When news of the Epstein files first broke , I watched it unfold on a television I do not own, in a room I cannot leave, on a TV channel I did not choose. The framing I received about Jeffrey Epstein—the financier convicted of soliciting sex from a minor and who was later found dead in jail following his arrest on charges of prolific child sex trafficking—came from Fox News.
This, of course, is the same Fox News that has spent years shielding, celebrating, and amplifying President Donald Trump , a sexual abuser and a man whose name appears throughout the Epstein files. The same Fox News that was built by Roger Ailes, a man who ran a serial sexual harassment operation out of one of the most powerful media companies in America. Ailes was removed from Fox News in 2016 after more than 20 women came forward with accounts of sexual harassment and coercion. He died the following year, reputation destroyed but fortune intact. The values of the network also remain , and so, too, does the ultraconservative channel’s influence in Texas prisons. Fox News is the media I am required to consume, and it is not an accident. I am a survivor incarcerated in Texas, where the television you have access to in state prisons is not determined by your curiosity, your education, or your hunger to understand the world; it is determined by your security classification. My classification dictates that I only have access to Fox News, so the men who run the racist machine that exploits women are the same men whose network explains Epstein to survivors in my prison. What we are fed is not information. It is a carefully constructed unreality designed to ensure that survivors never fully name what happened to them, or to women more broadly, or to the system that put us here. Fox News’ framing of the Epstein files, which routinely minimizes Trump’s relationship to the pedophile, is what women in this building receive as truth. The state’s decision to subject women to Fox News is political architecture designed to control what we understand about the world, about power, and about the violence that has been done to women like us. “Free” media indoctrination At the lowest security levels in Texas prisons, incarcerated people vote on which channels to watch. This may sound like democracy, but it is only a simulacrum of it—and this choice is not extended to all. As your classification rises, the small autonomy that allows you to vote is stripped away. At the highest security levels that include restrictive housing and mental health programs, which together can represent up to half of a prison’s population, there is no vote. Fox News is mandatory during the one hour a day people in higher security areas can watch television. Keep in mind that Texas holds nearly 150,000 people in state prisons, and some studies show that up to 95% of incarcerated women have experienced domestic or sexual violence at some point in their lives. We are talking about thousands of women, most of them Black and Latine people living inside the aftermath of American inequality, receiving their one daily hour of mandated news from a network that has spent decades framing power in the interest of those who hold it.
There is no getting around Fox News. People incarcerated in Texas cannot purchase or use their own television. Where I am located, two TVs serve each dorm that houses almost 90 people. When the Epstein story broke, I paid close attention to the ways that anchors on the channel managed the framing, emphasizing certain names and minimizing others. This coverage shaped which victims were credible and which powerful men were untouchable. It performed outrage while protecting the architecture of the story. And women inside received this performance as the primary—and sometimes only—account of what happened. The screen we share to watch Fox News is not neutral; it’s a policy instrument, an approach that extends beyond television. American Family Radio transmits freely and clearly on prison radios. Owned by the American Family Association, the group is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center due to its extreme, anti-LGBTQIA+ agenda. Focus on the Family, which has spent decades lobbying against reproductive rights and LGBTQIA+ equality, also broadcasts freely in Texas prisons. Radios are accessible only to those with outside financial support to aid in their purchase. Broadly, this means that the poorest and most isolated among us in prison are most dependent on free tablet content—content that is the most ideologically curated of all. Inside our prison, we have access to tablets that offer “free” content, meaning no additional purchase is required beyond the tablet itself. Similar to radios, purchasing a tablet also requires outside financial support. While many of us have jobs inside, Texas is one of seven states that forces its incarcerated population to work without pay . To more explicitly lay out the context we are operating within: The free content we can access without wages in our prison’s rural, Republican ZIP code consists of media such as the Christian Broadcasting Network, which recently fed us headlines that framed LGBTQIA+ rights as an attack on religious freedom and migration as a threat to civilization. Newsmakers also offers free content, along with the podcasts “Worthy People” and “Quick Start.” All of this media is conservative and evangelical, dishing out white, Christian nationalism with every click. There’s also Pando, a Christian nationalist app with recent offerings that included stories promoting conversion therapy and opposing gender-affirming care. All of this content is available for free. Meanwhile, The New York Times does not deliver to my prison’s ZIP code, and vetted, reputable news agencies such as the Associated Press have apps that cost $2 a month. Reputable news apps are also unavailable to anyone with a higher security classification. Offline, organizations such as Turning Point USA (TPUSA) have a physical presence inside Texas prisons. TPUSA, designed to radicalize young people to adopt far-right politics, was founded by transphobic and xenophobic podcaster Charlie Kirk, who was killed last year on a Utah college campus. Volunteers with the organization donate calendars and day planners to us. DayStar Television, a Pentecostal broadcasting network, donates Dove soap. This is charitable giving as a vector for ideological access, allowing the hand that helps you to also shape what you think. The state’s political calculation I need you to really understand what it means to be a survivor of sexual violence in a facility where the only accessible media is built by and for the people who most benefit from your silence.
