Fox News Didn’t “Steal” Your Parents
We must hold our conservative relatives responsible for their actions.
Two days ago, journalist Luke O’Neil published an article titled “What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News” in The New Yorker’s Intelligencer. The piece summarizes over a hundred individual messages that were sent to O’Neil by the concerned liberal and left-wing relatives of conservative people. Nearly every person who sent Luke a message told a similar story, of a beloved relative who had transformed from a loving and gentle person, into a fearful, hyper-conservative bigot, due to repeated exposure to right-wing TV, radio, and digital media.
O’Neil received this outpouring of messages and heartfelt stories in response to his own, very personal account of how Fox News warped the mind of his mother and his other relatives, which was published last week to his Substack newsletter. That piece was titled “I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family”, and it contained rich, poignant excerpts from a handful other people’s stories and experiences, too.
