Half of Fox News viewers believe climate change is not caused by humans. A 2014 study found that 72% of references to climate change on Fox in 2013 were misleading. Fox viewers were 31% more likely to agree with the statement, ‘it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States’. 60% agree with the claim that American Muslims are not an important part of the US religious community. 68% believe that the values of Islam are at odds with American values.
Fox News – the most popular news channel in America, with imitators popping up across the world – has indisputably changed the news media landscape. Some have argued it’s now part of the Republican Party machinery, and others say it’s the other way around.
Former George W. Bush speech writer David Frum said, ‘Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox’.
To understand the Fox phenomenon – how it influences the international conversation, where it came from, what it gets wrong and what it gets right – we need to situate the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘news’ empire in a wider context. The rise of television as a medium. What that meant for how information is presented to us, and how that changed how we approach politics.
Because Fox News is not just about Fox News. It’s about how we’ve all changed; how, in Marshall McLuhan’s tired words, the medium we communicate in – whether book, newspaper, radio, television, or the internet – is the message. Television created new ways to shape how the world is presented.
So, we’ll look at how many who are critical of Fox need to acknowledge that they get a lot right.
And that we can situate Fox in a larger historical arc – one that reaches right back to the Enlightenment, to romanticism, through to the idea that, for good and for bad, Fox might be the best example of a postmodern news channel.
Of course, Hannitys and Carlsons have always been around, but it takes a particular historical, philosophical, political and regulatory shape for them to slither through for the tropes, motifs, and elements that they employ in their delivery to be accepted and aired in the first place.
The Medium is the Message: History and TV
Seeing as our sight is the most sensitive and most important of our senses, it’s no wonder that there would be something inherently attractive to us about television. Invented in 1927, by 1946 there were around 20,000 sets in the US. By 1952 – just six years later – there were 15.3 million.
Television, like radio, was heavily regulated from the beginning. With limited space on the airwaves for stations, the Federal Communications Commission – FCC – granted licences, insisted a variety of political viewpoints were represented, and mandated that stations had to provide at least some programming that was in the public interest – news, education, and documentary.
News, at first, was simple. CBS and NBC – both radio networks – broadcast short newsreels with basic footage often staged and, if of the war, supplied by the government. Concise voice-overs supplied viewers with the basic facts. In these early years, news was the prerogative of the press and any news on radio and television sounded much like a short newspaper article.
The first popular news programme to film its own stories was NBC’s 1949 Camel sponsored News Caravan – presented by John Cameron Swayze, who would smoke Camels on screen.
In the 1950s, broadcasters began to experiment with new styles more appropriate to the small screen.
Journalist Don Hewitt joined CBS in 1948 and led an experimentation with graphics, maps, and charts, and introduced a revolutionary device: the teleprompter. Hewitt was creative, trying things like using toy soldiers to illustrate the Korean War.
He also innovated a style of mixing talking heads with narration over the top of footage, which quickly became standard across the networks.
In New York, knowing the visual appeal of television, WPIX began racing around the city to film stories of fires or plane crashes.
And while most news coverage was still simple, relying on the objective presentation of facts that readers of newspapers were largely used to, these rare innovations were harbingers of things to come.
The first innovative modern documentary style programme was journalist Ed Murrow’s 1951 See it Now. It used unscripted interviews, lots of specially filmed footage, and began to expand the topics it covered – an expose of Joseph McCarthy, the Korean War, a story on the Grand Coulee Dam, coverage of events like Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.
But covering sensitive issues, See it Now quickly attracted controversy. The FCC’s 1949 ‘fairness doctrine’ permitted opinion and editorialising, but also required a ‘reasonably balanced presentation’ of the issues.
After Murrow criticised McCarthy and continued focusing on sensitive topics, CBS cancelled See it Now in 1958, with chairman William Paley telling Murrow that he didn’t want a stomach ache every time the show aired.
Murrow – quickly becoming a national celebrity – became an influential critic of what television was becoming, bemoaning that it was, ‘decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live’.
Television could be a force for good, he insisted, but instead networks produced shows that appealed to the lowest common denominator to appease advertisers and attract the largest possible audiences.
Murrow was one of many critical of the ‘culture industry’ in the postwar period.
FCC chairman Newton Minnow gave a famous speech to the national association of broadcasters in 1962 that said television had become a sensationalist ‘vast wasteland’, with ‘screaming, cajoling, and offending’ commercials.
Adding to the criticism, in 1958 it had been discovered that several quiz shows had been fixed to keep popular contestants on and ratings up.
Scandals like this, and the critique that television was becoming Minnow’s vast wasteland, were becoming part of the national conversation and Kennedy promised to strengthen the FCC’s powers during his 1960 campaign.
In response, and in an effort of self protection, television executives took note and increased their news, education, and public affairs budgets.
Meanwhile, they searched for ways to make the ‘public interest’ programmes that they were forced to broadcast more popular.
In 1951, NBC’s Pat Weaver imagined a morning show that would, ‘tell early risers all kinds of things they should know as they faced the day’. It should feel like a magazine, should cover a variety of popular human topics, feature different guests, and, importantly cover the ‘women’s domain’ – fashion, children, domestic issues, and be presented by women.
Today launched in 1952 to bad reviews, but quickly became the most profitable show on TV. Other networks soon followed suit.
Executives were discovering something about television: human interest – everyday issues that focused on people, story, and emotion – was popular.
Reven Frank at NBC distributed a memo that argued that journalism on television was about narrative, and that, ‘every news story, without sacrifice of probity or responsibility, display attributes of fiction. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising action and falling action, a beginning, middle, and an end’.
The Construction of Nixon
Fox News, when it was launched on October 7th 1996, was the brainchild of one man: Roger Ailes.
Born in 1940 and graduating from Ohio University in 1962 with a major in radio and television, the loud, bombastic, opinionated, and controversial Ailes may have been responsible for more politicians and presidents being elected than any man in history. In the early sixties, his first job was on a local talk show: the Mike Douglas Show.
