F
or the first 18 years of my life, I lived
about a hundred yards away from
my grandmother’s house. As a kid,
I’d skip down the street to her house for a din-
ner of PopTarts and games of Kings in the Cor-
ner, “PBS NewsHour” always playing on the
TV in the background. The TV volume muffled
the sound of the back door, so I’d tiptoe as far
into the living room as I could before announc-
ing my arrival, to surprise her. We’d catch the
end of the broadcast before dessert: white wine
for her, an ice cream bar for me, “Antiques
Roadshow” for us both.
Throughout my childhood, I watched
hundreds of hours of the evening news at her
house. But somehow I remember very little
— I can only hear the “60 Minutes” clock tick-
ing away on Sundays and recall that I thought
stocks were physical towers rebuilt each morn-
ing. I can hear her sharp, rocky voice commen-
tating on the TV programs, in both agreement
and dissent, and her asking me to turn the vol-
ume up. Beside this occasional analysis, our
conversations mostly revolved around piano
and school, two things she cares deeply for.
At my own house, I spent years laying on
the kitchen floor in front of the heating vent
reading Newsweek. I remember election night
2008 — my parents sent me to bed before the
results were announced, but my mom later
snuck in to tell me that Obama won. I remem-
ber discussing Jennifer Granholm, the 2009
stimulus package and abortion at the kitchen
table.
The women in our family tend to be stub-
born and opinionated and I grew louder in high
school by writing, photographing and editing
for the Wind-Up, my school’s newsmagazine.
I had a byline and a habit of making the prin-
cipal nervous. And while my views may have
contradicted hers, my grandmother’s name re-
mained faithfully at the top of our sponsors list
— though I sometimes made sure her copy got
lost in the mail.
Today, my grandmother is 89 years old, and
I’m a 21-year-old college senior at her alma
mater. We keep our conversations limited to
my classes, Ann Arbor and her health after her
stroke last year. I see her much less often. She
spends most of her time in a wheelchair, alone
in her home, watching TV — but this time, in-
stead of the British voices of “PBS NewsHour”
or the juicy profiles of “60 Minutes,” Tucker
Carlson’s voice reigns in her living room. My
grandmother, now, spends all day watching
Fox News.
I’ll be honest. I don’t have many conserva-
tive friends, and almost zero Trump-support-
ing ones. I blocked the president on Twitter in
2016 for the sake of my anxiety, and like most of
Gen Z, I don’t have cable TV. Other than the oc-
casional clips that dot my Twitter feed, I almost
never watch Fox.
Until her stroke, my grandmother read
the Wall Street Journal every day and mostly
watched PBS. She went to lunch with friends,
ran errands on her own and we’d still initiate
political conversations at dinner. But since
her stroke, and especially since COVID-19,
she hasn’t left her house, she’s only seen her
home aides and close family and has stopped
reading the newspaper. Her transforma-
tion from lifelong conservative to a person I
didn’t recognize wasn’t solely because of Fox
News, and I’m far from the first to “lose” a
family member or friend to the network.
But I felt I had to at least try. So this past
week, I grabbed a notebook and recorder and
walked the hundred yards to her living room.
I asked her to tell me about Fox News and
what she believed and why. We hadn’t talked
politics in several years, aside from her call-
ing me a socialist during a wine-induced
conversation a few months prior. My mask
helped hide both the exhaustion I’ve built
up over the past four years and the smile I’ve
been wearing since recently coming out —
another part of me she’ll never know about.
I sat in a brown wooden chair, six feet and
a world away from her, captivated by the
familiar — her language, distrust and fear —
and the foreign: her.
I
n an essay for the Atlantic, “Do You
Speak Fox?”, Megan Garber explains
how Fox has capitalized on an identity
of fear.
“Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and
one tone: indignation. (You are under attack;
they are the attackers.) Its grammar is griev-
ance. Its effect is totalizing,” she explained.
“Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends
or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity
or Laura Ingraham, you will come to under-
stand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that im-
migrants are invading and the mob is coming
and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix
it.”
In an essay for New York Magazine, Boston-
based writer Luke O’Neil crowdsourced stories
from people who’d experienced the same con-
version with their loved ones.
“No matter where the stories came from
they all featured a few familiar beats: A loved
one seemed to have changed over time ... At
one point or another, they sat down in front of
Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive
comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became
a different person — someone difficult, if not
impossible, to spend time with.”
Nearly all of the respondents were adults
writing about their parents, or someone de-
scribing a falling out with their spouse. Fox’s
audience demographics are no secret: they’re
74% white, 44% middle class and 17% hold a
college degree. They’re trusted most by Repub-
licans and distrusted most by Democrats. And
of Americans 65 and older, 37% say Fox is their
main source of political news.
