by Tobin Smith
FOXOCRACY
ALSO BY TOBIN SMITH
ChangeWave Investing
(New York Times Bestseller)
ChangeWave Investing 2.0
Billion Dollar Green: Profit from the ECO Revolution
Copyright © 2019 by Tobin Smith
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. The moral right of the author has been asserted.
For more information, email [email protected]
Diversion Books
A division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, suite 1004
New York, NY 10016
www.diversionbooks.com
Book design by Neuwirth & Associates
First Diversion Books edition October 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-63576-661-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-662-2
Printed in The United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available on file.
For Brenda, Leslie, Marjorie,
and John Sydney McCain II.
FOXOCRACY
CONTENTS
Note to Readers
My Important Message for Self-identified Conservative or “Deplorable” Readers
Introduction: FNC’s Rigged Opinion-Segment-Scam: Confessions of a Fox News Hit Man
1 How Did the Fox News Tribal Identity Porn Playbook Become So Powerful?
2 How I Broke the Code on the Rest of FNC’s Tribal Identity Porn Conspiracy
3 In America, Politics Are Tribal . . . Period
4 My Road to Fox News Enlightenment 2000–2018
5 Why the Emotional Impact of Fox News Is Ten Times More Powerful than Conservative Radio
6 How the Fox News “Fair and Balanced” Tribal Warfare Playbook Works
7 A Few Key Stories to Illustrate the Playbook
8 Your Eyes Do Not Lie: Fox News Is Good Old Soft-core Sex Porn Too
9 More Fox News Production Lessons Learned
10 Why Fox News’s White Tribal Superiority Shtick Is So Incredibly Powerful
11 The Incredible Power of Weaponized Visceral Threat and Fear
12 The Untold Truth about Tribal Social Identity Porn
13 The Two Superpowers of Fox News
14 How Fox News Became a Significant Branch of the 94-Million-Strong Evangelical Church
15 The Facts About Fox News TV Addiction
16 What Then Is the Only Logical Conclusion About the Power, Intent, and Pathologies of Fox News’s Tribal Warfare Playbook in 2019?
Afterword: America Is Better than This: It’s Time for the Fox News Reckoning to Fight Back Against Commercial Tribalized Partisanship
About the Author
NOTE TO READERS
I held off publishing this book out of respect for my dear friend Brenda Buttner, who was also host of my weekly weekend Fox News opinion program Bulls & Bears. Brenda passed away in early 2016 after a long and courageous fight against cancer.
Frankly, with all the firsthand observations, secrets, and stories I accumulated as a fourteen-year insider within Fox’s Sixth Avenue New York headquarters, I was also more than a little afraid of Roger Ailes, until his passing in May of 2017.
Ultimately, when I discovered how what we were doing affected the millions of folks who fell down the Foxhole, I became ashamed of what I had helped Fox News accomplish. I am hopeful that more former Fox News opinion-program producers and contributors will add their stories to the record. Already, brave reporters like my old friend and longtime FNC reporter Adam Housley, Col. Ralph Peters, and recently Carl Cameron have quit Fox News in protest.
For the good of our country and its democracy, I hope more come forward.
MY IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR SELF-IDENTIFIED CONSERVATIVE OR “DEPLORABLE” READERS
Now listen up—if you are a self-identified conservative or a proud card-carrying Republican or simply a proud Deplorable—take a deep breath—it’s going to be ok, and you are going to learn to love my book (ok, you will learn to tolerate it).
First let’s be truthful with each other: If you self-identify as a “proud Republican,” “proud conservative Evangelical,” or “proud Deplorable,” I am going to assume a loved one or friend suggested you read my book. They very well may have bought this book for you, shoved it in your hands, and said “Dad/Mom/Brother/Sister/Aunt/Uncle, you need to read this book.”
Or maybe as a committed conservative, you may have watched me on Fox News from 2000 to 2013, and maybe you’re just darn curious about what I have to offer that has never been written before by anyone about Fox News.
So listen, friend—this is important. If someone you love suggested you read this book, I must warn you that you will reflexively find these lessons and insights of mine into Fox News tribal warfare strategies and tactics to be “fake news.”
To this, all I can say to you is “buck up, buttercup—you aren’t a snowflake, are you?” I can assure you that these disclosures I am sharing are not fake news or made up—they are very, very real because as a paid Fox News contributor, part-time guest host, and full-time after work drinking buddy to the Foxeratti staff, I lived each and every one of these experiences and lessons.
INTRODUCTION
FNC’s Rigged Opinion-Segment-Scam:
Confessions of a Fox News Hit Man
America’s sense of reality is dictated by what it is trying to avoid.
—JAMES BALDWIN
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
—VOLTAIRE
To begin to tell the story of how a little right-wing “niche” cable channel became the most politically powerful force in America (and the free world), let’s first disperse with the label “cable news channel.” In the grand scheme of things, the traditional concept of a conservative cable news channel is now mostly irrelevant.
