(2017-05-18) Opinion Fox News And The Anxious Elderly

Opinion: Fox News and the anxious elderly."Viewers don't want to be informed. Viewers want to feel informed." Those are the words of Chet Collier, one of the founders of Fox News, as quoted in Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Roger Ailes, the network's chief. (The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News--and Divided a Country)

Roger Ailes -- a former TV producer who had emerged as the most successful Republican campaign consultant of the 1980s -- was hired to run CNBC. After he lost an internal power struggle, Ailes joined Rupert Murdoch's Fox network.

The largest generation in American history, the baby boomers, were reaching deep middle age by the mid-1990s. They were beginning to share an experience familiar to all who pass age 50: living in a country very different from the one they had been born into.

Fox offered them a new virtual environment in which they could feel more at home than they did in the outside world. Fox was carefully designed to look like a TV show from the 1970s: no holograms, no urban hipster studios, lots of primary colors.

Back in the 1970s, students of public opinion had noticed a strange anomaly: in the very years, 1967-1973, when trust in government, business, the military and organized religion most sharply declined, trust in television rose. Some speculated that TV as an institution had an inherently adversarial relationship to other institutions: TV enhanced its own credibility by denigrating the credibility of everything and everyone that wasn’t TV.

Economic prospects have narrowed and darkened for middle-income people. First the stock market, then the housing market, then the gold market bubbled and burst – taking the savings of the unwary with them. Americans in their 60s have reason to worry about the stability of Social Security and Medicare.

The question famously associated with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, “Who’s looking out for you?” resonates especially powerfully in the ears of the economically anxious elderly in a rapidly changing country.