Resentment #I think this is correct and as he notes, it goes back all the way. (I've written a lot about this over the years in posts such as Resenntimental Journey Part 1/Part 2 and Resentment Tribe.) Perhaps it's baked in the human cake, but there's something special about the US that stems from its original division over slavery that have made one of our socio-political cultures particularly prone to this phenomenon.On Fox, the news exists in order to generate controversy. And controversy exists in order to generate resentment. And the resentment is what generates ratings. So this is my most concise idea about Fox: we should consider it “resentment news.” I think that’s the genre in which it trades… Resentment of whom? Well, a cultural elite that is corrupt and maneuvering behind the scenes to exercise power.
Myth #
Resentment of the cultural elite as a recurring theme in news puts me in mind of something that the critic Roland Barthes—a Frenchman—said about myth. Myth in the sense of a kind of ideological narrative that motivates people to particpate in politics and engages their emotions. And what Barthes said is: “many signifiers, one signified…” Or to put it another way: many stories—every night there’s new stories on Fox—one narrative that endures. Many provocations, one lesson. The liberals, the cultural elite, are at it again. And this is the essence of myth: that no matter what happens, the story remains the same, [which] is one reason the whole notion of Fox as a news channel is a little dubious: because nothing ever changes in Foxland.