The show became a success, went national, and Douglas became the highest paid star on television.
The Mike Douglas Show was where Ailes began honing his craft, learning that television was about drama, spontaneity, and appearances.
Producer of the show Woody Fraser taught him that, ‘The most important ingredient for a daily show was to keep it fresh, and one way was to keep people on balance, not knowing what would happen, sitting on the edge of their seats. It’s when people get bored that they switch channels’.
Another producer later said that, ‘Roger was just completely interested and intrigued by the mechanics of the ways these guys presented themselves and talked’.
During his 1968 presidential campaign, while appearing as a guest on the Mike Douglas Show, Nixon told Ailes, ‘It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected’.
‘Television is not a gimmick’, Ailes responded, ‘and if you think it is, you’ll lose again’.
Nixon had come off poorly on the very first televised debates between him and Kennedy. And Ailes’ confidence and inside knowledge about the new medium impressed Nixon and his aides.
The Nixon team hired Ailes and the work they did would soon change political campaigning forever. Ailes knew from his work on the Mike Douglas Show that television was about something contradictory: artificial authenticity. You had to construct the appearance of spontaneity. As all of his contemporaries were to become aware as they read McLuhan’s influential new book, the medium was the message.
At the time, he made a prescient observation. He said, ‘Nixon is not a child of TV and he may be the last candidate who couldn’t make it on the Johnny Carson show who could make it in an election.…’.
Politics, he was discovering, was now about television – the two were becoming intertwined. ‘This is it. This is the way they’ll be elected forevermore’, he said. ‘The next guys up will have to be performers’.
Ailes organised TV spots for the campaign that had supposedly ‘ordinary voters’ asking Nixon questions in townhall style meetings. To the viewer, the encounters appeared natural, but the questions were staged and the answers pre-prepared.
Ailes knew that because television was mostly local, Nixon could re-use preprepared stock phrases over and over.
In the book he wrote later – You Are the Message – he wrote, ‘On an index card you can keep in your wallet, list the key phrases of ten stories that will entertain audiences for the next ten years’.
He knew that more than just the authentic individual, the television medium was about presentation, style, emotion, camerawork, and the set.
Ailes more or less invented the idea of the soundbite. He wrote, ‘Television is a ‘hit and run’ medium. The general public is just not sophisticated enough to wade through answers. Therefore, at least some of Mr. Nixon’s answers should end with a… specific graphic, succinct, memorable comment’. Nixon needed, he said, to use ‘descriptive visual phrases’.
He knew television was about ‘moments’ – usually dramatic, spontaneous and unpredictable moments – even if you had to plan the spontaneous.
Ailes collaborated on the Nixon campaign with speechwriter and Nixon aide Raymond Price, who introduced him to the idea that politics is similar to TV. He said, ‘Politics is much more emotional than it is rational, and this is particularly true of presidential politics’.
Ailes was impressed with Leni Riefenstahl’s groundbreaking Nazi propaganda piece, Triumph of the Will, as many in film and television were at the time. The film was full of shots, camera angles, set pieces, and dialogue, all focused on curating the image of the Fuhrer.
Mike Douglas producer Kenny Johnson recalled he and Ailes talking about the psychological power of camera placement. He said, ‘There’s so many subtle things you see in propaganda. If you put the camera below a subject’s eye height, it’s the ‘hero shot’. It gives him dominance’.
When on set with Nixon in Chicago, Ailes complained that, ‘Those stupid bastards on the set designing crew put turquoise curtains in the background’.
He had them removed and replaced with wooden panels that had ‘clean, solid, masculine lines’. He wanted the subliminal feeling of Nixon being the hero at battle in an arena. He wrote ‘even if a viewer is not in favor of Richard Nixon, by 15 minutes into the programme he almost subconsciously begins to root for him’.
Nixon tended to sweat a lot so they had the air conditioning turned up to counter the studio lighting, and made sure they used the right make up.
After the Nixon campaign, Ailes was featured in Joe McGinniss’ best-selling The Selling of the President, which told the story of the taping of the television ads.
One memo from the book read, ‘Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back … Impression can envelop him, invite him in’.
It revealed that Ailes was obsessed with details like the colour of make-up on Nixon’s eyelids, the demographic of the audiences, the ‘presence of absence of a frown’.
Within the Republican party he quickly became a superstar. With his reputation growing he began his own consulting business – Republicans clamoured over him, hoping that they too could be the next Nixon. But Nixon had been teaching Ailes something too. Something that changed the dynamic of American politics. Ailes later remembered that, ’I never had a political thought, until they asked me to join the Richard Nixon presidential campaign’.
The Nixon campaign had run on now-familiar populist logic. That there were a group of liberal establishment politicians, media moguls, businessmen, executive producers, journalists, and anchormen – a ‘cabal’ of elitist snobs that was out of touch, unaligned with the views of the ‘silent majority’ of honest, hardworking, decent Americans.
The elites were politically correct east coast liberals who liked to tell the dim-witted how to live and what to do.
And television had already become a part of that establishment elite. By the 70s, the television networks had become a powerful force in American life. They saw themselves, like journalists, philosophers, and authors before them, as being a rational avant garde, leading the nation.
But they were already being seen as elitist and arrogant. They were already beginning to be met with suspicion.
In his history of television news, historian Charles Ponce de Leon writes, ‘They were losing it in part because they were seeking to inform through a medium that was poorly suited for rational discourse and the sober, objective analysis of complex issues and events’.
Ailes turned away from politics for a period. He worked on different shows and even on Broadway, putting on two shows that were met with a lukewarm reception. But he maintained his consulting work, and his spell in theatre, his experience and experimentation with different styles of TV, and his exposure to the most powerful politicians in the country would soon begin to synthesise into a potent force.
A Baby Fox and A King Maker
In 1974 beer mogul Joseph Coors approached Ailes with a proposition: a conservative news network, TVN.
