Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare

by Tobin Smith

  The liberal crash dummy prop the segment producer booked to be sacrificed on the right-wing economic altar would open the segment with something like, “Look—no one sophisticated in economics measures US inflation rates including the monthly price swings in gasoline/oil or commodities. What matters to the stock market is the inflation trend, and that trend is blah blah.”

  Then, for the last shot at the liberal heretic, the host would say, “Okay, Toby, what say you?” and I would hit the liberal with my carefully constructed, scripted, and rehearsed rhetorical kill shot. The performance was to mix sarcasm and snark for the enemy liberal with a smile to support the mindset of the viewer at home. By this time, I had mastered the machine gun + machete liberal disembowelment strike and could do it in my sleep.

  For this segment, the kill shot that most importantly the producer did not share with the poor liberal victim-of-the-day went like this:

  “Well first, thanks for calling our viewers at home unsophisticated. I’m sure they appreciate that. Second, here is what I know and, more importantly, what our viewers know: Forget the CPI numbers. They have so many seasonal smoothing computations, they have not been correct for years.” (Now I’m gathering steam.) “But more important, our viewers, unlike you, go to the grocery store and don’t have their dinner out at Le Cirque or delivered; they fill up their own vehicles with gas and don’t just step into a town car like you do. What they see are prices going up and their income going down under Obamanomics. They see rents going up. They see medical costs in a never ending upward spiral.”

  I’m just getting warmed up and the tribal right-wingers from Small Town USA are already getting their lovely dopamine hits as they anticipate the final death blow against their hated liberal big-city blowhard.

  “They also see the big banks and insurance companies bailed out. They see Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailed out on hundreds of billions of dollars in upside-down mortgages while they are losing jobs and losing their homes. It takes a lot for you to sit here and tell our viewers they are unsophisticated boobs. They look plenty sophisticated from where I sit!”

  The host would say, “And that’s the last word. Coming up: Why are home prices going up in DC and down everywhere else? We’ll report; you decide!”

  BOOM, shakalaka! Drop the mike.

  The liberal pundit didn’t know what had hit her because no one had given her that POV (point of view comments from the panel members are traditionally shared by the segment producer with all the panel members left and right) from me before the show—which made the scam work like buttah for most of my fourteen years and especially after our show went 100 percent tribal porn programming after the 2008 election.

  The protocol for political talk TV is to share the POVs of the segment so people arrive with different points to make. I hardly ever used my stated POV because the producer almost always gave me the script she wanted performed—that is why some of the crew came to call me “The Hitman.” And the token liberal would not complain (much) about being blindsided because all they really care about is face time on Fox News defending their tribal belief system and building their tribal identity brand.

  At home, the right-wing tribal partisan viewer cheered, “Yeah, baby! Way to go, Toby; screw that know-it-all liberal socialist!” and as we went to break, I heard in my ear from the segment producer, “Way to go, Tobe. Udaman!”

  At Del Frisco’s after the show, I would get the real story from the Gen-X aged producer: “Dude, that inflation shizzle was dope. You get it now. Every segment has a beginning, middle, and end—but it’s the end that keeps the viewer coming back to the next segment. I don’t choose the segments; I produce what I’m told to produce most of the time. You made me look good tonight; thanks!”

  That segment happened a thousand times in my experience at Fox News. It was like the movie Groundhog Day—always the same.

  THE PRODUCER’S MEMO: THIS IS WHAT THE POV SHUFFLE LOOKS LIKE ON PAPER

  Below is an actual email from the producer of this fixed debate ball game that we right-wingers got but the left-wingers most certainly did not. This particular “rundown” in TV speak is from right after the 2009 financial meltdown, but it could have been from any week. Understand that this is representative evidence of how the Fox News producers would stack the deck against the liberal pundit before the show ever started.

  And don’t forget that, as always, the “left-winger” guest was a no-name non-threatening “DemoPublican” already way out of his/her league on the issue in the first place; in fourteen years I never participated in an “opinion debate” segment that in any way was produced to be fair or in any way balanced.

