The News: The Fox Made Them Do It! (American Exceptionalism Edition)
Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe
There’s a style of pundit-reason that really gets under my skin. It isn’t necessarily the conclusions that it comes to that bug me, it’s the way it gets there. In this respect, I’ve really internalized the way that scholarship works its way to an argument. I may not myself always consistently hew to it, nor require everyone else to do so, but there are times where that preference drives me very strongly.
So, for example, I can’t help but read Kevin Drum arguing his way in a pundit-like fashion towards a conclusion that the singular important cause of the present political impasse in the United States is Fox News and think, “hey, there’s more to it than that, slow down and dig in deeper”. Maybe I’m more inclined to do that because Drum’s particular I’m-here-to-tell-my-progressive-friends-they-are-wrong, there’s-an-honorable-conservative-party-just-waiting-to-born-out-there thing irritates me.
This piece is no exception: it doggedly works towards its preordained conclusion (he’s argued that Fox is the font of all political evil before) largely because he more or less has to believe there’s a singular driver of contemporary American division that could be removed through some form of focused political or institutional action, thereby freeing Americans to recognize that they actually really have good feelings about one another and everything’s basically ok and we can have a liberal-center party and a conservative-center party and get back to dating each other and having a good old jointly patriotic time at the 4th of July picnics. It just feels like a variant of “the conflicts we are having here are a result of outside agitation”, a cry that goes up anywhere that political leaders and elites want to believe that there’s really nothing wrong and that the populace would be contented and at peace with one another if it weren’t for some sinister manipulation by some institution or group that has something to gain from division.
I’m not even opposed per se to an argument that puts a lot of causal weight on Fox’s influence—it’s important. The three specific things that stick in my craw about Drum’s Fox-did-it argument (or anyone else’s version of the same) are:
Drum breezes past some of the vast body of scholarly and general writing that is engaged by the same question that animates him: what’s changed in America to produce this kind of division? It feels like a pre-emptive strike for the most part: yeah, yeah, I know all that stuff so don’t write me to tell me I need to read the literature. But it’s important to the question that Drum is supposedly interested in.
It’s not just that Rush Limbaugh, Wally George, and Morton Downey Jr. preceded Fox and helped prepare an audience for Fox (and that Murdoch honed the approach that Fox took in other national media markets first, more on that in a bit), it’s that the question of how white Americans who identified with the right consumed media and related to public culture before Fox is a deep, complicated history that should weigh heavily on a claim that Fox is a breach or rupture in American public life. You could argue that all that Fox did is make the right-wing public sphere and the people consuming it visible to liberals and to amplify and expand that sphere further.
Drum throws a kind of grab-bag of evidence out to suggest that life in America is really better than ever and nobody should really feel economically desperate or socially precarious. Income inequality has risen dramatically, he concedes, but hey, “nonmanagerial wages are up by $4 since 2000”. Crime’s down, extreme poverty’s declined. He switches at that point to broad surveys of satisfaction: averaged out, folks don’t seem to think life has gotten worse. Even Blacks agree racism was worse in the 1950s! This is where the pundit style really annoys me—it mixes and matches types of evidence to get where it needs to go. Stick with the metrics for a while: is job security really the same for incoming employees as it was in 1980 in most fields or professions? Not for manufacturing labor, not for coal miners, not for professors, not for associate lawyers, etc. Are labor markets really the same as they were? Isn’t globalization something real and measurable in the impact it has had on economic life and consumer experience since 1980? Are wages generally up across the economy? Do wages and productivity have the same relationship in 2021 that they did in 1980? Do people have the same safety nets (governmental or personal) that they did in 1980? Do they feel secure for retirement? Isn’t financialization of economic and social life real and measurable? Do Americans have the same quality of health care really in 2021 as they did in 1980? And when you’re done with that, then switch over to survey data and really dig into that too. If Black Americans think things are better than 1950, do they think things are good? Etc. And then go beyond that: dig into what people think in the richer, deeper ways that thought and sentiment and interpretation really reside and express through action. Guess what? There’s scholarship for that too. You won’t find any way to read Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Land (and numerous similar works) and come out of it saying “Yup, it’s just Fox News, it would all be chill without that.”
