Tag Archives: Fox News

Propaganda’s Willing Audience

Talking Points Memo recently shared the findings of a paper by Bruce Bartlett, former economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, documenting the so-called “Fox Effect.” Bartlett’s conclusions are similar to those of others who’ve studied the political impact of what is widely recognized as the propaganda arm of the GOP.

A 2007 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that the arrival of Fox had a “significant effect” on the presidential elections from 1996 to 2000: Republican candidates gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in towns that broadcast the channel. (The research also credited Fox with GOP gains in the Senate.)

Meanwhile, a 2014 study by The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the likelihood of voting Republican increased by 0.9 points among viewers who watched “four additional minutes per week.”

Bartlett also found research that shows the Fox Effect caused congressmen in both parties to “increase their support for Republican policies.”

Last year, researchers out of Princeton and Vanderbilt found that during the Clinton years, members of Congress became “less supportive of President Clinton in districts where Fox News begins broadcasting than similar representatives in similar districts where Fox News was not broadcast.”

No serious observer doubts that Fox is a wildly inaccurate propaganda mill. (Several studies have found that people who watch Fox regularly know less than those who don’t watch any news at all.) The more important question, of course, concerns what researchers call “self-selection,” and what more down-to-earth folks call the “chicken and egg” conundrum. Why do certain people choose to watch Fox? Why does its propaganda work? More to the point, upon whom does any particular propaganda work? What makes person A receptive to misinformation that is crude and obvious to person B? 

At least one writer suggests that “white fragility” is the fertile ground being tilled by Fox and conservative talk radio.

White fragility is a termed coined by Robin DiAngelo, an associate professor of education at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. In her 2011 academic pedagogical analysis titled “White Fragility,” DiAngelo goes into a detailed explanation of how white people in North America live in insulated social and media spaces that protect them from any race-based stress. This privileged fragility leaves them unable to tolerate any schism or challenge to a universally accepted belief system. Any shift away from that (like a biracial African-American president) triggers a deep and sustaining panic. Racial segregation, disproportionate representation in the media, and many other factors serve as the columns that support white fragility.

At the end of the day, there are two very different reasons people follow the news: to understand what is happening in the world (even if those events or outcomes aren’t consistent with their worldviews, and may require adjusting those worldviews), or to confirm pre-existing fears and beliefs.

Propaganda outlets let partisans select reinforcement over reality.

As Bartlett points out, however, when reality bites and self-delusion is no longer possible (when, for example, the polls predicting Mitt Romney’s defeat turned out not to be “skewed”), the shock and disbelief can be overwhelming.

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American Opinion and Climate Change

“Thoughtful and informed”? Really? When was the last time you heard someone not wearing a tinfoil hat describing the American public as “thoughtful and informed”?

And yet…

Jon Krosnick is a professor at Stanford who studies Americans’ attitudes about hot-button issues. He’s surveyed opinions about climate change since 1995. As he points out, on most issues, voters are pretty evenly split;  so anything a candidate says will annoy about as many people as it pleases. There’s no net benefit. But that isn’t true of green points of view.

Many Americans, including people in Washington, do not realize how one-sided the public is on this. If they did, they would change their approach. I’ve been to Capitol Hill to talk to legislators and they’ve said: “You’re doing national surveys. I don’t think the people in my state feel that way.” So we’ve started looking at states and haven’t found a single state where a majority of residents are skeptical, but legislators think they are. West Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas — even in those states, large majorities are expressing green points of view….

What we’ve found is about 80% of Americans — I never see 80% of Americans agreeing on anything when it comes to other issues, so this is very unusual — believe the federal government should limit greenhouse gas emissions by businesses and in particular by public utilities.

Krosnick did say that Fox News viewers tend to be an exception to this majority consensus–and noted that it is impossible to know whether that is because Fox misinforms its  audience, or because the audience is composed of individuals who choose to watch Fox in order to have pre-existing beliefs confirmed.

The next time James Inhofe throws a snowball in the Senate chambers to “prove” climate change is a myth, someone should tell him that a “thoughtful and informed” public has moved on. A long time ago.

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Read My Lips: No Heckler’s Veto

I sure wish those Faux News pundits who claim to revere the Constitution actually knew what was in it.

Evidently, Satanists in Oklahoma City are planning to hold a “black mass.” Whatever that is. Now, insofar as we can tell, these folks have been entirely peaceful–however much their views may offend  adherents of more traditional doctrines, the only “harm” they’ve inflicted has been to religious sensibilities.

Enter know-nothing Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Carlson opined that the Satanic leader “clearly just wants publicity.” He asked if “Christians are playing into his plan” by protesting. In response to whether Christian should ignore him, Fr. Morris said that everybody needs to do what they think is best, such as talking about it on Fox. He encouraged prayer for the Satanic leader’s soul. When Clayton Morris interjected that the city is standing on free speech, Fr. Morris asked “what about if I want to desecrate a Koran…and speak pro-Nazi stuff right in front of my church and get people all fired up on a public sidewalk.”  (The Satanic mass is not being held on the street). Despite his (and Fox’s) belief about limited government, he opined that “government has to step in and say you can’t incite violence in the name of free speech.” The chyron validated his point: “First Amendment Foul, City: Constitution Protects Right to Gather.”