Coor’s dream was the first attempt at what Fox would later become. Like Nixon, he believed that the left dominated the media and the wider political establishment. He said, ‘All three networks slant the news with innuendos, accents, the sneers they make’.
He later said that ‘[We] got into it because of our strong belief that network news is slanted to the liberal left side of the spectrum and does not give an objective view to the American public’.
Former Nixon aide Bruce Herschensohn wrote a memo to TVN staff explaining how television could be used to promote conservative viewpoints. It became a model for later imitators.
The memo included the concept of ‘pretence balancing’ – ‘showing “all sides” of a particular story when, in fact the balance is tilted’.
And also of the hold frame – holding the camera in a flattering or unflattering position depending on what you wanted to convey.
Herschensohn also encouraged using commentator speculation which appears to be factual but is editorialised, catch-phrases, and sex-appeal to sell the message.
And the simple repetition of stories and opinions. He called repetition, ‘the oldest and most effective propaganda technique’.
TVN’s tagline was ‘the independent news service’ – not ‘right-wing’, they’d argue, just a balance to the liberal elite bias in the rest of the media.
Journalist Stanhope Gould wrote a story about TVN in 1975 entitled, ‘Coors brews the News’ which criticised the network and called Ailes, ‘the only man in history to run a national news organization while owning an entertainment industry consulting firm’.
The article damaged TVN’s reputation at the start and it only ran for two years. But while it struggled, TVN laid the groundwork for what was to come.
After TVN collapsed, Ailes continued expanding his consultancy business and by the 1980s he was one of the most successful political consultants in America, helping 13 Republican senators and eight congressman win office. And in that time, he continued to hone his attack ad method.
In one advert for Republican Mitch McConnell, Ailes attacked McConnell’s Kentucky opponent, Walter Huddleston, for being absent from key votes, away giving paid speeches.
Ailes said to the team, ‘This is Kentucky. I see hunting dogs. I see hound dogs on the scent looking for the lost member of Congress’.
The ad featured a dog trainer and bloodhounds and a voice over that said, ‘My job was to find Dee Huddleston and get him back to work. Huddleston was skipping votes but making an extra fifty thousand dollars giving speeches. Let’s go, boys!’ The ad concluded with the tagline ‘Switch to Mitch for Senator’.
The truth was that Huddleston had been present for 94% of votes, but it didn’t matter. Ailes successfully painted him as lazy and greedy, McConnell won and, as McConnell’s campaign manager recalled, the ad, ‘taught in every Republican campaign school about how to use humor as a deadly weapon’.
In 1984 Ailes was recruited by Reagan and in 1988 he took on George H.W. Bush, who, like Nixon, didn’t perform well on television.
Ailes suggested Bush play the Gary Cooper character – stoic, with a slowly-speaking deep voice – and once told him, ‘Don’t ever wear that shirt again! You look like a fucking clerk!’
One Bush campaign ad quickly became the most controversial yet.
As governor, Bush’s opponent Michael Dukakis had signed a pass that allowed a convicted murderer out of prison for a weekend. While on release, Willie Horton raped a woman and stabbed her boyfriend.
The story became a focus of Bush’s campaign – Dukakis is soft on criminals, soft on crime, soft on the death penalty, they said.
The ad sparked a claim that the Bush team were stoking racial tensions. And although he denied it, critics said the ad was textbook Ailes.
Ailes had allegedly told a reporter, ‘The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it’.
Bush was also aggravated. He told Ailes, ‘I want to get back on the issues and quit talking about him’.
Ailes told him they planned to do that the day after the election.
Bush won by a large majority. How much the ad contributed to the win – who knows. But as Gabriel Sherman writes, ‘It was validation that Ailes’s brand of divisive politics could win national majorities’. Ailes went on to work with politicians and media figures like Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh. Throughout his consultancy years he became more convinced that more than anything, politics was war.
The Rise of the Ideologues
Analogue television limited the number of channels that could be broadcast in any area. This limitation of the technology had made the FCC’s regulation tolerable even to those usually opposed to government interference, especially on matters of free speech. There were two pillars to the FCC regulation: the 1934 mandate that some of the programmes networks aired had to be in the ‘public interest’. And the ‘Fairness Doctrine’, that broadcasters had to give time to opposing political viewpoints. However, in the 1970s, cable and satellite began to make the limitations of analogue obsolete. The range of channels available began to increase.
In 1981, Reagan repealed the ‘public interest’ requirement by the FCC and abolished the fairness doctrine. A new breed of media soon developed – talk radio. Shows appeared like that of Rush Limbaugh, broadcasting partisan politics, opinionated, unapologetic, and revolutionary.
As the cable years went on, more and more varied channels popped up. Niche channels like Nickelodeon and ESPN launched in 1979, and the following year media mogul Ted Turner founded CNN – the first channel to broadcast news 24/7.
We now take 24 hour news for granted, but CNN is credited with several innovations – a revolving ‘wheel’ of news, a loop of stories, weather, financial news, and, it was the first national news operation that, with a huge investment in reporters, offices, and equipment, could go live ‘at the scene’ whenever possible – something normal news programmes, limited to their pre-scheduled slots, couldn’t do.
CNN was a success. It made $12.5 million in 1985, $38.5 million in 1986, and $60 million in 1987. There was clearly a taste for news ‘on-demand’.
It slowly built up offices around the world so that it could report on global issues as quickly as possible, and became the go-to for global news events like the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which CNN broadcast from live. It was the only station on air when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986.
Rupert Murdoch – already overseeing a global news media empire that included the New York Post, the Sun in the UK, and 20th Century Fox – was taking note.
In 1986, 20th Century Fox launched A Current Affair. Influenced by Entertainment Tonight and Murdoch’s tabloid journalism, it focused on crime, gossip, scandal, and celebrity – anything that could grab a viewer’s attention.
At the same time, Ailes had been invited to launch a show on NBC – America’s Talking. The show’s goal was to make factual programming more entertaining – business and stock market news should be approached as sports channels approached sports. Ailes wanted, ‘closer shots, more emotion, bolder sound, voice-overs announcing breaks instead of just music’.
