[This book explores the impact of modern conservative talk radio,
which is a byproduct of the 1996 media deregulation legislation that
President Bill Clinton signed into law, on our political and social
life.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE HIGH PRICE OF DELUSION  
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Guy Miller
August 1, 2022
Against the Current
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_ This book explores the impact of modern conservative talk radio,
which is a byproduct of the 1996 media deregulation legislation that
President Bill Clinton signed into law, on our political and social
life. _

,

 

_The Brainwashing of My Dad:
How the Rise of the Right Wing Media Changed a Father
and Divided Our Nation — and How We Can Fight Back_
By Jen Senko
Sourcebooks
ISBN-13: 978-1728239590

IN NOVEMBER 2020, 74 million American voters pulled the lever for
Donald Trump. Fifty-three percent of these 74 million believe the 2020
election was stolen. That means roughly a staggering 40 million
Americans have crossed the bridge into fantasy land and burned it
behind them.

Analyzing how this happened is essential in understanding contemporary
America. _The Brainwashing of My Dad_ makes a valuable contribution
toward that goal.

_Brainwashing,_ Jen Senko’s documentary film, was released in
2016.(1)
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book of the same name was published in October 2021. These two dates
serve as bookends around the sea change that was the Trump presidency.

Trump’s 2016 election caused many pundits to use the same trope,
“the cork is now out of the bottle.” If you think of that bottle
as a bottle of cheap, knock-off champagne, then think of its contents
as being spritzed all over the U.S. capitol building on January 6,
2021.

Jen Senko tells the story of how the bottle’s foil was removed and
its cork loosened, on both the personal scale of her father Frank
Senko, and on the larger scale of tens of millions of voters. A big
chunk of the story is told through the growth of right wing media.

Their 1960s and Ours

In a celebrated November 1964 essay “The Paranoid style of American
Politics,” Richard Hofstadter put a name to a familiar theme in U.S.
politics. Paranoia soon became an apt metaphor for how American
politics played out in the 20th century.

But paranoia is one thing while derangement and delusion are another.
They were a bridge too far, even for the New Right of the early 1960s.

In early 1961, Robert Welch and the three-year-old John Birch Society
labeled President Dwight Eisenhower “a card-carrying Communist”
— not a sympathizer, but an actual capital C Communist.

Alarm bells went off in the “respectable” conservative world. Its
Republican Party leader Barry Goldwater and its intellectual
gatekeeper William F. Buckley, Jr. wasted no time in excommunicating
Welch and his Society. What happened between then and now?

While Senko begins her account of the rise of right-wing media in the
years of the Great Depression, I’ll skip ahead to the 1960s. The
late 1960s were a heady time for the American left.

The title of Max Elbaum’s book on the Maoist New Communist Movement
of the period, _Revolution in the Air,_ captures the zeitgeist of
those years. The U.S. Socialist Workers Party declared in 1971:
“…we have a deeper, broader radicalization (than the 1930s) and
there will be no reversal of this radicalization before the working
masses of this country have had a chance to take power.”

On December 31, 1969 I made a new year’s toast, “to the 1970s, the
decade of the American revolution.” Sadly, history has not been kind
to our unbridled optimism.

While we on the left were looking through a telescope with a
rose-colored lens, the cadre of the right were using a microscope with
clear glass. They saw an economy with a falling rate of profit, a
student movement occupying Ivy League campuses, unions afraid to
strike, a civil rights struggle that morphed into the Black Power
Movement and the first rumblings of militant feminism.

To launch their counterattack they saw the urgent need for a revamped
media.

Three Mileposts in the Counterattack

First came Reed Irvine. Irvine was a Federal Reserve economist. When
he looked through his microscope he focused on the 1968 Democratic
Party Convention and what was to him a “liberal bias” in the
media’s coverage of that police riot on the streets of Chicago.

Just months after the teargas cleared, Irvine founded Accuracy in
Media (AIM). He was to remain at its head for the next 35 years.

