Is Fox News really the reason we're all so angry about politics these days? You can read my case for the prosecution here, and then you can read a critique from Dan Drezner here. Dan makes some good points that others have also made, which prompts me to make two points of my own in response.
First, and most obviously, I agree that there are no monocausal explanations for things like this. In particular, I give Newt Gingrich credit for being the godfather of American outrage politics in the early '90s. However, although he may have been first, he sputtered and imploded pretty quickly. It was Fox News that picked up the ball and turned it into a relentless 24/7 money spigot starting around 2000. Similarly, social media has probably made things worse over the past few years—though by less than many people think—but the real rise of outrage politics happened between roughly 2000 and 2015. Clearly social media played no role during that period.
More generally, there were lots of things going on over the past 20 years that played a plausible role in our broken politics. I won't even try to list them all. However, I'm aware of most of them and agree about their odiousness. I just don't think they're the major actors in fomenting political rage over the past couple of decades.
This leads into my second point. Dan says that "elite polarization" far predates the year 2000, and he's right. The wellspring of modern polarization was the counterculture movement of the '60s, with its liberal emphasis on civil rights, gay rights, and feminism. The subsequent switch of Northeast liberal Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats to the opposite party played out over the '70s and '80s and produced the ideologically polarized parties we have today. Robert Bartley played an underappreciated role by turning the Wall Street Journal editorial page—with its highly influential readership—into a take-no-prisoners conservative juggernaut beginning around 1978. Finally, in the early '90s, conservative actors like Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and Newt Gingrich brought everything together in the sweep of the 1994 election by a cadre of ultra-conservative true believers. From that point on, Republican elites were fully bought into the radicalization of their party. A decade or so later Democrats began to follow suit, though with different factions playing the radicalization role.
This is all a longwinded way of saying that I agree with Dan on this point. But polarization is not what I care about. I care about explaining anger and rage—and while polarization may help that along, it's neither necessary nor sufficient.
To build up rage you need to deliberately and relentlessly feed it. That's what Fox News does, and it's never relied especially heavily on polarization. Rather, it relies on a single-minded dedication to finding and exaggerating things about liberals that are most likely to induce fear and fury in its viewership. That's the battle plan Roger Ailes put in place and that Rupert Murdoch funded: not just conservative advocacy per se, but making liberals into objects of rage. This is the machine primarily responsible for the destruction of American politics over the past couple of decades. Newt Gingrich may have created the blueprint, but it's Fox News that engineered and won the insurgency Gingrich only dreamed of.
So is there anything we can do about Fox News? I think there is, though I suspect that even hardnosed liberals may quail at its incivility. But that's a subject for another post.
Audit them. Audit Fox News thoroughly. Many tax filers cheat, or “cut corners,” or otherwise fail to fully comply on purpose or inadvertently with the entire tax code. And the odds of filing an inaccurate or fraudulent tax return goes up as that tax return gets more complicated, as operating a multinational corporation inevitably is.
Also double check their compliance with labor laws: federal, state and local. Many corporations run afoul of labor laws, either on purpose or inadvertently. And throw the book at them when you find anything wrong.
Basically, investigate the crap out of them to ensure they’re doing everything by the book… you know, like conservatives do to drive abortion clinics out of business now.
...finding and exaggerating things about liberals that are most likely to induce fear and fury in its viewership.
AND, let us not forget, DISTRACT its viewers from the agenda of those whom Fox supports -- corporations and very wealthy individuals, and the Republican party that is their political servant -- which agenda is generally very unpopular and therefore needs to be kept in the shadows.
This is why it's not JUST Fox. They have the willing and vocal support of the entire Republican party, both the Establishment wing who likewise represent the wealthy, and the Crazy wing for whom it's an echo chamber. The Republican party is not just complicit; they're active co-conspirators.
