This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do you deal with a family member who believes everything that Fox News says?”

I remember as a kid how futile it was to explain to my parents that wrestling on television was fake.

They would point to the blood they saw and use it to prove it was real.

It didn’t matter in the least what was said to them or what was pointed out as an obvious ploy or staged athletic move; they refused to acknowledge the truth of the fraud the rest of us kids saw in the wrestling performance.

Making matters more convincing that it wasn’t an argument worth pursuing was how their agitation quickly escalated into anger if we persisted past the point of their capacity for maintaining patience with their annoying children. We learned that once we detected visible signs of anger, it wasn’t worth the effort to push them any further. By that point, the conversation had escalated into a frightening experience.

We eventually gave up and decided there was no harm in letting them believe whatever they wanted to believe.

Fox is an entirely different matter because its effect on their audience has contributed to a nightmare affecting the world.

I suggest one does not bother addressing the issue with one’s family because even if one succeeds in helping them accept reason, that victory has little impact on the severity of the problem Fox poses in society.

Addressing Fox as a threat to national stability and security is essential. There could be several approaches to addressing this problem, and one of them could be an aggregated accounting of behaviors exhibited by Fox adherents, collected by family members to construct a compelling argument for affecting legal change and influencing the media as a whole for the benefit of society.

My view on news media in society is that there is no justification for consolidated enterprises serving a profit motive. The Fourth Estate is a critically important entity within a democratic society that must be capable of earning and maintaining the public trust. That is impossible when their mandate is to serve the billionaires who are the existential threat to our democracies that we now face.

Let us take a page from the peer review process applied within the scientific community, ensuring integrity throughout the science discipline and the scientific community.

Matching the scientific community’s level of granularity in self-policing is as simple as breaking up large news media enterprises into community-based and locally-owned operations.

The more numerous the entities that represent the Fourth Estate, the more able they can become in ensuring the public is well served with a diversity of perspectives that can achieve a far more objective delivery of information than is possible through the lens of a billionaire who controls the dissemination of information with a self-serving agenda.

Funding for individual operations could be coordinated through a crown corporation that provides administrative services, such as an access point for advertising and a payment system modeled on existing systems, like Medium, where payments are distributed based on readership and engagement. Graduated access levels could be permitted, and stories can be assessed on a scale of widespread need for distribution versus content catering to niche markets. Public and subscription-based funding could support a system for disseminating critical information to broader audiences, ensuring everyone can access news crucial to their lives.