Thread by @RVAwonk

Yes, absolutely. But it goes beyond Fox News. This story can be traced back to the creation of right-wing think tanks, which were founded for the explicit purpose of helping conservatives win the "war of ideas", as former Reagan adviser Murray Weidenbaum once said. 1/

https://twitter.com/gabrielsherman/status/1203730137050763264

Conservative think-tanks arose from the expectation that conservative ideas deserve the same weight as objective facts. When that didn't happen, conservatives cried "liberal bias" and went off & created their own echo-chambers, with think-tanks as the foundation. 2/

Conservative think-tanks exist to produce ideologically-driven "research" and partisan "knowledge". When the media did not give this "knowledge" the same weight as objective facts, conservatives created their own sources of media to disseminate this partisan information. 3/

Conservatives used this to create the narrative that the mainstream media is corrupted by "liberal bias" -- simply because mainstream media refused to treat partisan information as if it carried the same weight as objective facts. 4/

In doing so, they not only undermined public trust in shared sources of knowledge -- they poisoned our political process by making it impossible to even agree upon a shared set of facts. How can you debate an issue if one side won't even acknowledge that objective facts exist? 5/

Fox News is the vehicle for this partisan information, and they've contributed to the problem far more than any other right-wing media outlet. But ultimately, this is about more than Fox News -- it's about an asymmetric relationship with knowledge producing institutions. 6/

Fox News is successful because of a 50+ year campaign promoting ideological rigidity, hyperpartisanship, & disregard for objective truths as core conservative values. There now exists an entire ecosystem to produce, disseminate, and promote right-wing propaganda as "facts". 7/

And yes, there are left-leaning think tanks and media outlets. But there's nothing comparable to the conservative ecosystem. They literally created an alternative knowledge-producing mechanism & media infrastructure because mainstream media was too objective. 8/