America’s Talking featured chat shows and phone-in programmes like Bugged in which viewers could talk about the things that were bothering them that day. But like TVN before it, America’s Talking struggled and Ailes, who many at NBC were already suspicious and critical of, was pushed out.
In the mid 1990s, as MSNBC and ABC looked to follow in CNN’s footsteps and launch 24 hour news channels, Murdoch wanted to be a part of this – and he knew Ailes was the man for the job.
Both men had a visceral distain for channels like MSNBC, which when it launched in 1996 wanted to portray itself in the image of an urban trendy downtown coffee bar – where, like shows like Friends and Seinfeld, co-hosts sat around, drinking coffee, casually and amiably discussing the news.
To Murdoch and Ailes, this elitist, sneering, metropolitan image concealed the liberal slant that turned its nose up at the real retro rural American, and worse, told them what to believe and who to vote for. With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, they thought, it was time this changed.
When the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, the Reagan-appointed Mark Fowler of the FCC had famously argued that the ‘public interest’ was what interested the public. No longer would regulators and establishment executives decide what counted as news – the market would decide.
De Leon writes that, ‘In previous decades, most well-educated Americans, including many of the corporate elite, would have rejected market populism as a cynical and potentially dangerous excuse to exploit the public’s poor taste and most primitive yearnings. In this view, merely satisfying consumer demand without considering what you were selling was unseemly and amoral’.
But by the 1990s, more and more Americans were criticising the establishment as being out of touch with ordinary Americans.
While at the same time, instead of ‘cultural uplift’, networks increasingly relied on chasing ratings and high viewing figures; more drama, cop shows, celebrity and scandal.
News anchor Dan Rather said in a speech, ‘They’ve got us putting more and more fuzz and wuzz on the air, cop-shop stuff, so as to compete not with other news programs but with entertainment programs, including those posing as news programs’.
CNN’s commitment to ‘pure news’ began to suffer in this increasingly sensationalist environment. But an event that would change the face of television forever was just around the corner.
In 1994, CNN decided to run back to back coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial. It became a national phenomenon and led to a 500% increase in CNN’s ratings.
It was clear that what people wanted was emotion, drama, everyday lives under the microscope. Dateline, launched in 1992, for example, focused on profiling celebrities or talking about worry-inducing medical stories.
It seemed like traditional news – textual, prosaic, the recounting of facts – was being challenged by something else. And it was that something else that Murdoch already knew a lot about.
Fox News: Fair and Balanced
Rupert Murdoch, 65, was already overseeing a global media empire with revenues of $9 billion. He had owned over 24 newspapers, 100 magazines, a book publishing company, 20th Century Fox film studios, Sky in the UK, VOX in Germany, the NY post, and he aimed to launch Fox News in 1996.
By this point Ailes had worked for and engineered the elections of several presidents and numerous politicians, ran a succession of programmes and stations – news and entertainment – and had put on shows on Broadway. Murdoch knew Ailes was the man for the job.
Internal memos said that Fox should counter CNN’s stale format, that was, ‘breaking news driven, processed event coverage, big story dependent … reactive and slow and predictable’.
‘FNC’ should emphasise ‘personality and programming, produced information, appointment TV, news plus human interaction’. It should be ‘convenient and interesting’ and have ‘attitude’.
Murdoch would spend $400 million launching the channel and didn’t expect it to be profitable until 2001. It first aired on 7th October 1996 and featured Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor at 5pm and Sean Hannity’s Hannity and Colmes at 9pm.
From day one, the focus was on how the network felt – the makeup and sets, hiring people from the entertainment world rather than news. Executive Chet Collier said, ‘Viewers don’t want to be informed; they want to feel informed’.
And at a news conference Ailes made an extraordinary claim. That Fox would be ‘fair and balanced’ because the liberal networks used ‘hot words, or code words’, to present the news with a liberal slant. Instead, Fox News’s approach would be neutral. Its slogan would be ‘We Report. You Decide’.
The premiere of the channel had none of the explosive hysterics we’ve come to expect from Fox, but O’Reilly would begin to hone the ingredients that would bring viewers back again and again.
David Brock notes how from the start, The O’Reilly Factor was revolutionary. He writes ‘opinion programming was still dominated by the Crossfire format—the left and the right debating each other. Larry King, who hosted a nonideological political and celebrity schmooze-fest, owned prime-time cable news’.
It was against CNN and Clinton that Fox would begin to find its footing.
Ailes called CNN the Clinton News Network, and through Clinton’s years in office, Fox covered Whitewater – a property development scandal that the Clintons were embroiled in – and the Monica Lewinsky scandal through the framing that the establishment elites – including CNN, ABC, and MSNBC – were complacent liberals covering for a corrupt and sleazy president.
What was new was that Fox managed to weave this into a recurring narrative – an on-going storyline – that viewers could return to night after night. During the Lewinsky story, CNN and MSNBC’s ratings grew by 40% and 53% respectively. Fox’s grew by 400%.
The O’Reilly Factor quickly became Fox News’s first success. In a media landscape in which news usually just came and went, O’Reilly returned to single narratives that functioned like a soap, an on-going drama, a storyline that viewers had an emotional stake in. Rather than presenting the facts, O’Reilly editorialised, voiced his opinion, and rallied against the elites. The first storyline was simple: Bill Clinton was a liar.
From his tabloid empire, Murdoch knew more than anyone that sex and scandal sells more than anything.
Fox made sure the Lewinsky story was entertaining. It featured polls like: ‘Which of the following do you think better describes Monica Lewinsky: An average girl who was taken advantage of, or a young tramp who went looking for adventure and thrills?’; ‘What is President Clinton more thankful for this Thanksgiving? Still having a wife? Or still having a job?’
