Outfoxed
There is a reason that Saturday Night Live spoofs Fox News mercilessly. Whether you laugh at the ironic humor written into the pseudo-hosts’ banter or at the tidal wave of retracted falsehoods in tiny writing, these sketches carry to exaggeration a phenomenon . . . that isn’t funny at all in reality.
Since the election of 2016, a new hyper-focus on “fake news” has turned our collective attention to questions of journalistic legitimacy. With the decline of readership for print newspapers and the prevalence of social media, anyone with a little web savvy can create a “news” website, and anyone with a Facebook account can inundated us with shares of “news stories” that assert all sorts of wild things. Earlier this month, an NPR story on election-related fake news led their reporters to a suburbanite in California who had manufactured a false report about an investigation of Hillary Clinton that was shared hundreds of thousands of times. NPR’s web text for that story also contained this little nugget: the man “says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.”
Interesting. Especially considering a University of Alabama study published last summer that explained how liberals are more interested than conservatives in hearing about “novel scientific data” regarding social and political issues. The UA press release explains that the lead researcher “found that conservatives were less interested in viewing empirical data than liberals in all three studies.” People who are interested in actual facts from reputable sources don’t just “take the bait.”
But lots of people do. In 2014, the Pew Research Center published its “Five Facts about Fox News,” one of which was that “the channel still drew a bigger audience than CNN, MSNBC and HLN combined.” While I appreciate a healthy, thoughtful conservatism as a political force in America, what I don’t appreciate about Fox News involves the assessments from Politifact and Politics USA that so much of the channel’s reportage is half-true or untrue. It’s not good for democracy to have the most-watched news provider on television to be portraying falsehoods as truth.
I live in the staunchly conservative Deep South, and I can’t even imagine Fox News’s market share down here. If it’s high nationally, then it’s got to be exorbitant in this region. I don’t think Deep Southern states needed any help being conservative – that trend predates Fox News by two hundred years – but their rhetoric does contribute to a more frightening trend: the willingness to believe in lies, because those lies reinforce a belief system. And what is perhaps most insidious about this methodology is the embedded notion that anyone who contradicts Fox News (with facts) is a liar— this is what causes all of us “liberals” the most chagrin: when we try to enter into a civil, fact-based discourse about the differences in our ideas, we’re the ones who are immediately mistrusted by the Fox News viewers!
As far as I’m concerned, Fox News doesn’t represent conservative thought at all. Though I only sometimes agree with them, people like George Will, Thomas Sowell, and David Brooks are actual conservative thinkers. No, the Fox News network is something else. It simply captures, broadcasts, and normalizes the blatantly irreverent attitudes of the middle- and working-class people who don’t understand politics and are angry as a result. There are millions of tax-paying, “salt of the earth” Americans who are smart, responsible, and hard-working in their daily lives, but who have little comprehension of the complexities of a federal system or of representative democracy, and are disgruntled about that— thus, we have the popularity of Fox News and the election of Donald Trump. Case and point: Fox News Insider’s Ann Coulter who after once proclaiming, “I Would Die for Trump,” recently tweeted this:
That isn’t conservatism; that’s fair-weather partisanship. Any conservative thinker would demand that Trump, once elected, adhere to conservative principles. To contrast a Fox News rabble-rouser against an actual conservative writer, last April, George Will wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post titled, “If Trump is nominated, the GOP must keep him out of the White House.” Likewise, the National Review – another publication that most Fox News viewers probably don’t read – ran an article in October titled “Crisis of the Conservative Intellectual: How populism replaced conservatism in the Republican Party.”
The kinds of flippant political antagonism that Fox News serves up do nothing more than cause many already-disgruntled voters to harden in their embitterment. And this trend against “the establishment” is little more than public resentment against the people who actually do understand American politics. And in this tepid mix, millions of voters get outfoxed. (Just read Jeet Heer’s recent piece in the The New Republic, “Trump’s Populism is a Sham.”)
Thankfully, as The Atlantic reported last August, Fox News may already be on the decline, by virtue of our current historical trajectory. Americans have been moving away from traditional media, like radio and TV, for decades now, and Fox News’s audience is largely older Americans, who still watch traditional TV and haven’t moved over to RSS feeds and news apps. So, as cable TV – an innovation of the 1980s – goes the way of the 8-track tapes and the mimeograph, so may Fox News fade into generational obscurity.
Filed under: Critical Thinking, Voting Tagged: bushwhacked, conservative, fake news, Fox News, NPR