Continuing to the present day, AIM has championed every rightwing
cause it comes across. Although the specific cause may change, the
focus on ending the “liberal bias” of the “mainstream media”
has remained a constant.

Basketball fans will recognize AIM’s tactic. It’s known as
“gaming the ref,” or claiming biased officiating. It starts at
tipoff and never lets up. One-time conservative columnist David Brock
puts it this way in _Brainwashing:_

“Basically, the idea of this group (AIM) was to counter their
feeling that the media were opposed to Nixon’s policies in Vietnam.
That’s how it began, but you could see how the campaign to discredit
the media in the eyes of conservatives would lay the groundwork for a
vast alternative media that would come later. It opened up space for
conservatives to get a foothold in the media.(2)
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Second came the infamous 1971 Lewis Powell Memorandum, which added its
voice to AIM’s mantra of the charge of “liberal bias.” The
memo’s call was that “complaints to the media and the Federal
Communications Commission should be made promptly and strongly when
programs are unfair and inaccurate” (i.e. not conservative enough).

Powell put special emphasis on targeting “television, which now
plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes, and
emotions of our people.”(3)
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Jen Senko points to a third source of the right’s media capture
project. A memo called “A Plan for Putting the GOP on the TV News”
was discovered, buried in the bowels of the Nixon Library, by a Gawker
researcher named John Cook.

The plan may have been written by media guru Roger Ailes. At any rate
his handwritten notes are all over it. _Brainwashing_ observes,

“The memo sets out a detailed plan for getting television stations
to promote GOP friendly news. It outlined a way to avoid ‘the
censorship, the priorities and the prejudices of network news
selectors and disseminators’ and deliver ‘pro (Nixon)
administration stories to its viewers.’

One glaring passage in the memo leaps out, “People are lazy. With
television you just sit-watch-listen. The thinking is done for you.”
More than a quarter century before its triumph, a vision of Fox News
was taking shape.

Deregulation Clears the Path

Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of
1996 and 60-plus years of reining in the power of private media
vanished with the stroke of a pen. Reed Irvine’s mission was
accomplished — the referees were finally gamed.

Thom Hartman puts it this way: “As a result, unprofitable news
became very profitable infotainment, and radio and TV stations no
longer had to ‘pay’ for their monopoly use of our public airways
with ‘programs in the public interest.’”(4)
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Gone were limits on ownership. Before the Telecommunications Act of
1996, 40 stations were the maximum number allowed for any one owner.
After a few short years of shopping as if at a fire sale, Clear
Channel alone mushroomed to over 1200 stations in its portfolio.

Much of rural America became saturated by rightist media. For example,
Minot, a town of 48,000 in North Dakota, now has six stations, all
owned by Clear Channel. (Clear Channel has rebranded itself iHeart).

As the smoke cleared, AM radio found itself on new terrain. “A 2007
study of 257 news/talk stations by the progressive Center for American
Progress found 91% of the programming was conservative, an imbalance
they concluded was not market driven, but a result of multiple
structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system.”(5)
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“Thanks to Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Clear Channel, and the phalanx
of right-wing broadcasters who appeared in the 1990s, and 2000s,
conservative radio and television had become a mainstay of American
life, not only reaching an audience of millions, but driving the shape
and focus of the rest of the news media and reworking the definition
of objectivity in the process.”(6)
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Jen’s Father is Programmed

Frank Senko, the dad in The Brainwashing of My Dad, fits many but not
all of the demographics of the Fox News junkie. At the time of his
“conversion” Frank checked the boxes: older (the average viewer
being in their 60s), angry, white and male.

But Jen describes a much different father in her childhood years. Her
description of a younger Frank paints him as non-judgmental and
happy-go-lucky. Although a Kennedy Democrat, he was not a particularly
passionate one — perhaps semi-political at most.