And I guess I have to point out, they were plowing fertile ground. Paranoia, magical thinking and murderous tribalism have been a staple on the Right for a long time -- especially among evangelicals, whose political rise parallels that of Fox -- and Fox's viewership has long skewed toward the comfortable and cranky, who at present are an unusually large portion of the population. Fox is a feedback mechanism and an amplifier, and there's no question that reducing their influence would reduce the whole destructive cycle substantially, but they're not the original source of the problem, and even destroying them utterly wouldn't make it go away.
The things some people will do just to get a frickin' tax cut.
Our wealthiest are no different than India's or The Philippines's or Russia's, with their gated mansions & heliport for quick escape if/when the pariah caste breaches the walls.
They think they can escape the consequence of their polarizing actions.
This is also why I wish Modi had joined Bolsanaro, BoJo, & El Jefe in getting COVID.
Kevin has a real weakness for "theories of everything." First, his lead hypothesis and now this. I believe that Kevin is largely right about lead, but inevitably he takes it too far, such as the time he argued that political violence in the Middle East will drop in the next ten years because the use of lead gasoline in the Middle East is falling.
Kevin writes:
"Similarly, social media has probably made things worse over the past few years—though by less than many people think—but the real rise of outrage politics happened between roughly 2000 and 2015. Clearly social media played no role "during that period."
Perhaps, if you narrowly define social media as Twitter, Facebook and their copycats. I consider internet message boards, and blogs with comment sections, like this one, to be social media. Internet message boards go back to the dial-up days. The far-right site FreeRepublic goes back to the mid-90s and it was a hotbed of militia instigators and John Birch conspiracy nuts.
Finally, there is another vector of rightwing anger and rage that draws surprisingly little attention: white evangelical churches. Most mainstream media largely ignores them. In the '90s, white evangelical churches were hotbeds of the militant anti-abortion movement and lately QAnon conspiracy theories and pro-Trump election fraud conspiracy theories have been circulating in them. Fox News may amplify what people are hearing in the pews of those churches but the real-world social networks that exist in those churches are far more effective at spreading conspiracy theories and the anger that comes with them.
Word-of-mouth is a very important mechanism for spreading bias and misinformation that is often neglected in discussions. The church culture among evangelicals and Southerners in general is an important way of getting people together to exchange and reinforce partisan biases. People don't just get their ideas from preachers, they get them from opinion leaders among congregations. For most people, uniformity of thought among groups like church congregations is much more important than reaching rational conclusions based on evidence. Religion would not exist if it were not for this.
There's a reason it was called ICQ.
Has Kevin made up his mind that it's Fox which is responsible for the culture war, or will we get another post blaming liberals?
Fox has been an important tool of Republicans, but racist resentment is fundamental among the white electorate - certainly not something that Fox has instilled among its viewers. The rise of the Tea Party and the enthusiasm for Trump caught most Republican pols and even Fox by surprise. Fox opposed Trump at first. Again, exploiting racism is something that Republicans have relied on for well over 50 years. Republicans did not oppose immigration systematically, because employers rely on it for cheap labor. Xenophobia intensified and was exploited by Trump without much influence from Fox.
The state of the media in the Fairness Doctrine era was gone before Fox - the Reagan administration eliminated it in 1987. The rise of propagandistic rightist media after that was inevitable and not confined to Fox. The spread of cable also played a role. If Fox is suppressed other outlets will take its place.
Talk radio plays a bigger role in this than most liberals seem to think. Viewers of Fox are at least aware that there are other sources of news, even if they don't trust them. But I had a job that required me to spend 10 hours or so one day a week driving a car. I listened to talk radio to pass the time. Once NPR's Morning Edition was over, I literally could not hear another liberal opinion the entire day, unless it was held up for ridicule. I used to come home and turn on MSNBC, just to balance the noise in my head. People who listen to talk radio all day long every day may not even realize there is another point of view.
I am pretty sure that NPR has liberal opinions all day long.
Yeah, all the contractors I know listen in on NPR every chance they get.
LOL.
