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