Ailes harassed women for decades. Besides Trump’s significant ties to Epstein, he has also faced multiple credible allegations of sexual assault and more broadly, he has a long documented history of predatory behavior toward women. Fox News—the network Ailes built and that Trump’s political power depends on—is the news source mandated inside Texas prisons for the most controlled populations of women, many of whom experience state violence inside these walls.
This is yet another alarming example of how the state controls what survivors know about the world that harmed them. The ways in which prisons control the media we have access to is another form of harm, one that is largely invisible to outsiders, making it wholly unchallengeable. This isn’t merely a prison problem. Thousands upon thousands of people cycle through Texas state prisons, with most returning to their communities. For women in particular, they return molded by how they were treated and what they were given access to. The media they were forced to consume has the potential to shape how they view power and rights; it shifts who they view as a threat and a legitimate authority or source of information. When those returning home vote, raise children, or talk to neighbors about politics and policy, they carry the ideology the state instilled in them, and the state has a growing interest in what that ideology is.
Christian nationalist ideology, packaged as free content, teaches that LGBTQIA+ people are dangerous; that women’s primary role is domestic; that authority comes from above and should not be questioned. These are not neutral values. They are the values of movements that have actively worked to restrict voting rights, reproductive rights, and the rights of all marginalized people. When these harmful values are offered for free, and independent journalism costs money that incarcerated people do not have, the state has made a political calculation that it knows will pay off. Let us consider the Trump administration’s failed attempt to defund public media . These efforts should come as no surprise. NPR represents a media tradition oriented toward accountability and pluralism, and this journalism remains largely inaccessible to those of us who are incarcerated. American Family Radio, on the other hand, broadcasts its homophobic and misogynistic content inside, unimpeded. This contrast is a policy statement about the hate speech the state values, and the reporting it seeks to silence. There is a violence in being kept ignorant of the forces that shape your life. This is especially true for survivors of sexual predation, who are force-fed “news” produced by a crazed network that uplifts white Christian nationalism while shielding the predator-in-chief and his many allies whose names also appear in federal documents tied to child sex trafficking. I feel lucky to see this media censorship as the state violence it is, but I am also angry. The state has decided that survivors inside do not need to understand the world accurately. It has decided that the most isolated, the most controlled, the most economically stripped among us are the best candidates for mandatory ideological programming. It has decided that “free” means right-wing and that white Christian nationalist content is charity. This is the controlled information ecosystem of American incarceration, and you should not view it as separate from mass incarceration’s other functions. By controlling the media we have access to, the state can manage how the oppressed understand their oppression. This brainwashing is delivered each day through a television bolted to a wall, in a room we cannot leave, tuned to a channel we did not choose.
Most of all, I am enraged on behalf of the survivors I’ve seen tune into Fox News as it manufactures alternate Epstein realities. They watch this programming because it’s all they have access to and they want to be informed, but it is only a continuation of the violence already done to them.
When the prison has the power to choose what we know, that is its own kind of sentence. Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice. The post The Controlled Information Ecosystem of American Incarceration appeared first on Truthdig .