I am pretty sure that you are wrong, unless you consider classical music and jazz to be liberal. The contrast between the way Hannity or Limbaugh covered the news and NPR was enormous. Whatever liberal tendencies NPR may have, it always presented opposing points of view and treated those who expressed the opinions with respect. On a scale of 1 to 10, with one as the extreme left and 10 as the extreme right, NPR may have been a 4. Talk radio was a steady 9, with gusts up to 11.
I agree. Many people don't realize the extent to which a lot of middle and lower middle class working people spend listening to talk radio in their vehicles on their way from, to, and at work Monday through Friday.
I had a job (in the 90’s ) that got me behind the wheel a lot, and I agree. I’d add one thing- Limbaugh worked very systematically to change the emotional and literal meanings of words. Trump was the apotheosis of the RW TR of the 90’s. He’s been sputtering for a while, seduced I think by the snarl of the post Rush years. What the right has yet to appreciate is that Trump has touched everything they are, and everything that Trump touches gets f****d. Of course he has touched the whole country, and maybe the world, so…..
Talk radio plays a bigger role in this than most liberals seem to think.
Kevin's specifically talking about our rage-infused politics, and the time line doesn't work with right wing talk radio, which has been around since at least the mid/late 80s (Limbaugh had huge ratings by the early 90s). If Talk Radio were a major culprit in fomenting political rage in America, we should see more evidence of this in the 90s, but, according the date Kevin has provided, the rage spiked during the early 90s recession, but then returned to normal levels as the economy boomed.
This has not been the pattern since the year 2000.
(Also, as Kevin points out in another piece, it's likely Fox News is better at generating rage because a lot of people apparently think it's actually real news, rather than infotainment/agitprop -- because Murdoch insists on maintaining that charade. But there was an obvious clownish quality to Limbaugh's schtick that rendered it more obviously entertainment.)
Fair enough, but these things don't happen overnight. It's hour after hour, day after day, year after year that eventually adds up. Plus, Limbaugh ultimately gave rise to even worse yakkers until talk radio became a 24-7 rage fest. When I used to ask my conservative friends to respond to something Rush said, they typically replied that they didn't listen to him or that they considered him just an entertainer. After a few years, that defense quit working.
The conflict between the pro-slavery, racist factions in the US (mainly the South) was not invented by Fox - it antedates the nation. The highly political evangelical religious movement was not invented by Fox either. Fox did not invent the Republican party, which made the deliberate decision in the 60's to exploit racism to get support for their plutocratic economic policies. Fox is part of this exploitation, but it is nonsense to blame it for the the current polarization. How could there not be polarization when it is the main electoral strategy of one party?
The increasing popularity of Fox is result of the pre-existing racist and religious bias and Republicans' determination to exploit it, not the other way around. Kevin sometimes has difficulty distinguishing cause from effect.
Fox is part of this exploitation, but it is nonsense to blame it for the the current polarization
He's not blaming it for "polarization." He's blaming it for the spike in political rage over the last two decades. Kevin goes over this very point in today's post. Parties can be quite diametrically opposed in ideological terms (look at the election of, say, 1964, or 1980) without their partisans going berserk.
FNC is the consequential manifestation of the elimination of the FCC Fairness Doctrine, which is the result of the conservative war to gain and solidify political power.
The Fairness Doctrine relied on the government's authority to regulate use of the public airwaves. That was the only thing that let it pass constitutional muster (it would otherwise be a clear violation of the First Amendment). Fox is a cable network and does not use the airwaves, making it immune to the FD or anything like it.
Resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine *could* put an end to right-wing talk radio. But it cannot put an end to Fox.
Fox News in fact holds several FCC licenses, specifically for TV stations in key markets on the east coast, but also for radio stations. Furthermore, in every market where there is a Fox franchisee, there are FCC licenses at stake.
