30 Day MAGA Media Detox

If Someone Sent You This, They Are Worried About YouThat is not an insult. Someone who cares about you read something and thought of you. Not to start a fight. Because they are watching something happen to you that you cannot see from the inside.There is a psychological reason you cannot see it.What the Science SaysIn 2020, political scientists David Broockman at UC Berkeley and Joshua Kalla at Yale paid 763 hardcore Fox News viewers to watch CNN for 30 days. One hour a day. Prime time.After one month, those viewers changed. They became more likely to believe voting by mail was secure. Less likely to believe Democrats were stealing the election. More critical of Trump’s handling of COVID. Less convinced the world was an exceptionally dangerous place.They did not become liberals. But their picture of reality started moving toward what was actually happening, because for the first time in a long time they were seeing information Fox had been hiding from them.Broockman and Kalla named the mechanism: partisan coverage filtering. Fox does not just slant the news. It decides what exists. The fuller picture of the country, the one every other news source was covering, simply did not exist inside the Fox universe.The viewers did not know what was missing. You cannot miss what you never knew was there.Two months after the experiment ended, almost everyone went back to Fox.And every single change reversed. Every updated belief. Gone. Like it never happened.The network does not need to win arguments. It just needs to be on every night, rebuilding the wall.One More ThingIn 2023, the Dominion lawsuit forced Fox News hosts to testify under oath about what they actually believed.Tucker Carlson privately called the election fraud claims “absurd.” Sean Hannity said he “did not believe it for one second.” Dana Perino called it “total bs.” A Fox Corp vice president called it “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”They said none of that on air.Fox settled for $787.5 million. The largest media defamation settlement in American history.Their viewers, by and large, never knew it happened.The Challenge30 days. No Fox. No Newsmax. No OAN. No Truth Social. No MAGA Facebook groups. No MAGA podcasts.MSNBC, PBS NewsHour, BBC, AP, and the New York Times only.At the end of 30 days, one of two things happens.Your picture of reality shifts. Because you will have spent a month seeing information that was being kept from you.Or nothing changes. In which case you will have done something most people in your position never do: tested your beliefs against a different information environment and found they held up. That is the only honest way to know what you actually believe versus what you have simply been told to believe.Post this and tell people you are taking the 30 Day MAGA Media Detox. Then tag someone who needs to try it.Not to shame them. Because you are worried about them.The same way someone was worried about you.We need to snap people out of the cult. This has been proven to work. We should send this to people who want to get out of the cult. SourcesBroockman, D. & Kalla, J. (2022). The Manifold Effects of Partisan Media on Viewers’ Beliefs and Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers. American Political Science Review (2023).Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network. Delaware Superior Court. Settlement: $787.5 million, April 2023.The Brainwashing of My Dad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe