FoxNews and the telescreen effect
One doesn’t need to watch Hannity on FoxNews to know what he was talking about.
Just check what new questions were posted on Quora, a question and answer social media site. Sean Hannity reanimated the dead Hunter Biden laptop story — actually the New York Times admitted that the laptop is real1 which made it sort of news.
What’s not news is what lawyers call “chain of custody” problems. The problem is not what is or is not on his laptop, the problem is how long the laptop was in someone else’s possession, who had access to the laptop, and and their political interest in it.
I did not need to check Quora to know it was the issue celebre on Hannity last night. The story blared in the cafeteria where I work the graveyard shift. It blared like the telescreens in Orwell’s 1984. The cafeteria is quite large and more than 100 feet away from the TV I could hear it.
It’s not the first time that I have encountered the FoxNews at volumes that precluded conversation or meditative thought.
In 2019, I worked as a night auditor/front desk clerk during the graveyard shift in rural Minnesota (think a very red corner). One night just before midnight a couple in their 50s checked in. About five minutes after checking into their room, the husband came to the desk to complain TV was not working. It took about 3 minutes to resolve the problem; and as I exited their room, the blare of FoxNews could be heard.
About 6:30 am, I had set up the complimentary breakfast. The husband came out into the lobby as other guests began helping themselves to cereal, biscuits and gravy, waffles, etc and promptly put on FoxNews. It was loud. The morning went from conversational to Trump cheerleading in seconds.
I changed the channel to weather (popular in farm country) and handled the FoxNews husband as diplomatically as possible.
Nevertheless, he vented “Why don’t people want to hear FoxNews?”
Not watch…hear. The absence of critical thinking comes from being deafened by Big Brotherism.
The 23rd paragraph of a story about a continuing federal investigation of Hunter Biden even after an agreement was reached on his tax problems.