Even then, under 47 USC §316, the FCC has the power to regulate licenses (for the use or operation of apparatus for transmission of energy, or communications, or signals by radio), which, if interpreted under a modern framework, would allow the FCC to regulate cable. See, cable is not just a cable; it is the wireless transmission to a network of stations which are then fed to homes via a hardwired cable.
It's interesting that, according to the first chart, Fox viewership starts trending downward during Obama's presidency. I would never have guessed that.
The advent of cord-cutting? That was becoming a lot more feasible for people just as the Great Recession was arriving to crunch their budgets.
The thing that Trump brought to the table on this, I think, is shamelessness and that no matter what you said or did it was ok. Gingrich imploded because he did stupid/outrageous things that shamed his party. The difference with Trump is that no matter how stupid he is and how outrageous he acts, it is ok. If he lied about something that there was absolute proof he was lying about his version was accepted. I thought that when he said of McCain “I like heroes that don’t get captured” that Trump was toast. But he was right. He could shoot someone without consequence.
I was wrong in thinking that that was unique to Trump. It’s not, as has been shown over and over by the likes of Gaetz and Jim Jordan. And the entire Republican Party acting like January 6th never happened.
Trump showed the GOP that they can get away with much than they ever dreamed.
Before Trump, Republicans talked in coded language and used dog whistles because they feared that explicit expressions of bigotry would cost them more votes than they'd gain. Trump came along and tossed out the dog whistle in favor of a megaphone, and while I do believe that Trump did cost the GOP some votes (particularly in the suburbs) the losses were nowhere a big as Republicans had feared and Trump fired up the Republican base. Now that Republicans have crossed the threshold, there's no going back.
A minor quibble is that equating liberal Republicans of the Northeast with Dixiecrats as equivalent in ideological polarization is simply wrong. The liberal Republicans were just nice guys, while the Dixiecrats were poison shit.
I would say elite polarization of wingnuts starts a generation earlier, with reaction to the New Deal, which proved to everyone, with complete certainty, that a government focused on improving the general well-being could work really well when staffed with people who actually want to make it work. By the time WWII ended wealthy conservatives were desperate to destroy this by any means they could contrive and for that the USSR seemed the gift they couldn't have dreamed of, but then they discovered that anti-communism wasn't nearly so motivating in many quarters as outright racism. It was then that opposition to racism among the powerless creates opposition to the opposition among the almost as powerless, where the motive becomes the idea that you are powerful if you have a helpless victim you can 'legitimately', in some sense, abuse.
It was the cultivation of that that becomes elite polarization of wingnuts, and any motive to focus the negativty is a conservative virtue.
Isn't the problem with Fox New how you fight it, with however much incivility it would take, without giving it more attention than it already commands? The other quagmire in the battle against Fox News is that probably the only thing that could defeat it is actual political power in opposition. The only opponent that could bring that power to bear is the Democratic Party, but they've demonstrated repeatedly since Carter or Clinton at least that they don't have the political power required. Or at any rate when they get it they clearly don't know how to use it.
Fox ends with a bang or a whimper? Or maybe a yawn, which would be boring, but more effective. Imagine Hannity bored with himself! (He may be already, but he might need the money to disappear in the style to which he has become accustomed.)
I have been a big proponent of blaming all kinds of political ills on Fox News for a long time. So I'm only too happy to pie on to Kevin's screed. But I think Kevin overlooks one of the main reasons FN has been so pernicious: Fox's basic, jighly effective marketing strategy of discrediting mainstream news media as "liberal." If you take away facts - researched and verified information about what's going on - you leave a viewership that doesn't trust anyone - but you. Which is the point. In that way, Fox can not only amp up rage, they negate reason. It's the first thing every autocratic system does: shut down an independent press. Only Fox's innovation was simply to take away the credibility of the honest media against which it competes. That's the power they've cultivated with stunning success, and the Right has latched onto that and rode it to victory virtually everywhere outside of major metropolitan areas.
I think the essential thing was the ability for RWNJs to have their own media sources which didn’t rely on mainstream approval.