Let me give you a little play-by-play on the recent Mueller Report to illustrate my point. As we all now know all too well these days, creating and controlling the first twenty-four-hour narrative of any national political story is now decidedly in the hands of a certain right-wing $3 billion a year for-profit public company. But the real yet almost unimaginable power of Fox News is how it operates as an entire media and non-secular ecosystem that I have come to describe as the American Foxocracy.
Why? Because with Fox News’s now one hundred million-plus monthly audience reach for its emotionally overpowering content, the contest to be the first to own the Mueller story was never in doubt. More importantly, by the time Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference landed on Attorney General Barr’s desk, the battle to spin it had already been won.
My point here is that narrative spin contest was not “won” within the confines of what many people still see as a cable news channel.
It is very true that in today’s digital device ecosphere, the battle to own the dominant twenty-four-hour news cycle narrative is professional life and death for digital media publishers. Whatever media complex gets the most views, clicks, likes, shares, and streams wins the day (and the enormous ad dollars). For Fox News and its phalanx of White House insiders, Trumpism sycophants, and highly paid spin-doctor contributors like me all spinning the same mutually agreed upon fifth-grade language catchphrase twenty million times—“No collusion, no obstruction, complete exoneration.”—the game to own the political narrative was over after just a few hours.
In reality, it was over before the attorney general started to speak.
Why? Because with the twenty tim
es larger audience reach on Facebook and YouTube than the other competitors fighting to win the narrative, there was only going to be one clear winner: Fox News. What almost all the media still misses is the crucial lynchpin, the enormous political and cultural power I’ve dubbed the Foxocracy. With the introduction in 2008 of what we now call “digital surveillance capitalism,” aka Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter social media platforms, the audience reach and daily audience engagement time of FNC’s white tribal identity content exploded thirty times bigger than FNC’s primordial three million prime-time cable-only audience pre-2008.
Fox News provides its content consumers with what they absolutely value more than almost life itself: the most emotionally engaging and satisfying content on the planet—with the exception of kitty and puppy videos—for free.
Social media platforms know what clicks/shares/comments best because every second of every day they digitally surveil their audience to measure and identify the most emotionally engaging content on their digital platform. According to the social media traffic and engagement ratings/metrics, the “most engageable content on social media” is Fox News’s material. They have algorithmically targeted the white folks aged fifty years and older who have shown themselves to be the most emotionally vulnerable and likely to engage with what I call Fox’s white tribal activation content.
And guess what? Starting in 2012, fifty-plus-year-old social media users became the largest and most active segment of Facebook’s 240 million American users.
Coincidence?
Hardly.
The network’s favorable interpretation of the Mueller Report—that it exonerated the president—furiously vacuumed up reactions, comments, and shares on social media that exceeded the night’s cable ratings by incredible magnitudes. In fact, Fox News’s main Facebook page nearly doubled CNN’s in total engagements the day the Report dropped according to the analytics firm CrowdTangle. The New York Times and the Washington Post each mustered just one-sixth the number of Facebook interactions. MSNBC, Fox News’s liberal foil, drew just one-tenth.
Like I told ya—when it comes to the raw power of spinning and propagating any national political narrative in America, today there is no more lethal force in the free world than the American Foxocracy. It’s not a race, it’s a digital slaughter.
And what no one until now has reported in-depth is the extensive and heartbreaking collateral damage to American families, our democracy, and the way our voting citizen sees and votes regarding America’s future.
How did this all really happen? How did a tiny niche cable channel become the most powerful voter persuasion weapon known to the free world? How did a large part of America become the American Foxocracy?
Read on.
You may think you already understand Fox News’s opinion programming; that it is nothing more than highly choreographed and rigged WWE-like performance art carefully designed to deliver a confirmation bias rich 24/7 tribal-validation feedback loop to its core tribal partisan base/addicts. But I am going to help you really understand by opening the Fox News opinion-program producer’s kimono and exposing the fixed-outcome strategy, tactics, and production process that I participated in during most of my fourteen years at Fox News.
Yes, like pro wrestling, Fox News has season-long narratives that require the good-guy hero protagonists (“the baby faces”) to always win and the bad-guy antagonists (“the heels”) to lose. The difference is the WWE audience knows the matches are rigged; in wrestling, the fans’ suspension of disbelief is called kayfabe. (The concept of kayfabe offers a fascinating insight into the psychology of the Fox News addict as well, which I’ll get deeper into later in the book.)
And just like a WWE wrestling match, FNC producers create and fix the outcome of their white tribal identity segments from back to front. They start by defining the viewers’ accepted tribal partisan ideology. Then they script and choreograph the order of the talking head opinion sequence to reach the ultimate conclusion. And just like a WWE or reality show producer, Fox News producers and hosts are trained to script and choreograph a carefully orchestrated set of what TV producers and executives like to call “moments.”