Passionate argument was valued in presenters above all else. The vote recount in the Bush vs Gore election in 2000 also had all the ingredients of a partisan nightly drama viewers could return to. Fox overtook MSNBC’s ratings in 2000. By the spring of 2001, O’Reilly was beating Larry King in the ratings for the first time.
9/11 – With Us or Against Us
In his influential book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that we have two ways of thinking – system one and system two. System one is emotional, quick, relies on instinct – it grabs attention, its fights or flights, it acts on autopilot and speeds us up, it cements habits in place. The other system, system two, is slower, more thoughtful, more deliberative – it thinks through problems, is more cautious, rational, and reflective. Both are necessary for human survival.
Fox News is a system one news network.
Twenty minutes after the twin towers were hit on 9/11, Fox unveiled an innovation: the crawl.
It updated minute-by-minute, providing short catchy soundbites: ‘Day of Terror in the United States … Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York … wtc towers collapsed … Manhattan is sealed o … all train and bus service halted’.
Its graphics were bold red: ‘TERRORISM HITS AMERICA’, they announced.
The emotional coverage combined war and tragedy with patriotism.
Presenter Jon Scott said, ‘Folks, it just bears repeating. This is a tremendous tragedy, yes. But we are still the most powerful nation on earth. It bears repeating, America is still standing. We are united, we are strong, and we will find out who did this’.
Next the Fox logo was changed to include an American Flag and presenters began wearing American Flag pins. The flag in the logo was so new that many at the network wondered if it was too crass, if they had already gone too far.
But MSNBC soon followed, rebranding itself as, ‘America’s News Channel’, and using catchy American flag coloured graphics.
One producer later said, ‘Roger likes things to be produced simply and overtly. For example, he likes words in graphics to be big’.
He said of the logo in graphics in the corner that, ‘he made his bigger than CNN’s at the launch, then, when CNN made its bigger, Roger made his bigger still. He kept doing that until CNN gave up’.
In an age of screens, terrorism and the media were beginning to be about the same thing: grabbing visual attention.
In the aftermath of 9/11 Fox quickly led the clarion call for war.
O’Reilly said, ‘We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them’.
Three days after 9/11 O’Reilly interviewed Laurie Mylroie, the author of Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America.
O’Reilly said: ‘You sound like you’re a person who says, ‘Hey, Saddam Hussein should be on the destruction death card, along with Osama bin Laden’. He should be target number two, maybe’.
‘I’d even say target number one’, Mylroie replied.
Fox went on to hire a composer to write ‘Liberation Iraq’ music – they wanted it to be emotional, intense, aggressive.
One producer said, ‘more tom-tom drums because they had more urgency. I wanted it to sound like, I don’t want to say war drums, but …’
Adverts for coverage included eagles and fighter jets and ostentatious ‘war on terror’ logos
One ad read: ‘Fox News Channel. The country at war. Stay with us for breaking news and live updates, fair and balanced, exclusively from the team you trust: Fox News Channel. On the ground. In the air. Reports from the front. Inside the conflict. War coverage, second to none. Fox News Channel. The political fallout. With eyes around the world, a commitment here at home. The first place to turn for the latest in news— Fox News Channel. Real Journalism. Fair and balanced’.
When troops entered Baghdad and reached Firdos Square, Fox knew it would be a ratings hit. One produced recalled, ‘What better picture than having our fucking flag in Firdos Square. It was the capper on 9/11. The towers went down but the flag went up on that statue. It was like, fuck you, Saddam’.
A reporter said on air, ‘There we go! Saddam Hussein is now under the Star Spangled Banner. That’s all you’re gonna see from now on!’
Anyone that criticised the war was un-American.
Alex Jones from Harvard University later reflected that, ‘In a conservative time, a time of war, Fox viewers like their news from a strong American perspective, with flags rippling in graphics and a pugnacity toward the nation’s critics – the people John Gibson, host of Fox’s nightly ‘Big Story’, referred to last week as the peanut gallery’.
9/11 did for Fox News what the Lewinsky scandal began. Ratings surged, and in 2002 Fox overtook CNN for the first time.
Obama and the Fox Party
After the Iraq War ended and Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise, public opinion began turning on the decision to go to war, and Fox’s ratings suffered as it struggled to find a new storyline. Bush was being criticised over his mishandled response to Hurricane Katrina and viewership dropped by 15%. It was becoming clear that Fox News’s fortunes were, like a ship buoyed to the tide, knotted to the waxing and waning popularity of the Republican Party.
In 2002, Al Gore had already noticed that Fox News was becoming, ‘part and parcel of the Republican Party’. Anita Dunn later said that Fox was the ‘research arm of the Republican Party’.
And so searching for that next narrative thread, that next sensational plot line, was becoming part of party politics.
Obama – who announced he would run for president in 2007 – was everything Fox needed – and the period began to show how Fox could take a single fringe minority opinion and inflate it into a national topic that directed political debate.
One leaked email sent by producer Bill Sammon encouraged anchors to emphasise passages lifted from Obama’s autobiography about socialist conferences he had attended, Marxist professors he knew, and references to difficulties he had had with a white girlfriend.
Sammon said that Obama was, ‘drawn to Marxists’, and had racial obsessions and problems with white women.
Glenn Beck said on air that, ‘this president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture’.
He continued, ‘I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem… He has a—this guy is, I believe, a racist’.
Beck jumped from CNN to Fox and quickly found success with his distinctive style that featured a chalkboard on which he outlined his conspiratorial and sensational interpretation of the political landscape.
Sherman writes that, ‘He seemed to many to be Fox News’s id made visible’.
Obama, Beck told viewers, had a ‘deep-seated hatred for white people’.
At different times, graphics along the ticker read: ‘The Real Barack Obama; Aligned W/ Marxists, Socialists’; ‘Obama’s Radical Past; Close Friends W/ Marxist’; ‘Obama’s Chosen Friends; Marxist Profs & Structural Feminists’; and ‘Obama’s Racial Divide; Emotion B/W Races Never Be Pure’.
One story that Fox pushed claimed that Obama had spent four years at a Saudi Arabia-funded Muslim Madrassa – a school – in Indonesia.
