Monday, March 7, 2016

The Epistemology of Fox News

"Fox News instills in its viewers a formidable distaste for critical thinking. It encourages dogmatism while discouraging curiosity. It teaches people to care more about 'what' a belief says about the world than 'why' one should accept it. It propagates what philosophers would describe as bad epistemology.
"This is incredibly dangerous to our country’s future because critical thinking is the intellectual backbone of every functioning democracy. The fact that Trump is leading a pack of truth-challenged White House hopefuls is unambiguous evidence that our democracy is not functioning properly. A dysfunctional democracy is, of course, exactly what Fox News wants, for the obvious reason that it makes controlling the masses of cognitively stunted voters much easier. But then Trump rolled in from left field with his billions of dollars and charismatic authoritarianism and quickly filled the vacuum of ignorance, fear and gullibility that Fox News and its media cohorts had diligently carved out for the past seven years." Phil Torres

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