Do Americans have a tendency towards conspiratorial thought? Here I’m just as sick as he is of the obligatory citation of Hofstader, but the idea that you measure the influence of conspiratorial visions of history by counting how many people believe in them and reassuredly saying “wow, not many, so it wouldn’t be a big deal if it wasn’t for Fox News” is like saying that if only half the population has actually seen a Star Wars movie or show, Star Wars should be unfamiliar and unimportant to the other half. Culture—and thought—circulate and influence and translate and iterate in non-linear, non-literal ways. An interpretative vision of the world that’s extremely uncommon but that happens to have a major influence over people who dominate an important institution, for example, can far more powerful than its number of adherents would suggest. Americans who self-consciously identify as libertarians, for example, aren’t that much more numerous than QAnon adherents, but they have influence over institutions where their views end up influencing all of our lives.
By treating Fox’s messaging as essentially all intention, no meaning, Drum is freed from having to interpret it directly and from having to see its audience as having meaningful agency in shaping that message both in terms of inputs and outputs. It is, he suggests, a positive feedback loop that gained its initial energy as a straightforward strategy for the retention of electoral power in an unfavorable electoral climate, so it fed white resentment at perceived losses of privilege and status, doubly so for white evangelicals, and is now on automatic pilot. There’s a lot to that analysis, but Drum invests in it so heavily precisely to indemnify Fox audiences from responsibility or intent and to have to avoid grappling with the deeper social epistemologies embedded inside the Fox world-view. If it’s just about seeking power and it’s just on automatic pilot, then white resentment isn’t something that really resides deeply in consciousness or selfhood, evangelical desires for some form of theocratic dominion are just media tropes, and almost nobody is really hoping for autocracy or fascism. That’s just where the auto-driving car is taking us, nobody actually wants that in any deep or persistent or agentive way. This is not a question that can be resolved by evidence, scholarly or otherwise, but I think anyone who is dismayed by the present situation at least has to reflectively dwell on the possibility that there are other ideas and theories of power, justice, social order, and aspiration that have deep and real residence in the hearts and minds of some people living in America, that Fox rises up out of some of those visions. Maybe some people really don’t believe in democracy, don’t believe in equity, don’t believe in freedom of thought for all, don’t believe in justice for anyone but their own in-group. It is a thought that so plainly terrifies Drum—and many others who try to operate as “enlightened centrists” that they can barely even consider its possibility.
Finally, the problem for any analysis of the contemporary political moment in the United States that stays entirely bound up in American experience—as is often the case—is that many of the basic structures of political and social division in the US of 2021 are visible across the entire planet. Rural and urban divides animate a lot of electoral politics and for that matter political struggle in countries where elections are non-existent or heavily manipulated. Alienation from governmental power and growing attachment to ethnonationalist sentiment are strong trajectories of political organizing and community outlook in fifty to sixty nations. Outlandish-seeming theories about events and actions seem to proliferate in most public cultures at the moment, and only some of them can be traced back to Murdoch-owned or Murdoch-imitating forms of formal media. Vaccine hesitancy that seems motivated by some form of shared hostility to public health, science or government policy has been a meaningful force in many countries that don’t have a malevolent press actor. There’s something bigger going on that has some very particular and very intense manifestations in American life—and arguably maybe the US should play out differently given the real pluralism built into its core idea of national identity. But that bigger picture suggests that any explanation that overweighs a single causal contributor like Fox News is hung up on one tree at the expense of a causal forest.
I was also disappointed by Drum's piece. I often like his long-form writing for Mother Jones, and that one was just boring. It felt like it was stringing together evidence without really explaining anything.
That said, if you think the question at hand is something like, "Is Fox News, by itself, responsible for ~40% of the change in how, "culture wars" take place in the US, or ~10%?" There's no definitive way to answer that question, but they way in which you answer the question will significantly impact your reading of American politics. If Fox News is responsible for ~40% of the observed change then it really does need to be singled out as specific bad actor.
Could prejudice on the left be doing anything to amplify the division?
I've got some leftish tendencies (it's complicated), but when I look at the way people on the left I know talk about anyone who's even somewhat on the right, I keep thinking that I wouldn't be likely to be receptive to anyone who hates me that much.
Yes, there was definitely something going on that so many people loved listening to Limbaugh.