Lifted from InsightMag.com, unnamed ‘sources’ had claimed that the madrassa Mr. Obama attended may have taught, ‘a Wahhabi doctrine that denies the rights of non-Muslims’.
Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Cal Thomas at Fox spread the story, with Thomas saying on air that there were, ‘[a] lot of questions’ about whether Obama, ‘spent two years in a Muslim school in Indonesia’.
The truth was that Obama had attended a secular school when he’d lived in Indonesia for four years when he was five.
Next came the claim that Obama wasn’t even American.
Jerome Corsi claimed on Fox & Friends that Obama, ‘has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website’.
He said: ‘The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it’.
Continuing that, ‘There’s been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it’s been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It’s a fake document that’s on the website right now’.
Hannity said, ‘Do I think he was [born in America]? Yes. Do I think this is odd that they won’t produce the birth certificate? It’s beginning to get odd to me’.
The Birther movement was a win-win for Fox. Either Obama ignored it or refused to produce his birth certificate and they could keep making the claim, or he did, doing so acknowledging that it was a possibility and that it mattered.
As soon as Obama was elected, in true Red Scare style, Glenn Beck quickly compared Obama’s policies with Soviet five year plans and his policies with those of fascist dictators.
When the Tea Party – headed by Sarah Palin – gained some popularity in an inevitable backlash against Obama and his politics, Fox News began acting as cheerleader.
Sherman writes that, ‘Palin had somehow managed to graft the old western myth of the self-reliant frontiersman onto a beauty-pageant face and a counterpunching, don’t-tread-on-me verbal style—a new kind of character, and a remarkably compelling one’.
Palin was inevitably going to be attractive to Fox.
Christopher Hitchens wrote that, ‘At least Richard Nixon had the ill fortune to look like what he was: a haunted scoundrel and repressed psychopath. Whereas the usefulness of Sarah Palin to the right-wing party managers is that she combines a certain knowingness with a feigned innocence and a still-palpable blush of sex’.
As a small number of Tea Party events and rallies in support of small government and low taxes and critical of Obama’s policies sprang up around the country, Fox covered them less like news and more like adverts.
In February 2009, Greta Van Susteren announced that, ‘Tea Party protests are erupting across the country. Angry taxpayers, or at least some of them, are taking to the streets in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party’.
Fox began to broadcast live from the events but they quickly also began participating, with Fox New stars like Beck and Hannity giving talks.
The Sacramento Tea Party’s Facebook page announced, ‘We’ve just received notice that Fox News will be broadcasting the Your World with Neil Cavuto show live from the Sacramento Tea Party’.
When a round of parties were announced for April 15th, Fox News aired at least 107 commercials for them.
One said ‘April fifteenth, all across the country, Americans are making their voices heard. In California, Texas, Georgia, Washington, D.C., citizens are standing up, saying ‘no’ to more taxes and demanding real economic solutions. April fifteenth: As Tea Parties sweep the nation on Tax Day, we’re there with total fair-and-balanced network coverage—live’.
Megyn Kelly announced that, ‘You can join the Tea Party action from your home if you go to TheFoxNation.com … a virtual Tax Day Tea Party’.
The language – ‘events will sweep the nation’, ‘people everywhere’, is intended to give the impression that everyone is doing it, it’s national news, and Fox is simply covering it, ‘fair and balanced’, rather than being a mouth-piece for and embedded in the movement.
By 2012, Fox was indisputably intertwined with the wider Republican Party. They had five Republicans actually on their payroll – Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and John Bolton.
The 2012 Republican primary was christened the Fox News Primary. Candidates would only appear on Fox rather than other networks – with over 600 appearances in 2011.
Fox, of course, capitalised on the drama, announcing things like, ‘Governor Huckabee will announce tomorrow night on this programme whether or not he intends to explore a presidential bid’.
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum said on ABC that, ‘Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox. And that the balance here has been completely reversed’.
In 2010, at least 30 Fox News employees would support, in differing ways, over 300 Republicans. Appearing on Fox would not only boost media exposure but also raise cash. Sarah Palin appeared on Fox for a total of fourteen hours in 2010. Brock writes, ‘No wonder Republicans loved appearing on Fox News at 9 p.m. Less than fifteen minutes of time could bring in forty thousand dollars, far more efficient than almost any other form of grassroots fundraising’.
When Glenn Beck shilled for the many-tentacled pro-business anti-Democrat Chamber of Commerce lobby on air in 2010, he said, ‘I would like to make this the biggest fund-raising day in the Chamber’s history’.
He pledged $10,000 of his own money and then asked, ‘So put your money where your mouth is. If you have a dollar, please go to GlennBeck.com or to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and donate today’.
It was the biggest donation day the Chamber had ever had.
So by the time Trump was gearing up for his presidential run in 2015, Fox was part of a pro-business, anti-tax, anti-immigration, anti-Obama, sensationalist, emotional, rallying network that acted as the mouth-piece of the Republican movement.
But how is it that Fox captivated audiences so quickly? It seems to be an indictment of their method that Fox’s 1.5 million primetime viewers in 2022 leaves MSNBC and CNN trailing, with 668,000 and 583,000 respectively.
Let’s see what we can understand about how Fox does it before thinking about how competing media might respond.
Postmodern News
The postmodern thinker Jacques Derrida was famous for criticising Western philosophy for being what he called logocentric.
Logosis comes from the Greek word for reason, Derrida means here that philosophers have long-presumed that they’re building a kind of objective pile of knowledge that gets to some essential truth – an indisputable ideal – that one could understand neutrally. Thomas Nagel called it the presumption of, ‘the view from nowhere’.
Derrida argues that this is impossible – we are embedded in the world, with a subjective language, each with different human perspectives.
I think, more than anything, Fox is successful because it understands this. That for good or bad, news is about more than facts. It’s about selection, interpretation, presentation, points of view. And while it often steps into the unethical, into exaggeration, hyperbole, mistruth, and hysterics – it is successful because it’s not exactly wrong – it leans into its perspective.