  At Fox News, the rule was and still is that the liberal panelists were always two strikes down before they got to the plate. That was just one part of the Fox News audience grift strategy—there’s a lot more to come, trust me.

  A BLOCK: PRES OBAMA DECLARING THE MASSIVE FINANCIAL OVERHAUL MEANS NO MORE TAXPAYER-FUNDED BANK BAILOUTS

  New financial reform law, new promise. The president saying today, “Because of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes. There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”

  The same day, a new report out saying taxpayers could be on the hook for another $700B because of Fannie and Freddie. So is the president right . . . is this the end of taxpayer funded bailouts?

  ((Focus on how taxpayer funded bailouts are NOT over. This is NOT a Freddie, Fannie or housing debate—don’t go there!))

  Please come with other examples that prove the president’s promise wrong.

  Taxpayer Tab for Fannie, Freddie, Other Housing Bulges by $700 Billion

  http://www.moneynews.com/Headline/Taxpayer-Tab-Fannie-Freddie-700-Billion/2010/07/21/id/365249

  U.S. bailout watchdogs slam Obama housing programs

  http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2116858520100721

  Next after Obama signing of financial reform bill: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

  http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/0721/Next-after-Obama-signing-of-financial-reform-bill-Fannie-Mae-Freddie-Mac

  About 40 percent leave federal mortgage aid program

  http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2010-07-20-mortgage-aid_N.htm

  B BLOCK: HOUSE SPEAKER PELOSI SAYS PAYING FOR JOBLESS BENEFITS WOULD BLUNT JOB CREATION

  On Tuesday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “People who get unemployment insurance need it, they spend the money immediately, injects demand into economy and creates jobs. That stimulus effect is completely blunted if you therefore say ‘we’re going to have to pay for it.’”

  ((Please keep your focus on how or why the “stimulus effect” is blunted if unemployment benefits are paid for.))

  With Unemployment Extension Set to Pass, Republicans Do the Unthinkable and Stall

  http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5608860/with_unemployment_extension_set_to.html

  Unemployment Extension In Agonizing Endgame Slog: When Will The Checks Go Out?

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/21/unemployment-extension-endgame_n_654859.html

  CBO: Unemployment benefits might, or might not, stimulate economy

  http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/07/cbo_unemployment_benefits_migh.html

  C BLOCK: 75% OF YOUNG AMERICANS THINK THEY WON’T SEE ONE PENNY FROM SOCIAL SECURITY

  New poll out this week saying three-fourths of those aged between 18 to 34 don’t expect to get a Social Security check when they retire.

  Is this actually great news for America? Focus on how Social Security is going broke because of Obama’s runaway spending

  Poll: Faith in Social Security system tanking

  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-07-20-1Asocialsecurity20_ST_N.htm

  The Kids Who Could Save Social Security

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-schurenberg/the-kids-who-could-save-s_b_654082.html

  D BLOCK: PREDICTION
S

  If you need any ideas shoot me an email or give me a call.

  THE GAME-SHOW FIXING OF THE 1950S VS. FOX NEWS OPINION-PROGRAM FIXING

  The motive behind fixing a Fox News opinion program is no different than the motive behind fixing game shows in the 1950s (busted in 1959) or WWE wrestling matches after that (busted in 1994): to keep the audience emotionally engaged. The most popular game shows in the ’50s were the ones with winners who won multiple games. Game shows of the late 1950s were always produced with live audiences, and when a champion became a multi-show winner, the audience would not leave! Winners of The $64,000 Question became cult heroes. (Remember Dr. Joyce Brothers?)

  The fixed game show scam then was that the big winners were shown the answers before the show or the questions were tailored for the big winner based on questions he had been asked before the show.

  Roger Ailes started his TV production career a little after the ’50s game show scandals, but he never forgot the lesson: TV viewers love the feeling of watching their hero win. It’s well known in the TV industry that Ailes admitted he fixed the “debates” he produced for Richard Nixon in 1972—Roger was indeed the originator and master of the fixed outcome TV debate program.

  Key Point: When that hero on your screen is not just someone off the street but a man or woman the viewer knows and has trusted for years as a tribal blood brother, the viewer-pundit connection is visceral and ten times stronger. The Fox News analyst or contributor who delivers tribal victory for years becomes a hero to the FNC addict. That’s why Fox News has so many hosts and talking heads that have been in their positions for years and years: The more the viewer trusts them and the better their Q (likeability) scores, the more valuable they are to the rigged-outcome opinion segments.

  It’s why I still have people walk up in airports and heavy GOP zip codes and say, “Hey Toby—miss you kicking lame liberal butt on Fox News” after being gone for five years. It’s also why the segment producers gave me advanced talking points before the show that others did not get—why risk the viewer’s hero not winning when you can ensure a “noble death” for the tribal enemy in our blood-and-circus gladiatorial-like events. If you remember, Roman emperors fixed their “contests” so the heroes won, too.

  DRAMATIC EFFECT COUNTS TOO

  If you are the host’s go-to hit man, it’s much more dramatic and visually compelling to rhetorically kill the libtard enemy face-to-face in-studio than from a satellite location. Most of our liberal guests were in New York City for the taping for that reason, although the really feeble ones could do their “hits” from DC or other Fox News locations because they were so easy to take down that no one needed to face off eyeball-to-eyeball.

  After a few years, I had the Fox News fixed outcome production scam figured out, so I played along and performed my role exactly the way Roger had designed the process produced by the opinion-programming production team. I became the most dependable hit man, and though other contributors were let go in the 2008–2010 recession, I kept getting new one-year contracts.

  Why? Because the producer and host could count on me to rhetorically dispatch and dismiss the liberal prop/crash dummy nine-out-of-ten times. That is what they call at Fox News “great TV, brother!”

  FOX NEWS FINALLY DID AWAY WITH THE “FAIR AND BALANCED” LIE, BUT NOT THE OPINION-DEBATE SCAM

  I can only assume that after Roger Ailes was fired by Fox News in 2016 for various sexual harassment and assault issues, the Murdoch family finally concluded that selling the false promise Roger made a hundred times a day—that Fox News was the only fair and balanced news on television—was not only ironic and farcical but legally fraudulent as well.

  In 2016, Fox News stopped making the “fair and balanced” claim. But I can tell you from watching recently, Fox News in no way ended the rigged “opinion” programming scam. Now that Fox News is operating as de facto Trump TV, the charade is simply more visible.

  WHO IS TOBIN SMITH?

  Even assuming you’ve read this book’s flap copy and maybe the About the Author page, unless you are a longtime Fox News junkie or investment newsletter junkie, you may be asking yourself “Who is Tobin Smith? Why does he think he knows so much about Fox News that others don’t?”

  Great questions—you do need to know and understand a few important things about me. First, my political and cultural biases are simple: registered Independent, former Republican, part-time media and cultural critic (at StopTheFoxocracy.com), and full-time investment newsletter publisher and editor-in-chief at www.transformityresearch.com.

  But most importantly, I was at Fox News on the air many times every week for fourteen years. And I got enough face time with Roger Ailes—the head of Fox News—and his lieutenants at the headquarters in New York City to learn every aspect of his programming philosophy and tribal warfare playbook.

  If you know and understand Roger Ailes’s psyche, you’ll understand Fox News. So let’s you and I start on that quest now.

  From my conversations with him and those who worked for him, I am able to decode and share the key parts of his massive imprint on our “cable news network” masquerade and tribal warfare tactics for you.

  Ailes was (and still is today even after his death) the proxy persona that FNC producers write to and direct for. If you could push his instinctual emotional hot buttons and get his white tribal partisan reflexes reflexing, producers knew they could hit the Fox News audience’s emotional hot buttons and emotional reflexes.

