Fox in the White House
by Tom Sullivan
Propaganda is good business.
Rupert Murdoch explained his vision for Fox News to Reed Hundt, Bill Clinton’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 1994. It would follow the lowbrow model of his overseas tabloids. His audience would be football fans and working-class. He would carve out a niche audience that would be his alone. Hundt told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”
In time, the Fox audience would become Donald Trump’s base. It was growth medium in a Petri dish waiting for the right spore to waft through the window.
Mayer maps out the codependent relationship between Trump and Fox. Trump needs Fox to retain control. Fox needs Trump because he keeps ratings high.
Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff as well as White House director of communications. Opinion host Sean Hannity reportedly calls Trump to trade notes most nights after his show ends. White House advisers consider him the Shadow Chief of Staff.
A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”
Mayer’s latest explores both the history and familiar controversies surrounding the cable news giant whose motto in the Trump era might be “Hair and Unbalanced.”
Blair Levin, at that time the chief of staff at the F.C.C. and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, says, “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”
Roger Ailes, the late Chairman and CEO of Fox News, developed programming “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear,” Levin argues.
Yochai Benkler of the Harvard Law School professor co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The model Murdoch envisioned is not right versus left, he tells Mayer. “It’s the right versus the rest.”
A senior fellow at Media Matters, Matt Gertz believes, “The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.”
The codependent feedback loop between the White House and Trump means they reflect each other like mirrors on opposite walls. Gaze long into Trump TV and Trump stares back. That’s just what Trump wants from “executive time.”