The Fox News Factor is everything to Trump
by digby
President Donald Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden this week hosting Brazil’s new President and beamed from ear to ear as this fellow right-wing demagogue parroted his favorite catch phrase “fake news” in front of the White House press corps assembled before him. Trump said he was very proud to hear the president use the term and he went off on an extended rant against social media as well as certain networks, promising once again to “do something about it.”
He complained again last weekend about Saturday Night Live mocking him and suggested that the FEC and the FCC look into stopping them from doing that. His top henchman in the House of Representatives, Devin Nunes, just this week filed a 250 million dollar lawsuit against some small time Twitter parody accounts that made fun of him and Trump Junior is writing op-eds complaining about twitter and Facebook censorship.
The “fake news” charge is nothing new, of course. Trump has used the phrase even more than “no collusion” and “witch hunt” over the past two years, clearly trying to indoctrinate Americans into believing that they must believe him and his allies and no one else. He has said it outright:
“Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. … What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
The attack on social media stems from a daft conspiracy theory that says the various platforms are censoring conservatives. It’s not true. They don’t know how the internet works and they thrive on victimization and conspiracy theories so this fits in nicely with their worldview. Attacking satire and humorists for being disrespectful to people who are in power, as Trump and Nunes are doing, is a new thing but it is obviously designed to intimidate. Trump is known for doing that.
But for all the complaining about bias and fake news, there actually is a plethora of right-wing propaganda on the internet and we’ve seen some disastrous results with the burgeoning international white identity movement using it for inspiration and organization. The Christchurch killer was steeped in it and obviously drew much of his murderous ideology from participating in chatrooms and forums.
Even Fredrick Brennan, the 25 year old creator of the website 8chan (which he cut ties with in December) expressed regret saying, “it was very difficult in the days that followed to know that I had created that site.” He told the Wall Street Journal he believed it could happen again.
Still, as dangerous as these propaganda outlets are and as much necessary attention as we pay to such things as Facebook algorithms and twitter bots, they really aren’t the major propaganda tools that are responsible for the political culture that results in a president like Donald Trump. The president’s hold on his true believers, which number in the tens of millions, isn’t a consequence of his twitter feed. The medium he has truly mastered and which seems to be the one that has the greatest influence on the people who love him is good old-fashioned television.
New polling by a group called Navigator, published by the Daily Beast, shows that Fox News viewers hold very different views than everyone else. Indeed, they seem to be indoctrinated just a thoroughly as those 8chan posters. The poll surveyed more than 1,000 registered voters to determine the beliefs of people who watch Fox news and compare them to people who don’t. The portrait that emerges shows a group of people who took Donald Trump to heart when he said “stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from the fake news.”
They conclude, “there is an alternate reality in American politics, and it plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country.”
The other word for this alternate reality is propaganda. One can see this most clearly in this one finding. Among Fox viewers:
78% believe the Trump administration has accomplished more than any administration in history, compared to 17% of all others.
This is an absurd belief but it’s one that is constantly promoted by the network and the president himself in the feedback loop between the network and the White House. The Trump base believes this despite there being no evidence at all, in the real world, that it is true.
There has been some interesting reporting by Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair in recent days about changes at Fox as Lachlan Murdoch steps up to take over the empire now that the new Fox Corp. began public trading as the new parent of Fox News following the sale of the 21st Century Fox film and TV division to Disney. Apparently the younger Murdoch isn’t keen about their role as Trump TV. There are rumors that some of Trump’s most vociferous supporters might be leaving the network, Sean Hannity being the most likely.
Trump himself has been pushing hard from his twitter feed for Fox to keep the faith, obviously exhorting his loyal followers to push the network to stay on the team:
Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro. The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country. They have all out campaigns against @FoxNews hosts who are doing too well. Fox …..— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019
….must stay strong and fight back with vigor. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country. The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them. Be strong & prosper, be weak & die! Stay true….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019
At the moment Trump has a stranglehold on the Republican party. And even if Fox were to change direction there’s no way to know for sure that the Trump supporters’ alternate reality wouldn’t be maintained by conservative talk radio and online journalism. But it’s doubtful. Fox is by far the most important influence on Trump’s most loyal voters, particularly the older, white faction that makes up such an important part of the GOP base. These are not the people deeply enmeshed in the trolling, “shitposting” culture of the online right. They are just standard right-wingers who have been inculcated with non-stop Trump fanfiction for the past three years.
Reporters often say that GOP officials are stymied about how to wrestle the GOP base away from Trump, that his popularity keeps them under his thumb and unable to fight back. What profiles in courage they are. But they may be saved by the Murdochs. If they decide to sell their much smaller Fox Corp, as is widely believed to be the plan, Trump could lose his most important propaganda arm. Whether his followers can ever be deprogrammed remains to be seen but it will definitely never happen unless Fox News changes its tune.
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