One story stands out in Jen’s memory of her dad. On a childhood
visit to New York, her family disembarked at the Port Authority in
Manhattan. Just outside its doors, Frank was confronted by a homeless
African-American man. After a brief conversation with the man, Frank
gave him a generous contribution and called him “sir.” Decades
later, Jen looked back on that day with affection and pride.

Jen’s dad came from a poor family of immigrants from Poland and
Ukraine. He recalled walking barefoot to school in rural Allegheny
County, Pennsylvania during the Depression years of his childhood.

A military stint during World War II led to school on the GI Bill and
eventually to a master’s degree in engineering. Most of Frank’s
working career was in a government job at Ft. Monmouth, N.J.

Frank spent the Fort Monmouth years commuting by carpool, which meant
good-natured bantering and office gossip with the other passengers.
There was no need for the car radio — except perhaps for traffic
updates.

All that changed when Frank continued to work after his
semi-retirement. He began working three or four days a week at a
part-time job that required a long commute. Preferring the stimulus
that talk radio provided over music, he now had a new drive-time
companion.

Steve Rendall, a co-founder and former senior analyst for the media
watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), points out
in an interview recorded in Brainwashing, “Most people don’t think
about this, but talk radio is something unlike a lot of other media,
that is, it’s almost always done alone. And they’re listening to
this one other person, and there’s sort of a personal thing there,
and a connection.”

In his book _Talk Radio’s America,_ Brian Rosenwald makes a
similar point when he quotes historian Gil Troy:

“Talk radio creates an illusion of community and fosters a
surprisingly strong sense of identity at a time when anonymous
shopping malls replaced intimate main streets. Americans, especially
older ones, yearned for connection and community and talk radio
provided it.”(7)
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Frank Senko’s entry drug to the world of rightwing media was a loud
mouth host named Bob Grant. Wikipedia gives us a flavor of Grant’s
racism. Grant dubbed his format “Combat Talk.” An example of its
style: Grant describes Haitian refugees as “swine” and
“sub-human infiltrators,” who multiply “like maggots on a hot
day.”

This period marks Frank’s transition from mensch to monster. The
transition was complete a year or so later when Rush Limbaugh came on
the scene in 1988. Soon Limbaugh became what Frank called “My
hero,” adding “I always agree with Rush.”

Deeper Into the Woods

Now completely retired, Frank established a new routine that revolved
around his obsession with conservative media. Three hours every
weekday were carved out for what Jen designated “Limbaugh
Lunches.”

The kitchen was commandeered and the volume on the radio turned up.
When the bombastic sound of Rush’s voice bled into the living room,
Frank’s wife Ellen put her foot down. The solution? A heavy wooden
door was installed to keep Rush in the kitchen.

There was little down time in Frank’s “re-education.” When
Limbaugh went to commercials, the radio was muted and the sound of Fox
News was turned louder. At night, Frank plugged in earbuds and
listened to talk radio in bed. Once again, Ellen complained. The
solution? Separate bedrooms.

At this point, Frank was lost as a casualty to the world of
conservative media: talk radio, Fox News, and a steady diet of emails
filled most of his waking hours.

As his daughter recounts, “In the years that followed, he fell down
a rabbit hole, which completely took over his life and hammered home
the realities of how the media we consume impacts the way we think and
how we see the world.”

Gone was the “happy-go-lucky” “live and let live” dad of
Jen’s youth. In his place was a combative, irritable man, driven to
convert everyone he came across to his new world view. His daily
barrage of right wing emails caused many of his friends and family to
block him.(8)
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Was Frank Senko brainwashed? Or even more fundamental: Is there such a
thing as brainwashing?

Is Brainwashing a Real Thing?

The verb “to brainwash” made its debut in American discourse in
the early 1950s.

Edward Hunter, a Cold War journalist and OSS veteran with ongoing ties
to the CIA, is generally credited with introducing “brainwashing”
into popular culture.