“Fox didn’t necessarily change anyone’s
mind, so much as it seems to have supercharged
and weaponized a politics that was otherwise
easy for white Americans to overlook in their
loved ones,” O’Neil writes.
My grandmother’s politics were easy to
overlook, for a while. We’ve never been more
divided, and I’ve gone back and forth on
whether our relationship can handle the con-
versations I’d like to have with her. I’m not
sure we’ll ever see eye-to-eye on much, but as
someone entering the journalism field in just
a few months, it’s hard to watch her belief in
truth slip away. I wasn’t there to fight with her
or change her mind, which was good because I
was about two years too late. I began by asking
where she got most of her news and why she
relied on Fox.
Five minutes and 33 seconds into the inter-
view, she began to cry.
“I feel this country’s just going to pot with
all these liberals wanting to burn the country
down and start over,” she said. “I think that’s
so wrong. I do believe in our Founding Fathers
and they did a lot — they were very smart peo-
ple and they worked hard, they had very good
ideas.”
She broke off, and I got up to find tissues.
“You’re all not going to have as good a life
as I’ve had,” she said, alluding to my genera-
tion.
“They’re ruining your lives by burning the
whole country down. And who wants to live
through all these riots in every city?”
She paused and took a deep breath, her
voice flooding with anxiety. “I just wish
Trump would go in with the National Guard
and put those people in jail.”
It was baffling to hear her distressed by
things and events that I perceive so differ-
ently. I was thankful my mask could hide my
shock and confusion — with that explanation,
I wasn’t even sure where to start. I sat latching
onto my shirt sleeve, quietly saying to her, “It’s
OK, Grandma. Breathe for a second.”
I silently reminded myself that this anxi-
ety is a direct result of the bubble she’s in, not
necessarily her whole character. In moments
of despair at the state of our country, I’ve been
wondering if some people really just don’t
have empathy — do they truly not care about
their neighbors? What about people they’ll
never meet? My grandmother will never meet
the people protesting for Black lives in Chi-
cago or Portland. She’s not evil, but she’s been
conditioned to be afraid of what she doesn’t
know. The way she ingests news, she will only
ever hear that Black Lives Matter protestors
are rioters, intent on tearing down our cities.
I believe a completely different narrative, in-
formed by the places I get my news.
“Fox foments fear and loathing not really
because of a Big Brotherly impulse, but be-
cause the network has recognized that fear and
loathing, as goods, are extremely marketable,”
Garber writes.
A similar story to mine appeared in the Bos-
ton Globe, written by freelancer Linda Rodri-
guez McRobbie. She wrote about Jen Senko,
whose father had descended into anger and
fear after consuming hours of talk radio every
day.
“A man who’d made his children read for
an hour before bedtime, who always told them
that higher education was the most worth-
while thing they could do, became suspicious
of universities as liberal incubators. A man
who used to stop people on the street when
he heard an accent he didn’t recognize to say
hello now didn’t like immigrants or Hispanic
people. A man who’d welcomed his children’s
gay friends into his home ‘didn’t want it in his
face’ anymore.”
I wouldn’t say my grandmother used to
stop people on the street to say hello, but she
certainly wasn’t as paranoid as she’s become.
Her idea of the truth has become so distorted
that I had a hard time understanding her ex-
planation. “Where does your trust in Fox come
from?” I had to ask.
“
Just watching them,” she said. “I call that
the real news and I call the other the fake news.
I can’t say that I ever felt they were lying. Now
you keep hearing the other side saying that
Trump lies all the time. I said, I don’t know
where he lies because I don’t have all the fig-
ures. And if he says, I made this much money
for the country, you know, I don’t know those
facts. So it might be that he exaggerated.” She
believes liberals, like Nancy Pelosi, don’t use
the facts and will lie about things all the time.
We agreed that most journalists work to tell
the truth — that the ideals of the profession still
remain and it’s more crucial now than ever. We
disagree on exactly who is doing their job cor-
rectly. We disagree on almost everything, really.
It’s hard to comprehend how far apart we
are, though the physical distance between us
is usually less than a football field. I’m a col-
lege senior, dating a woman for the first time,
preparing to plunge into the journalism world,
seeking out new friendships and squeezing the
last drops out of my education. My grandmoth-
er is largely alone in her house, with medical
conditions, during a pandemic and with only
one constant companion: Fox News. Our situ-
ation is a tangible example of the larger dis-
course happening in the U.S., one that’s ex-
hausting and scary. My grandmother and I will
never fully cross this divide together, though I
know shouting from our respective sides of the
chasm won’t do, either. We’re two generations,
a hundred yards and now six feet apart, but in
2020, I’ll take what I can get.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
15 — Wednesday, October 7, 2020
statement
ANNIE KLUSENDORF, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
Two generations,
a hundred yards and six feet apart
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE
ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE