This is national politics played out in a microcosm. In this same vein, do we have a Fox News Jesus Christ and a CNN Jesus Christ. or God, or the Holy Spirit? No, that's not the case. There is only one God and one Jesus Christ. And the life of Jesus spelled out in clear and simple terms on what his discipline should do. And as us evangelical always say. What will Jesus do? It won't do as my sister snapped at me, "You are not Jesus Christ!" ..........
=================================
The Cable TV Quarantine Fight
Families who differ on key political questions — Fox News or MSNBC? — used to change the channel or decide that politics was off-limits. But agreeing to disagree now can seem dangerous.
By April 17, 2020
In common with many Americans from politically divided families, Sandy Levin, a 51-year-old Democrat who cannot abide Fox News, and her mother, a 79-year-old Republican who watches it all the time, have spent the last three years aggressively not talking about politics.
Sure, they’ve had their share of clashes, as when Ms. Levin’s mother become terrified that immigrants from Mexico were preparing to invade Los Angeles. (“I would take her out to the front yard and point to the Valley and say, ‘Nobody is coming,’” Ms. Levin recalled.)
But then came the coronavirus, and politics invaded their relationship. Not only are the two talking more, mostly about coronavirus-related logistics and Ms. Levin’s mother’s health, but also they have had to confront the fact that they are living according to two conflicting truths about the crisis unfolding outside. At the end of March, “my mom said she didn’t understand why everyone’s still getting upset because the flu is much worse,” Ms. Levin said. (Ms. Levin asked that her mother’s name not be used and said she did not want to be interviewed.)
“I said, well, many more people are dying and nobody knows what kind of disease this really is, and she said, OK, I’m going to go,” Ms. Levin said. Even more alarming, Ms. Levin said, her mother was still letting older friends drop by her house as March turned to April.
A recent Pew Research Center study found that Americans’ attitudes toward the coronavirus pandemic vary sharply depending on where they get their news. Just 35 percent of people who mostly watch MSNBC, for instance, said the media had exaggerated the risks of the virus, compared with 79 percent of people who mostly watch Fox News and 54 percent for CNN.
That’s standard these days, the dueling perceptions of reality. Many people in politically mixed families have spent the last few years trying to keep the peace by avoiding political topics. They agree to turn off their preferred cable TV networks during family visits; they limit Thanksgiving discussions to anodyne topics; they refrain from engaging in Facebook arguments.
But the coronavirus has thrust politics front and center into daily life. It has forced families to be together more — either physically or virtually — and touched off potentially life-altering arguments about how to meet the moment.
“People are trapped with each other at home and can’t walk away,” said Emily Van Duyn, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Program on Democracy and the Internet who is studying how the pandemic is affecting couples with clashing political views. “Before, the answer was to withdraw completely, and now they can’t.”
The greatest tension, she said, comes over what news to watch on TV, particularly in families where the choice is between MSNBC and Fox.
One Fox viewer she interviewed recently complained that his girlfriend was being “brainwashed” by MSNBC, a longtime target of the right, with its frequent Trump-hating commentary.
“It’s a huge dividing thing,” Dr. Van Duyn said. “People say, ‘I can’t watch this with you, and I have to go to the other room.’”
In Yoder, Ind., Terry Ecenbarger, who listens to Fox Radio while driving his truck, said he was coming to terms with his wife’s MSNBC-watching habit, mostly by trying to self-isolate elsewhere in the house when he hears the TV.
“She used to be in the office and now she’s in the living room,” Mr. Ecenbarger, 68, said. “It’s on all the time, and even she’s conceded that she watches maybe a little too much.”
Both he and his wife, Amy, who is also 68, said the crisis had brought them together, surprisingly, when they watch President Trump in his daily briefing.
Mr. Ecenbarger voted for the president, he said, because he was ready for a change. This wasn’t quite what he wanted.
“I was raised a Republican and all my friends are Republicans, but he’s been a disappointment to me,” Mr. Ecenbarger said.
From the start, Fox has covered the coronavirus differently from other news outlets. Its commentators — Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and others — initially played down the virus’s seriousness, accusing the president’s opponents of exaggerating the threat as a way to hurt Mr. Trump. Later, with the network under intense criticism and threatened with the possibility of lawsuits, Fox hosts toned down their skepticism. They also attempted to whitewash their past comments by selectively quoting examples of reporting from other media outlets that suggested they were not alone in getting the story wrong.
Since the median age of Fox viewers is around 65, according to Nielsen, many Fox-related family rifts take place along generational lines. In interviews with people from around the country, some of whom responded to social-media queries to discuss the points of contention between themselves and their older Fox-watching relatives, common themes emerged. The Fox viewers initially took longer to recognize the seriousness of the coronavirus threat. And, not surprisingly, they tended to praise the president’s leadership and accuse his critics of politicizing the crisis to score cheap points.
“It was very typical lines about the liberal media overblowing the situation to attack Trump and bring him down,” Matthew Strickland, an unemployed social worker in Portland, Ore., said of the response of his mother, 67, to the initial reports of the coronavirus threat.
Even after the president started to change his tone, bringing the infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony S. Fauci to the forefront of his briefings and acknowledging the gravity of the threat, Mr. Strickland said, his mother was still committed to her earlier, more relaxed position.
“My mom had absorbed so much information about it being overblown, it’s just the flu, there’s nothing to worry about, that it was still partially in her brain and she was still going out and socializing,” Mr. Strickland, 37, said.
His mother did not want to be interviewed, perhaps for fear of exacerbating the rift, and Mr. Strickland said she was now staying home, per the White House’s suggestions. But their discussions have been difficult in that she gives more weight to what Mr. Trump is saying at any given time than to what scientists are saying.
In Daytona Beach, Fla., Caroline Day, a 32-year-old NPR listener, had similar conversations at the beginning of the crisis with her girlfriend, who is 61 and a Fox viewer. (Her girlfriend declined to be interviewed when she heard the article would be in The New York Times.)
Early on, both pledged to socialize with no one else and to avoid trips out except for food and between their two houses, a mile apart. Even still, Ms. Day said, her girlfriend supported the initial decision by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, to keep the beaches open. At home, she kept Fox on all day, a running backdrop to her life, urging Ms. Day to watch it so that she might “learn something.”
“Before we were just living our daily lives and politics weren’t constantly at play,” but then it became a constant tension, Ms. Day said. Her girlfriend, a sales representative, is eager for things to open again so she can return to work, and that was another source of early friction.
Jeanne Safer, a psychotherapist and the author of “I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics,” said the crisis illustrated an essential fact about political differences: It is virtually impossible to change someone else’s mind by presenting them with alternative arguments.
“Article thrusting, where you take an article you think is important and stick it into another person’s face, is 100 percent guaranteed to fail,” she said. “If your father or grandfather or whoever watches Fox, you have to make it a nonissue; you do not discuss it. You have to find a dignified way of presenting your point of view by saying what you are going to do and realizing that not everyone you love will agree with you.”
That is the approach taken by Melissa Perrucci, 51, a resident of northwest New Jersey. Since the crisis began, she said, she has had several upsetting conversations with her mother, 72, a Fox viewer who lives in Florida. Their family used to be able to talk things out, Ms. Perrucci said, but not in the past few years.
“They have never wavered, never compromised, and it wasn’t a conversation,” she said of talking politics with her parents. “And then inevitably I would get upset and explode and they would say it was all my fault and I was an oversensitive, emotional liberal, which I am — I am emotional.”
On the phone a couple of weeks ago, Ms. Perrucci criticized the president’s slowness in mobilizing supplies to combat the virus, and reminded her mother that Ms. Perrucci’s sister, who lives in New York, had underlying health conditions that put her at risk.
“I said, ‘This could affect your daughter, don’t you understand?’” Ms. Perrucci recalled. After a heated conversation, she said, her mother asked: “Why do you take out all your frustrations on me?”
The two haven’t spoken since, though Ms. Perrucci’s mother sent a friendly text and Ms. Perrucci sent a video of herself playing the piano. She also sent her mother an Easter card with, she said, “a little joke about ‘don’t go crazy and go to church.’”
Meanwhile, Ms. Day reported that things had gotten better between her and her girlfriend in the last week or two, mostly because they had learned to coexist while not talking about politics. They go for long bike rides, they talk, they laugh, they do not mention the president.
“Every few days, the White House briefing is still on the TV at her house, but it isn’t something that our day centers around,” Ms. Day said.
Sometimes, she said, they just switch the sound off.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.