Fox lies because viewers want lies
Fox is infotainment for the WWE crowd. But it’s nothing new. It’s The Drunkard without throwing peanuts. David Blaine’s fans know the magic show isn’t real. It’s not clear how many WWE and Fox fans know those entertainments aren’t real. Or how many Fox anchors do, for that matter. But Dominion lawsuit filings gave us a hint this week.
The Drunkard is a morality play. Like other morality plays, temptations of the flesh, of money, reveal character. We all have our failings and know it. We watch to boo and hiss at the cartoonish bad guys. But we cheer for their redemption, like Scrooge’s every Christmas, knowing it could be us.
Something darker is afoot with Fox and Trumpism. WWE and morality plays don’t lead to violent insurrection. But as the Dominion lawsuit reveals, the lure of money was a big motive behind Fox’s lies.
Michelle Goldberg recounts in The New York Times:
As the Dominion filing lays out, there was panic at Fox News over viewer backlash to the network correctly calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Despite its accuracy, the call was viewed, internally, as a catastrophe.
“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson texted his producer. He added, “An alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.” Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”
Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back. While the Arizona call was “damaging,” Fox News C.E.O. Suzanne Scott wrote in a text to Fox executive Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, “We will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”
By feeding Fox viewers lies in the style to which they’d become accustomed.
“Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.
But like professional wrestlers, Fox celebrities know to keep up the front for the fans and not to break character in public. Again, it’s not clear how much of their ideological ranting is performance and how much is sincere. Some of each? I’d wager it’s not all kayfabe.
On that, some prelude to how American conservatism got here (from 2021):
Pretensions Republicans had to being a party fueled by patriotism and serious ideas began dissipating with the trickle-down nonsense and “starve the beast” strategy sold by President Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor and pitchman. Reagan budget director David Stockman later admitted it was all a con.
Richard Nixon’s impeachment over Watergate had been an embarrassment for the party. The greater scandal of the Nixon years — his 1968 back-channel effort to “monkey wrench” the Paris Peace talks for political advantage — would not be exposed for years. President Lyndon Johnson hid what he knew at the time but felt Nixon was guilty of treason and had “blood on his hands”. Reagan lied about tax cuts and sold weapons to a terrorist nation to fund a secret war in defiance of Congress. And got away with it.
It was a few short decades from there to Republicans committing war crimes and lying the country into war in Iraq; to nominating a know-nothing pinup for vice president; to electing a white-nationalist, narcissist man-child as Republican savior. The former pro-wrestling impresario would rub elbows with autocrats. The career con man would preen daily as half a million Americans died in a pandemic he denied while pimping a miracle cure. He would instigate an insurrection by cosplaying “patriots” bent on overturning an election and installing him as dictator.
It’s all fun and games until someone puts the flame of democracy out.
Conservatives want to take the country back to the 1950s. Just not to truth, justice, and the American way. That was always for whites then, just as “created equal” remains today more an aspiration than reality.
“The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers” has been on a “long march,” historian Rick Perlstein once wrote, toward “the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.”
Fox doesn’t know where the boundary is either. This time, it might cost them.