  At an office event early in my career I cornered Roger and asked, “So Roger, just who is our target audience? Describe them to me please—give me a mental picture of the viewer at home.”

  Roger responded, “Look at me—I am the audience. White, fat, balding, age fifty-five-to-dead. I’m a red state Midwest conservative guy sitting at home in his favorite chair with a remote control surgically attached to his hand.”

  “What does the viewer most want from me?” I asked.

  “Well after the producers and host scares the shit out of them, he wants to see you tear those smug condescending know-it-all East Coast liberals to pieces . . . limb by limb . . . until he jumps up out of his La-Z-Boy, high fives the TV, and screams ‘Way to go Toby . . . you KILLED that libtard!’”

  “Why do you and they hate liberals so much?” I asked.

  “Wait,” Ailes said, “are you a liberal, Tobin?”

  “Nope—card-carrying Republican (I lied). But I don’t viscerally hate liberals—I just find that so many of them are just so poorly educated about how capitalism works and how the laws of economics work—I try to help them understand them better—that’s why I am here.”

  “Well Toby—here’s why guys like me fucking hate liberals. For one thing—liberals hate America—they all hate capitalism—and they think anyone waving an American flag on the Fourth of July is a gap-toothed, slack-jawed hillbilly.

  “They also think they are all better than you and guys like me. To them I’m a small towner hick from the sticks. Of course, they all went to a better college than me too. They are so smug and so much smarter and richer than me. They never miss a chance to rub my face in something stupid I said or did twenty or thirty years ago.

  “For chrissakes, they already own all the important newspapers, all TV, all the movie studios, important colleges, and all the rest of the entertainment industries—but that is not enough—they always want more! They want me and guys like me to shut the fuck up and let the Masters of the Universe run the world.

  “Why do I hate liberals? This is why: If I was on the ground outside bleeding on Sixth Avenue, they would walk over and snap my neck with their Gucci loafers and not blink.

  “Well guess what—payback is a mofo ain’t it!”

  So there ya go—he was a few cocktails in. I wish we could have talked all night—but I got the main point; for the short, fat, sickly Roger Ailes (he had hemophilia for decades), Fox News’s Liberal Death Star plan wasn’t business; it was personal. It was payback fo
r every liberal who had underestimated him and every insult and disrespect he endured as a right-winger in left-wing industries.

  What I learned early on about our fearless leader (and later our core audience) was that his hatred of liberals was not just an act where we produced televised and digital tribal warfare—our audience was also bitter. To use a sports analogy, think of the bitter hatred between fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. Both teams were exports out of New York City to California—and they were rivals. But when Giants pitcher Juan Marichal turned around in the batting box and smashed his bat into the head of our beloved catcher John Roseboro on August 22, 1965 (not that I remember the date . . .) Dodger-fan hatred of the Giants became personal and bitter.

  My point: I can tell you this firsthand—for thousands of Fox News viewers whom I have met in person or on social media, Fox News is very personal for them too. Their hatred of liberalism and liberals and cultural PC-ism is bitter and visceral, too. They too have metastasized and bone-marrow-level hurt feelings from the disrespect and condescension they feel they get from every corner of liberal America.

  THE FIVE KEY EMOTIONAL PILLARS

  The emotional exploitation pillars of the Fox News tribal warfare playbook are:

  Existential white tribal fear

  Bitter hatred and feelings of disrespect

  Blasphemous outrage

  Visceral bitter resentment

  Victimhood and blame of “elites” and “others”

  Conversely, to them Fox News is like a campfire where they can safely huddle around and feel pride about themselves and their close pals. To use one of the combat metaphors that many viewers are so fond of, Fox News is a digital foxhole where they feel safe while they watch their tribal heroes bring the fight to “those people” who constantly disrespect their Retro America culture and orthodoxy and want to confiscate their guns and disrespect their God. The foxhole camaraderie with their Fox News hosts feels real to them—even though to the hosts it’s just an act (ok, maybe not Hannity—that dude believes his own bullshit, for sure).