In fact, as de Leon points out, local television stations in America were doing this long before Fox. He writes: ‘While the networks cultivated a broadcast style that was purposefully Olympian —’news from nowhere’, in Edward J. Epstein’s phrase—local stations did exactly the opposite, producing a journalism that was rooted in particular communities, featuring anchors and reporters who acted like human beings, not emotionless professionals’.
So, yes, the news isn’t just this rationalistic presentation of information. We cannot escape having a perspective on the world, and people should be able to express that perspective. So before we get to how Fox’s anti-rationalistic postmodern style is used and misused, let’s take a quick look at how we can understand Fox’s formula and toolkit.
The Fox News Formula
I think we can loosely categorise Fox’s formula into three parts: presentation, narrative, and emotion.
Let’s look at presentation first.
We’ve already seen how Ailes revolutionised the use of graphics, soundbites, sets – the presentation of style. Arresting, sensational, shocking images and good-looking presenters are, of course, always going to play on our evolutionary wiring to attract our attention. But the use of charts, graphs, and maps – visual cues – are now an uncontroversial part of the media landscape.
ABC had led the way as far back as 1977 by making Roone Arledge, the head of ABC Sports, the head of ABC news – he’d used graphics and charts to illustrate sports trends and had revolutionised televised sport by emphasising the stats and drama, and by making the stories of the sportsmen and women the central focus of coverage.
One study on the use of graphics in news concluded that, ‘data suggest graphics help younger and older viewers store and retrieve information presented in television news stories’.
So presentation to attract attention is inevitable, but Fox uses this to maximum effect.
One graphic, for example, featured Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with Fidel Castro, surrounded by a love heart, and read, ‘CASTRO’S DREAM TEAM: WANTS CLINTON AND OBAMA IN ’08’.
They also present information in a misleading way, for example cropping the bottom of charts to make Obamacare enrolment look lower than it was.
Soundbites, the set, camera placement, catch phrases, charts, image selection, and graphics all supplement the traditional rationalistic presentation of the news, and like anything, can be used and misused.
Now let’s look at narrative.
Tobin Smith, who worked at Fox and went on to write a book about his time there called Foxocracy, writes that: ‘Fox News has season-long narratives that require the good-guy hero protagonists (‘the baby faces’) to always win and the bad-guy antagonists (‘the heels’) to lose’.
We’ve seen how, instead of presenting news, Fox constructs narratives that, like television drama seasons, keeps viewers coming back for more. There always have been national and international stories, of course, but Fox also embeds itself in the story, turning it into a good vs evil drama.
Narratives that followed the Lewinsky Scandal, Obama’s birth certificate, Trump’s swamp, and so on, all follow a similar formula that Ailes learned from Nixon:
- Establishment liberals control the country, the media, even the world.
- They’re all hypocrites, sanctimonious, greedy, wrong, dangerous, etc.
- They’re actually in the minority, though.
- You are the silent majority – the honest average good guy – but you’re also the little guy.
- We, at Fox, stand up for you.
The narratives usually revolve around the traditional American way of life being under attack. That way of life – the ideal Fox News identity – is often protestant, or at least Christian, church-going, married with kids, hard working, patriotic, flag-bearing, rural, anti-globalist, working class, avoids drugs, straight, white, constitution loving, and doesn’t like immigration, socialism, big government, and so on.
Fox News defends this identity against the misguided elites. And Ailes knew that more than anything, people wanted to watch their heroes win.
He sent a daily memo at Fox pinpointing the emotional target for the day – hosts were to spread and amplify the message.
One Fox News employee said: ‘They were in search of these points of friction real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack’.
And importantly, it’s not the most pressing issue or the most notable global event that is necessarily woven into a narrative. It’s the story that, however small, aligns with the ideology. They often take a small story – usually from a right-wing blog or obscure source – twist it, and turn it into an existential threat and a story of national or international importance. If the story is picked apart by other networks, they simply quietly drop it from their coverage and move on.
Stories might have a grain of truth, or be possible, but the narrative is presented with omissions and exaggerations designed to misconceive the audience into thinking it being more of a threat to them than it is – migrant caravans heading towards the border, trans activists ‘grooming’ children, covid regulations being designed to give the elite more power.
The idea that you can take a minor story or possibility and turn it into a direct attack on the demographic you’re talking to is not new. Moral panics in the press have been around forever. The phenomenon began to be studied more seriously in the 1960s when researchers here in the UK noted how a very small story about a teenage gang had been spun into a national panic. The tabloids found that moral panics sold more newspapers. And who led the tabloid press in the UK? Murdoch.
Now let’s look at emotion.
Ailes once said at a Campaign Managers Forum in 1988: ‘Let’s face it, there are three things that the media are interested in: pictures, mistakes, and attacks. That’s the one sure way of getting coverage. You try to avoid as many mistakes as you can. You try to give them as many pictures as you can. And if you need coverage, you attack, and you will get coverage. It’s my orchestra pit theory of politics. If you have two guys on stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem’, and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?’
As humans we rely on emotion – facial expressions, gestures, tonality, the drama in spontaneity, surprise, and argument. These are at the centre of human life. When TV supplemented newspapers as the primary way we get our news, it was no surprise that this new direct visual medium would change how the news was delivered.
Smith says one executive told him: ‘Here’s what I give my producers when I hire them so they can write compelling teases and emotionally powerful openings. I call this process ‘Emotional Target Practice’—to aim your tease and sermon to where their emotional and cultural orthodoxies were and compare and contrast to how different and scary liberals and liberal orthodoxy are today’.
Executives focused on orchestrated ‘moments’ – they told presenters to ‘make it a moment’ – keep drawing out and focusing on the drama: outrage, argument, shock, attack. Find the ‘wedge’ issue. The moment is made more powerful with maximum sarcasm.
Dan Rather at CBS told Esquire that moments are when a viewer, ‘feels it, smells it, and knows it’.