So Rush and the conservative talk radio thing would be step one, Drudge was clearly doing this in terms of what he promoted leaking into the mainstream news coverage and that was all pre-Fox News blowing up and pre-social media, he’s probably the next link in the chain. Then Fox News, then social media, each one stepping up the crazy from the previous step as the amount of regulation on what can be said on their chosen platform drops.
Essentially the ability to detach themselves from any type of oversight that would force RWNJs to even pretend to be based in reality is what sent us to where we are today.
Anger.
Another thing everyone ignores is the privileging of anger management disorder in the US, and in US popular culture. People like Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson and John Belushi made their entire careers out of playing jackasses who can barely control themselves. This is portrayed as 'edgy', or clever, in fact as wit, and social conservatives take it completely literally to the extent that almost any other emotion they may have is secondary to their anger management disorder.
Which Gibson novel had a character within that had ‘poor impulse control’ tattooed on his forehead?
Pod Save America talked about your article in MJ.
And, just in case anyone has any doubts about what Fox "News" actually supports, here's Tucker Carlson going abroad to prop up Fascism:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tucker-carlson-orban-hungary-far-right_n_6108bbd1e4b038cedb36fa71
I'm mad as hell at the Democrats and I don't watch Fox News. If we blame everything on Fox News, then we don't need to look at our own inadequacies, right?
Why aren't the Democrats demanding an investigation of the origins of COVID? And even if there is no there there, how did Fauci get away with going against Congress and diverting money to gain of function research? Yes, I know he says it's not "gain of function research", by using some definition that only he knows.
And why don't the Democrats stand up to their crazies instead of consistently conceding. For instance, loyalty oaths dressed up as diversity agreements in order to teach in schools. People ARE losing jobs because they are not toeing the line.
And why can't Democrats see what a disaster Kamala Harris is. Is it just because she's a woman of color that makes her immune? Check out the video of her defending arresting parents of truants on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDLANlZEicg .
And how about the Democrats cozying up to big finance. Why didn't heads roll for the financial crisis of 2009 instead of being rewarded?
And how many Democrats would agree that anyone who voted for Donald Trump is despicable? And a racist?
Look, I can make just a long list of things I don't like about the Republicans, and I didn't vote for Trump, but the Democrats have got to stop thinking they are holier than thou if they want to win people over.
"So is there anything we can do about Fox News? I think there is, though I suspect that even hardnosed liberals may quail at its incivility. "
Direct action?
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Here's what I do not understand: If Fox has a Primetime viewership of under 3 million, then how can it possibly be true that 30-40% of Republicans are "regular Fox viewers." That math makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Either people are lying about being regular viewers, of the measure of primetime viewership is missing a zero. So there's no way it could possibly be the later given the amount of money involved, it has to be the former. And if it is the former, then Fox News' reach into the GOP is far FAR smaller then everyone assumes.
Limbaugh used to get 20+ million listeners a week bask when there were about 250 million people in the United States. Let's be generous and call that 1 in 10 Americans. If Fox News now only gets 2.5 million viewers per week and there are now 330+ million people, that's fewer than 1 in 100 Americans, an order of magnitude less than Rush used to get.
But let's be REALLY generous and say that every night, an entirely different set of people watch Fox News. If that's true I question its power for a new reason, but set that aside for now. Under this assumption, that would give you a total primetime audience per week of something like 17.5 million Americans. That's a) smaller than Rush at his peak, and b) still only about 5% of all Americans given population growth.
Not only is there no way to get to 30-40% of all Republicans "regularly" watching Fox News with that number, there's also no way Fox News can possibly be responsible for such a massive change. Not unless its entirely and only about elite polarization AND all Republican elites regularly watch Fox News. And yes, you might be able to build that case, but it's a much more narrow path to national effects under that hypothesis.
And since all of the above is exactly the kind of thing Kevin tends to pick up on, I....feel like I am taking crazy pills here!!!
So many typos. lol. Does this thing not have an edit button for comments?