The Fox News Fallacy
The Fox News Fallacy is having a dire effect on many Democrats. This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it.
Crime is a great example of this. Initially dismissed as simply an artifact of the Covid shutdown that was being vastly exaggerated by Fox News and the like for their nefarious purposes, it is now apparent that
the spike in violent crime is quite real and that voters are very, very concerned about it
Another example of the Fox News Fallacy is the immigration issue. The Biden administration has resisted—still resists—calling the situation at the Mexican border a “crisis” and initially insisted that the surge at the border would go away on its own as the hot weather season arrived. This was the line most Democrats adhered to, invoking the idea that the issue was more a Fox News talking point than a real problem.
It is now apparent that the border surge is not going away anytime soon and that
the perceived liberalization of the border regime under the Biden administration has indeed spurred more migrants to try their luck at their border. And it is not going away with the hot weather. Maria Sacchetti and Nick Miroff of the Washington Post report:
Finally, here’s one that's increasingly in the news these days: "critical race theory" (CRT), a term originating in academic legal theory that has been shorthanded by the right as a catch-all for the intrusion of race essentialism into teacher training, school curricula and the like. The Fox News Fallacy is very strong here as the standard Democratic comeback is simply to assert that any voters, including parents, who are concerned about "CRT" are manipulated by Fox News and are opposing benign pedagogical practices like teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, the Tulsa race massacre, redlining and so on.
The not so subtle implication is that such voters are racists since who else would be opposed to simply teaching such historical facts?
Democrats who embrace the Fox News Fallacy are inclined to believe there is no real issue here other than voters, whipped up by Fox News, who are simply opposed to teaching students about slavery and the like. That is a mistake and blinds Democrats to a real problem that is emerging.
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-fox-news-fallacy