Hunter’s 1951 book, _Brainwashing in Red China: The Calculated
Destruction of Men’s Minds,_ tied together anti-communism and the
Orientalist stereotype of the devious Asian. The image of the cruel
Chinese interrogator was cemented in the 1959 novel The Manchurian
Candidate, followed by the popular movie of the same name three years
later.(9)
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Real or not, in 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles approved MK Ultra, a
top secret U.S. program in an attempt to duplicate the Chinese
“success” in washing brains. Kat Eschner wrote in an April 17,
2017 Smithsonian article:

“It (MK Ultra) ballooned in scope and its ultimate result, among
other things, was illegal drug testing on thousands of Americans. But
MK Ultra has gone down as a significant example of government abuse of
human rights, and for good reason.”

To hide it from the American public, much of the project’s dirty
work was franchised out to Canadian hospitals and clinics.

Kathleen Taylor, a research scientist in the Department of Physiology,
Anatomy, and Genetics at the University of Oxford, is one of the
experts Jen Senko interviews for her book. Professor Taylor is the
author of _Brainwashing, the Science of Thought Control._

In her book, Taylor introduces the concept of “brainwashing by
stealth.” Unlike the physical, coercive force of popular
imagination, brainwashing by stealth more resembles what happened to
Frank Senko and his immersion in the subculture of Fox News and Rush
Limbaugh.

“Since brainwashing is all about belief change,” Jen Senko writes,
“I asked Dr. Taylor to describe the factors in creating it.” In
her answer Taylor cites five criteria. Frank’s case meets them all:

1) Isolation, cutting the subject off from other sources of
information.

2) Control, which involves the brainwasher having control of new
information (Rush often would tell his listeners, “Don’t think
about this until I get back to you on Monday.”)

3) Uncertainty, where the subjects’ old beliefs are attacked,
leaving them confused and unsure.

4) Repetition, talking points are repeated ad nauseam.

5) Strong emotion, a staple on Fox News.

Taylor further explains brainwashing by stealth. “(The subject) is
not so much forced to believe something, but all the information
coming at them is pushing a line. There is no alternative in terms of
information. So, if you control the information that goes into the
brain, to a great degree you control what the brain is going to think
and believe. That makes it difficult for the person to think of
anything else because the horizons are narrowed and everything is
constricted down to what information is available to them.”

There is more than one reason why 40 million American voters believe
the 2020 election was stolen and have crossed the bridge into an
alternate universe. There are deep-going material reasons beyond the
deceptive power of media involved in this mass delusion, but we
underestimate the role of media in this process at our own peril.

Notes

*  The 2016 video is 86 minutes long and is available on YouTube.
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*  Throughout “Brainwashing” Jen Senko quotes from interviews
she conducted with Noam Chomsky, David Brock, Rick Perlstein, Kathleen
Taylor and others.
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*  _A Confidential Memorandum: The Attack on the Free Enterprise
System,_ Lewis Powell, August 23, 1971.
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*  _The Hidden History of the American Oligarchy,_ Thom Hartman,
26.
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*  _Messengers of the Right,_ Nicole Hemmer, 267.
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*  _Ibid.,_ 269.
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*  _Talk Radio’s America,_ Brian Rosenwald, 16.
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*  Thanks to a hospital stay in his 80s, followed by a long
convalescence, Ellen Senko took charge of Frank’s media access.
 She eliminated FOX News and talk radio from Frank’s routine. Over
time much of the old Frank reemerged. In the _Brainwashing_ video
Frank now described himself as an “independent” and having no
problem with same-sex marriage. Frank Senko died at the age of 93 in
2016, at peace with his family and friends.
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*  The concept of “brainwashing” was used to explain why
American POWs made public statements denouncing U.S. imperialism.
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Guy Miller is a retired United Transportation Union member, long-time
socialist and lifelong resident of Chicago.

* mass media
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* talk radio
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* right wing talk radio
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* Propaganda
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*
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INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

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