80% thought he was not.
Not sure how close you can get to the truth using numbers regarding this sort of thing, but if we’re going to run numbers, let’s run ones without a bunch of assumptions (such as the idea that only primetime viewers watch fox news and that “You’d probably need to be in that group of 3.5 million average primetime viewers to even be considered brainwashed.” Or that I said brainwashed. Or that I said anything about “the bulk of the electorate.”)
129 million Americans voted for Clinton or trump. 25% of Americans, according to this poll, favor fox news. Of those, 78% think trump is honest and trustworthy, while only 15% of the rest of America thinks so. So if everybody had the same view of trump as non-fox viewers, then 129,000,000 x .25 x ((78-15)/100) = 20,317,500 fewer Americans who voted for Clinton or trump in 2016 would think trump was honest and trustworthy than in the actual, propaganda-ridden America.
Those are fox news viewer numbers, and, like I said, those idiots are also most likely influenced by the rest of the right-wing propaganda operation, which includes rush limbaugh, alex jones, and dozens of other radio talk show hosts, and also breitbart, redstate, blaze and a thousand other websites. Plus bots and pundits and meme writers on facebook and other social media.
Right-wing propaganda isn’t the only reason people like trump. They also like him because he hates the same people they love to hate, because he’s conned them into thinking he actually cares about them, because he doesn’t talk like an elite, because he plays to their fears and hates, because he’s conned them into thinking he’s a good business man and a tough negotiator and a tough guy in general, and a few other reasons. But he did all that conning and convincing with the help of right-wing propaganda, and without that propaganda, he wouldn’t have convinced nearly so many people. It was a very close election that was almost certainly decided by a WAY smaller number of people than the number of people successfully cultivated by right-wing propagandists.