This approach–oh, no, we can’t let [fill in the blank] speak, because what they have to say will anger people and spark civil unrest. We have to shut them down in order to preserve the public peace!–was the argument used across the American south to shut down people like Martin Luther King. It’s called the Heckler’s Veto, because it allows “hecklers”–people who disagree with what is being said–to veto the message.

The courts have consistently ruled that they can’t do that. The message from the bench has been clear: If the authorities are genuinely worried about breaches of the peace, they need to beef up security, not shut the speaker down.

Isn’t it interesting how many pompous frauds want the protections offered by the Bill of Rights for themselves–but don’t want those same rules applied to others?

I have news for Tucker Carlson: It’s only freedom when it applies to everyone. Even people you don’t like. If the government gets to pick and choose who gets to assert a right, it’s no longer a right. It’s a privilege.

And privileges can be revoked.
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The Bundy Bunch

I haven’t posted about the bizarre episode that Jon Stewart aptly dubbed “Apocalypse Cow,” because–to be candid–I’ve had a huge problem understanding why anyone would rush to the defense of a guy whose claim to fame is that he doesn’t pay his bills.

The facts aren’t really in dispute: when Bureau of Land Management rangers attempted to enforce a court order to confiscate cattle owned by Cliven Bundy, an assortment of militiamen, “patriots” and assorted kooks–all armed–came to his defense. The government, fearing another Waco, temporarily retreated. This bit of adult restraint was celebrated by Bundy’s ragtag army as a great victory.

Bundy has been illegally grazing his herd on public land since 1993. He never paid the very minimal grazing fees initially imposed by President Reagan, and several courts have confirmed that he currently owes taxpayers over a million dollars.

His “defense” is that he doesn’t recognize the existence of the federal government.

What I don’t get is the Right’s wholesale embrace of this “taker.” Fox News–especially Sean Hannity–rushed to defend a guy who proudly admits to ripping off government and the taxpayers. The network that routinely excoriates “welfare cheaters” evidently saw no irony in its defense of  a brazen moocher.

It turns out that rural radicalism is nothing new. In fact, Catherine McNicol Stock wrote a book documenting a long tradition of rural extremism in the U.S.

As Stock noted, the arrest of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing gave homegrown terrorism a face, and that face turned out to be white-skinned, blue-eyed and clean-shaven. Networks of home-grown, small-town militiamen, conspiracists, survivalists, and white supremacists who had been there all along, suddenly became visible. They are heirs to “a tradition as old as the country itself, characteristically angry and frequently violent, rendering patriotism as intolerance.”

The recurring themes in rural radical movements are familiar:  anti-federalism, white supremacy, populism, and vigilantism.

Cliven Bundy has proved himself an heir to the entirety of that radical tradition, but ironically, when he shared his overtly racist views, it suddenly became “a bridge too far” even for Fox, which prefers its racism to be (slightly) more subtle.

What I still don’t get, however, is what attracted them to this moocher in the first place.

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Truth to Power

When David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, I didn’t think much of him.  His most memorable phrase–the “axis of evil”–fed into the bipolar worldview of W’s administration, and was distinctly unhelpful.

Since he left politics for journalism, however, he has been nothing short of admirable.

Frum has joined the small but growing group of frustrated Republicans like Bruce Bartlett,  Norman Ornstein and Andrew Sullivan who have been willing to say aloud the things that so many of my own companions from a long-gone GOP share privately. He has been willing, as the saying goes, to speak Truth to Power.

A recent column about Fox News is an example, and well worth clicking through to read in its entirety.

Frum notes the research showing that Fox viewers know less than people who don’t watch any news at all, but he says that criticizing Fox for its manifest inaccuracies is to miss the point. Fox isn’t in the news business.

Before Fox, news programmers had struggled with the question of what their product was. Did it include health information, and if so, how much? Weather? Financial information? Human interest? Political opinion? Ailes built his new channel upon a very different question: who is my product for?

The largest generation in American history, the baby boomers, were reaching deep middle age by the mid-1990s. They were beginning to share an experience familiar to all who pass age 50: living in a country very different from the one they had been born into.

Fox offered them a new virtual environment in which they could feel more at home than they did in the outside world. Fox was carefully designed to look like a TV show from the 1970s: no holograms, no urban hipster studios, lots of primary colors.

In other respects too, Fox offered a path back to a vanishing past. Here was a place in which men were firmly in charge, and in which women were valued most for their physical attractiveness. Here was a place in which ethnic minorities appeared only in secondary roles — and then, with brave exceptions, only to affirm the rightness of the opinions of the white males in the primary roles.

Fox, Frum tells us, is intentionally geared to the anxiety-filled old white men who are having great difficulty dealing with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing world–a world where they no longer enjoy unquestioned privileged status.

Like talk radio before it, but even more intensely, Fox offered information programmed not as a stream of randomly connected facts, but as a means of self-definition and a refuge from a hostile external reality. Fox is a news medium that functions as a social medium.

Ailes began by identifying his target audience, and shaping his “news” to their tastes. As a business strategy, it was brilliant. Unfortunately, the collateral damage has been extensive–both to the American political system, and more recently (and ironically) to the Republican party.

What’s that old story about riding the tiger?

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