Smith recalls that at Fox, moments were best when the viewer’s culture was under threat, apparently disrespected (are you calling our viewers stupid?), the Bible disparaged. He described it as ‘existential white tribal fear’, and ‘visceral resentment’.
Bringing presentation, narrative, and emotion together, Smith said the Fox News formula works something like this:
- The Fox News Alert flashes up signalling a threat, fight/flight excitement kicks in (helped by visual resonant images/graphics/sounds).
- The host scares the viewer into thinking they’re under attack
- The viewer becomes tribal, defensive, the tension is heightened.
- The enemy – an interview or clip – fights the host.
- The host steps in as hero – the enemy is stupid, selfish, out of touch.
- Everything is crafted to ensure the safety and satisfaction of a victory at the end.
Is It Fox? Or Is It a Wider Problem?
Before seeing what we can learn from all this, it’s worth pointing out that while Fox News makes the product, people still have to choose to watch, and if people are attracted to Fox, the question becomes, ‘is Fox part of a wider phenomenon?’
Trump may have been the Fox News president, but he was a reality TV star and a billionaire first, after all – it wasn’t just Fox that put him in the Oval Office.
And to consistently claim that the elites have consciously rigged the system against you and that the country is under threat, there has to be a receptive audience.
Smith points to loneliness and elderly estrangement as a factor, for example. Communities, families, and individuals left behind by a fast-moving modernity.
Journalist Peggy Noonan similarly writes, ‘We have the fierce teamism of the lonely, who find fellowship in their online fighting group and will say anything for its approval. There are the angry who find relief in politics because they can funnel their rage there, into that external thing, instead of examining closer and more uncomfortable causes. There are the people who cannot consider God and religion and have to put that energy somewhere. America isn’t making fewer of the lonely, angry and unaffiliated, it’s making more every day’.
But one poll has shown that MSNBC viewers are also old, and that Fox News’ demographics are spread across ages. And while 74% of Fox News viewers are white, 70% of MSNBC’s are too.
So it might not be true that Fox’s viewers are old, white, and isolated. The real difference in viewer demographics is in education and type of employment. Fox News viewers are more likely to have not graduated from university and work in blue collar jobs than the viewers of other news networks.
The wider phenomenon is more likely to split down the lines of what John Sperling and Suzanne Wigans call retro and metro America: ‘Retro America, the one culturally, traditionally and economically rooted in the past, and Metro America, the one culturally heterogeneous, culturally modern and economically focused on the future’.
Of course, when working class wages haven’t improved much, if at all, in fifty years, while the rich elite get richer, it’s easy to sell viewers a narrative that blames the other, the immigrant, a shadowy conspiracy of establishment figures out to make your life worse.
Conclusion: Countering Fox
So, I think there are two sides to Fox – a postmodern Fox and a hysteric Fox. The first, I think, is an inevitable development in response to the possibilities of television as a medium. The second is a reactionary, conspiratorial, truth-twisting ideology that progressives could better counter if they more willingly used Fox’s postmodern arsenal against them.
When the Selling of the President came out in the wake of Ailes’s Nixon ads, there was a debate about whether television was manipulation, an act, artificial. But the style of television – that went on to include soundbites, graphics, manufactured spontaneity and drama, the appeal to our system one emotional mind, story selection, repetition, framing, editorialising – is a part of the possibilities of this postmodern medium.
Fox fits into a narrative that favours these things over elitist, rationalist, objective journalism that can often be dry. It fits into reality TV, morning talk shows, cop shows, shocking videos, live events, humour, and personality – these are things that can be used and misused, for good and for bad.
I don’t think there’s any going back to government interference like the Fairness Doctrine. In this internet era in which a million voices can flourish, it makes no sense to rely on regulation methods of the past – people should be allowed to present their point of view.
As de Leon wrote back in 2015, the ‘post-television age is imminent, and its arrival will mean the end of television news as we have known it for the past fifty years. On the Internet, a new journalism has already begun to emerge, and over the next decade it will likely become our principal source of news’.
Much better to isolate Fox’s hysterical excesses and counter them. And that will be a challenge for anyone whose commitment to truth, fairness, and justice trumps their appetite for likes and ratings. Fox News already dominates Facebook. On the day the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election was published, Fox’s Facebook page views were double CNN’s. The New York Times’ and Washington Post’s were far behind.
And what are those hysterical excesses? I think you can see them perfectly represented in this graph. This is the point where postmodern framing meets its limit. There is something undeniably modern about a graph. You are representing data, neutrally, numerically. When it comes to data it’s unethical, misleading, just wrong and manipulative to twist the frame.
And there’s a similar critique in how Fox selects stories to cover. Any story has a range of evidence, different possibilities and interpretations, different people appraise its importance in different ways. A story can be described generously, sceptically, described in a way that covers different points of view, or can be straw-manned. Any event can be interpreted in myriad ways.
But Fox will always select the interpretation that aligns with their ideology and is the most scary interpretation, no matter how small the chances of that interpretation being correct, no matter how outlandish it is. When Obamacare was the story, the emphasis was on this hysterical fear of ‘death panels’ that could choose who would and wouldn’t receive healthcare. White farm owners in South Africa being attacked or under threat of being evicted became about white genocide. Trans rights became about grooming. Covid becomes a conspiracy to control the population.
Instead, any serious and honest person would look at any story and ask themselves – what’s the most likely interpretation to be true here?
Instead, Fox presents the story by weaponising the most emotional language, supported by the most attention-grabbing graphics, relying on the most destructive tendencies of our evolutionary inherence – our defence mechanisms, fear, survival, fight-or-flight, our tendency to focus on the threat, the danger, the negative.
Sources
Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room
Tobin Smith, Foxocracy
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David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt, The Fox Effect
Bruce Bartlett, How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/opinion/roger-ailes-richard-nixon-fox-news.html
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Nicholas Confessore, How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News – and Became Trump’s Heir
Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How A Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution
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