If you were listening inside a Fox News production studio or editing room, or you heard what I heard in my ear from a producer before a show I hosted, you always heard directions like “make it a moment” or “make it land.” This instruction refers to any of the important moments in the segment’s story line—an individual sentence, a sudden realization, or the split-second look before it looks like a physical fight might break out.
But invariably at Fox News the term “moment” means the same thing: make sure you hit the audience’s most powerful emotional triggers in a very precise sequence—and then squeeze out every possible ounce of drama or outrage possible before the conservative hit man drops the liberal opponent like an anvil to end the segment in a righteous victory for the Foxocracy.
After you’re done reading, when you see a Fox News opinion program, you will understand and recognize this scripted eight-point emotional moment journey from fear to victory in a different light. You will understand the careful choreography and addictive flow and rhythm of white tribal identity porn:
The viewer sees and/or hears the “Fox News Alert” or cold-open tribal heresy or threat (even though the opinion show is not a news program at all). The amygdala (your brain’s danger and risk assessment system) subconsciously decides that this is a fight-or-flight event and provides the viewer an adrenaline, cortisol, and epinephrine boost.
The Fox host then purposely scares the crap out of or pisses off the viewer with sound-on-tape B-roll (known as a “SOT” in TV lingo) of a liberal politician/celebrity/talking head impugning, insulting, or mocking the viewer’s right-wing tribal belief system/orthodoxy.
The viewer naturally enters active tribal mode, with the tribal brain kicking in. The viewer’s risk-assessing amygdala silently shouts, “Say it again, and I’ll punch you out!”
The tribal enemy (aka libtard) stands his/her ground, repeating the pronouncement and tribal heresy with more authority.
The right-wing host and paid contributor heroes step in, coming to the defense of the right-wing tribe, rhetorically punching the tribal enemy in the nose for the viewer.
Boom! The fight-or-flight adrenaline rush the viewer got from the opening tribal threat is replaced with a nice big dose of the brain chemical dopamine.
The dopamine sets the viewer into anticipation of another tribal victory.
With the thrill of victory triggered by the validation of tribal orthodoxy and feelings of continued safety, the viewer’s brain now releases the good stuff—serotonin, the opiate-like chemical.
Repeat, repeat, and repeat. Imagine what happens to a sixty-eight-year-old viewer going through this highly choreographed fear-to-victory roller coaster thousands and thousands of times. It reminds me of that old Bill Withers song, “If it feels this good being used, you can keep using me until you use me up!”
ONE OF A THOUSAND EXAMPLES OF THE BALL GAME AND THE POV SHUFFLE
To orchestrate and guarantee the right-wing partisan viewer’s happy dance, everything started with CEO Roger Ailes’s talking points Memo. Consider the memo the producer’s emotional trigger targets of the day. Here’s an example: Since my show, Bulls & Bears, was, in theory, a business-and-markets show, we had a recurring theme of “hidden inflation” that was “destroying household budgets” and of “the real unemployment rates were fake” and being manipulated by the Obama administration. This conspiracy perpetrated a lie on the American people blah blah blah. (Not coincidentally, this was a favorite Trump conspiracy talking point as well.)
Bear in mind, I ran (and still run) an economic and equities research shop that used government data and our proprietary economic data to successfully forecast recessions and bear stock markets (which we knock-on-wood have done since 1994).
I follow the stats from the Bureau of Labor and from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) v
ery carefully. My firm (like virtually every other analyst or firm except for right-wing partisans) also uses inflation data without food or energy prices, for one reason: Food and energy prices swing wildly based on weather and commodity feed-related costs. My point here is that if you forecast inflation based on those non-economy-related variables, you make lousy trend forecasts and suffer from “garbage-in, garbage-out” syndrome.
But at Fox News our favorite inflammatory angle was attacking the Consumer Price Index inflation rate because it excluded food and energy prices. Roger deemed that the CPI was an underhanded manipulation because of course households bought food and used energy every week. At least once a month after 2009, Bulls & Bears would have a segment about the “fake inflation numbers.”
So every friggin‘ month, I would get this call or sit-down from my segment producer Jen: “Toby, I need you to take the point on the ‘fake inflation numbers.’ First I need you not to say your same old shit of ‘no one gauges the real inflation rates by blah blah blah.’ Our audience shops at the market, and when bread prices or vegetables or beef prices are higher this week than last week, that is what inflation is to them. When the price of gasoline is higher this week than last week, that is inflation to them, so I need you to play ball with me on this one; we have no one else from our right-wing guests or contributors who will make this case!”
I would say, “Gee, I wonder why? Why is this so important?” even though I knew by this time she had no control over the segment selections because they all came from the second floor and Roger’s daily Talking Points Memo.
“Jesus, Toby, just give me what I need. We have an hour to go to the taping. Here are the talking points I need you to make for me!” I knew she was under a microscope to make sure we held and built our audience from the previous show. And, again, at this point I knew our show was like a right-wing ideological confirmation bias Pez dispenser—there were no objective facts; only the subjective beliefs and feelings of our audience mattered.