Piner writes: "Cable news is bad. Fox News is the worst. We’d all probably be better off if we shut off Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly and watched sports or nature documentaries or talked to our families. This does not have to be a hypothetical. We have the technology in our very own homes to make this dream a reality."
A Fox News studio. (photo: Fox)
24 July 16
How to use “parental lock” to prevent your parents from tuning in to cable news.
able news is bad. Fox News is the worst. It is, after all, the network that blamed a hoodie for the death of Trayvon Martin and claimed that poor people have it pretty good if they’ve got a refrigerator. We’d all probably be better off if we shut off Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly and watched sports or nature documentaries or talked to our families. This does not have to be a hypothetical. We have the technology in our very own homes to make this dream a reality.
Abby, a Slate reader, watched her mother—who’d lived in the United States as a permanent resident for nearly 30 years—become a U.S. citizen to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. She was quite surprised, then, to find her mother becoming an increasingly attentive Fox News viewer. Abby felt she had no choice: The child unleashed the power of parental lock on her own mother.
After Abby’s mother called her cable operator to ask why the channel wasn’t working, Abby revealed that she had blocked it. The mother and daughter then had the opportunity to “have a conversation about whether it was a good news source or not.”
If you see your friends or family falling into the chasm of cable news, perhaps parental lock is right for you. Here are instructions for three major cable providers, copied from those providers’ websites.
Time Warner instructions to “monitor your kids’ entertainment”:
Comcast Xfinity instructions to “lock access to specific individual channels” for boxes that use the X1 operating system:
Comcast Xfinity instructions to “control what your child watches” on non-X1 TV boxes:
Verizon FiOS instructions to “set up and use parental controls”: