by Tobin Smith
The FCC figured out the fixed game shows in the late 1950s and shut them down. The FCC even kicked most televangelists off network TV stations and UHF channels (who then just regrouped to form Christian cable TV channels).
Why has the FCC not called out and fixed the Fox News “fair and balanced” rigged opinion debate scam?
FOX NEWS: THE OXYCONTIN OF TRIBAL IDENTITY MEDIA
Finally, the best analogy about viral unintended consequences of Fox News tribal ID porn I ever found was the real story behind the unintended consequences that created the OxyContin plague and epidemic. Now of course I am not comparing addiction to synthetic heroin to addiction to Fox News tribal identity porn—don’t go there.
But hear me out on this because the parallels are very instructive. Both went viral for very similar reasons. Gambling, booze, drugs, Oxy, and heroin are all the same—if they are used as a coping mechanism, the neurochemicals and psychoactive chemicals involved are addictive. When the user develops a physical tolerance threshold and the normal dose starts to lose effect, you consume more or an even stronger painkiller to cope.
Originally, Purdue Pharmaceuticals’ new synthetic heroin OxyContin was labeled by the FDA as a “short-term acute post-surgery pain relief agent” and was only approved for two days of usage. The reason it was only approved for two days was, like any psychoactive pain coping medicine, if you take Oxy for more than two or three days, your body begins to develop a physical tolerance for the drug. Mental health professionals call this a negative and degenerative addictive feedback loop because the more Oxy you take, the worse the side effects and possible addiction can get.
Let’s be real—if you take Oxy at a dosage level that would drop a charging rhino, the odds go up astronomically that you will develop a physical and mental addiction to opioids.
Well gee—guess what? The makers of Oxy allegedly hired a bunch of FDA regulators to big fancy jobs as lobbyists and soon after Oxy was able to get a “label shift” upon receiving additional research (that Purdue Pharmaceuticals paid for). Yes friends, the FDA—which is just like the FCC—has a mandate to protect American citizens. But after lobbying, the FDA removed the “two-day only” label and made it okay to prescribe it for a longer period.
Why is this analogous to Fox News, you ask? Well for one thing, the FCC was heavily lobbied (the same way) by right-wing lobbyists to remove the Fairness Doctrine regulations and restrictions in 1987. By the time the FCC approved Fox News as a “cable news channel” in 1994, most had forgotten that less than a decade before the right-wing Reagan administration was successful in removing the “label restrictions” on the rules of conduct for televised news.
Like I shared before, in 1949, televised news was—shockingly—required to be news. The FCC “label” required broadcast license holders to broadcast news content under rules that, if broken, could cost the broadcaster its broadcasting license.
But the irony here (and analogy to the unintended consequences of changing the use label for opioids) is the Fairness Doctrine was created by the Congress in 1949 because they were so afraid that if one of the three major national networks were to be owned or controlled by a “political partisan,” that network could imbue its left or right political and cultural view on a third of America and have undue influence on our democratic election process.
They gazed into a future of millions of Americans inundated with right- or left-wing propaganda and rightfully saw this type of partisan content would be unhealthy for our democracy.
The result? The removal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 was like the FDA removal of the two-day dosage of OxyContin. That regulatory shift set the table for the Fox News scam (perhaps better described as the audience grift). Fox could label and call the network a “news network” when, in fact, they made all their money and ratings on their tribal identity porn content. They could hire some unknown TV news folks to read the news, and the old people who grew up with TV news created under the “dosage” rules of the Fairness Doctrine would think the real content and engagement strategy was news—and think the talk show hosts were TV journalists like Walter Cronkite who were just giving the occasional editorial.
My point: Fox “News” Channel’s off label content explosion from fifty thousand viewers to one hundred million users makes FNC the OxyContin of televised media for a whole bunch of reasons.
By the way, in 2019, according to the Nielsen ratings, twenty-four out of the top twenty-six shows on cable TV today meet my classification of televised tribal partisan identity activation and validation pornography. The tribal identity TV pornocalypse is already here, and we and our caveman brains did not evolve to be ready for it.
Fox News on the right and now rapidly catching up MSNBC and CNN on the left (both new to the tribal partisan identity porn industry but learning fast) already dominate cable. Tribal TV has had its OxyContin moment—and eighty million Americans and their families are already negatively impacted.
American society has devolved and turned out exactly as one might expect if you were aware that today over two hundred million Americans consume billions of hours of emotionally traumatic tribal warfare from both left and right wings as monthly entertainment.
I mean, really—what could go wrong, eh?
What else should a reasonably educated person expect would happen to a country of two hundred fifty million adults living in one constitutional republic which, for at least the last twenty years, economically and culturally is essentially two separate countries (Metro and Retro America) where each separate country shares common politics and federal government but is separated by different economics, territory, and culture (see the seminal 1995 Bill Bishop article on the dire implications of “The Big Sort”).
To quote Mr. Bishop, “America may be more diverse than ever coast to coast, but the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote like we do. This social transformation didn’t happen by accident. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood and church and news show—most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs.
“And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country is so polarized, is so ideologically inbred, that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live just a few miles away. The Big Sort has dire implications for our country.”
Fox News did not invent the Big Sort—but what it did for the Big Sort we now call Retro and Metro America is augment it into the Big Sort Generation 2.0 while profiting off it. Now we have a country where the adult residents of each separate Metro and Retro country consume billions of hours of highly powerful video tribal partisan identity porn content that validates and accelerate their Big Sort way-of-life cultural segregation.
Yet the only commercial objective for tribal identity porn publishers is to demonstrate and validate new reasons to fear and hate the other 125 million adults living in Metro America by literally objectifying and demonizing each other as cultural and political jihadists in order to sell them electric wheelchairs and gold bullion bars and to prepare them to survive either the coming rapture or inevitable American Civil War II—whichever occurs first.
Public health experts tell us an epidemic is “a disease that spreads exponentially among many people in a community at the same time.” But the term epidemic can refer to something that spreads or grows rapidly, and the exponential growth of white tribal identity hate porn consumption from fifty thousand in 1996 to one hundred million or more today is an epidemic.
That’s the grifter edge—every human brain, whether in Retro or Metro America, has the same innately griftable emotional and psychological vulnerabilities. This immutable fact of life is what makes media grifters so wealthy and their victims so unaware and then so surprised they got grifted.
It is one of the best media grifts ever—selling the eyeballs of old right-wing senior citizens has grossed Fox News nearly $3 billion a year with over $1 billion in profits every year since 2010
. The value of the entire Fox News/Fox Business Network business of grifting old right-wing white people is worth over $20 billion.
CHAPTER 2
How I Broke the Code on the Rest of FNC’s Tribal Identity Porn Conspiracy
Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players.
—PADDY CHAYEFSKY IN NETWORK
How do you become a star host at Fox News? Talk, act, and think like you are a televangelist cult leader. The most successful Fox News hosts have become leaders of their own tribal identity cult that meets every weeknight at the same time for worship. “American conservatism” is just political fundamentalism. If you wanna have a successful Fox News show, watch an Evangelical televangelist—they have our program strategy down cold.
—WHAT AN FNC EXECUTIVE PRODUCER ADVISED ME IN 2009 BEFORE I GUEST HOSTED MY FIRST FBN PRIME-TIME PROGRAM
I now realize Fox News is nothing more than a propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration [that is] wittingly harming our system of government for profit while assaulting our constitutional order, the rule of law, and fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers.
—LT. COLONEL RALPH PETERS (RET.), ANALYST ON FOX NEWS CHANNEL 2008–2018
Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
—BUDDHA
Fox News Lesson No. 2: If you understand geriatric psychology you understand why the tribal right-winger engagement-and-addiction formula works.
To understand this lesson, you have to understand the target audience (as described by Roger). The core Fox News conservative tribal viewer is a basically a clone of Donald Trump, minus the great education, the tossed hair, bone spurs, and narcissistic personality disorder.
For your edification, here’s the most recent Nielsen television viewer data in general: “Television is particularly popular among men and is even more attractive to people who didn’t go to college and to Americans over the age of seventy.” In a highly related matter, up to 47 percent of America identifies as Evangelical Christians, depending how you choose to define the term.
That is an excellent description of a cultural and politically conservative tribal partisan. Remember, 50 percent of Fox News viewers are over the age of sixty-eight and, according to Nielsen, watch an average of more than seven hours of TV per day. And 65 percent of the FNC audience for any given show except the morning shows normally skews male.
Fox News’s core viewers see the world through the eyes of an old, white, culturally and politically ethno-nationalist tribalism. Why more old white men? Because they are generally more culturally resentful and more prideful than older women, plus they have fewer close friend relationships.
“WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RELIGIOUS CULT LEADER AND A FOX NEWS HOST? NOTHING”
In late August 2009 going into the Labor Day weekend, David Asman, the host of an evening show I regularly appeared on at Fox Business Network called America’s Nightly Scoreboard, took the week off. I had been pitching myself to the executive producer of the show to guest host America’s Nightly Scoreboard in David’s absence.
By the end of my first decade in cable TV punditry I was addicted to the juice you get doing FNC cage match television. It always took a few hours and martinis to calm down after taping a show—the adrenaline was addictive. I watched other folks guest host our Bulls & Bears show, and in most cases I was sure I could have done a better job. So I started pitching myself as a guest host.
Note: In talk TV, you build your shot at your own show by staying around the studio during major holidays and guest hosting the shows where (1) the hosts are on vacation and (2) the show has the lowest ratings (the pitch to the executive producer is “What do you have to lose—I might even raise your crappy ratings!”)
Hosting live TV without a net with people screaming in your ear while you are talking to millions of people is the only way to learn how to do talk TV hosting well. In this case, the executive producer was new to Fox and FBN and came from CNN. I think he assumed I had guest hosted shows on Fox News before so after much badgering he said, “Okay, you’re in—don’t fuck it up.”
Since in fact I had actually never hosted any live TV program before, I immediately went to the office of a well-known executive producer of one of Fox News’s highest-rated evening prime-time programs that I occasionally appeared on and asked him, “Hey boss—so how do I become a star host at Fox News?” I was expecting some technical advice and such, but I got none of that stuff.
He said, “Sit down and listen. First you have to really understand the audience in the evening—they are much different than the Country Club/Capitalist Republicans that watch your Saturday morning show who have real money in the stock market. The evening audience is the core Fox News base—they are the (for the most part) more white working and lower middle class or retirees that are addicted to Fox News. Their main TV is on Fox News all day—we know this from the Nielsen reports.”
He continued, “The best advice I can give you is what I tell the anchors at night—you gotta talk, act, and think like you are a religious cult leader. The most successful Fox News hosts have literally become leaders of their own Evangelical denomination that meets every weeknight at the same time. Their audience worships at the altar of the host’s version of conservatism because conservatism in America is just a nice way of hiding the fact that tribal right-wing political fundamentalism is more like a religious cult than anything else.”
“Really? Dude, I’ve seen Elmer Gantry a bunch of times—so what you are saying is I should I channel my inner Jim Jones and get ’em to drink my Kool-Aid?”
“Toby, I’m dead serious. You don’t see the email and snail mail we get from our core viewers. Ever since Obama was elected and we added crazy ol‘ conspiracy theory dude Glenn Beck to the lineup at 5:00 p.m. along with all his millions of conspiracy theory kooks, our ratings are skyrocketing, but it’s a whole new crowd.”
He was dead right about the Glenn Beck conspiracy theory crowd. Beck took over John Gibson’s 5:00 p.m. show in 2009 with about 500,000 viewers, and the ratings exploded to 1.5 million viewers. Bear in mind this is the toughest time slot for cable TV—potential viewers who aren’t retired are mostly at work on both the East and West Coasts and not watching TV.
Beck’s audience blast came from his huge daily right-wing radio show audience (more than ten million listeners at the time). Along with the conspiracy theory nutjob folks he attracted, he also had a large Evangelical audience. I hosted Beck’s show one time (I was the only experienced guest host available in the studio at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday when his car was delayed as I remember), and the emails I got after the show were shocking in the extreme conspiracy theory dogma his viewers wrote me about.
A note on conspiracy theorists: Now that you understand tribal identity psychology, let’s go to this important subset of conservatives. As a group conspiracy theorists are extremely insecure souls who need mass quantities of personal self-esteem building.
What drives conspiracy theory behavior and makes conspiracy cult leaders so powerful is the psychological profile of conspiracy theory fans—that they are among the most low self-esteem people on earth.
Let me ask you this—who is the most well-known conspiracy monger in America?
It’s not Alex Jones of InfoWars or Glenn Beck. It’s Donald J. Trump, of course! You know, the one who pushed the Obama “Fake Birth Certificate” conspiracy for five years among dozens of other debunked conspiracy theories.
Behavioral psychologists tell us all conspiracy theorists have a distinct psychological profile. They’re almost always deeply insecure and are in some degree of an existential crisis. The conspiracies they hold onto are a tribal belief system or psychological construct created to mentally survive in a world they perceive to be haphazard, scary, an
d unfair.
Key Word: “unfair.” Ever hear or read that term “unfair” in a speech or tweet from Donald J. Trump? Since his POTUS announcement in July 2015, he has spoken or tweeted the word “unfair” over one thousand five hundred times. So yes, dear friends—the behavior of the president of the United States and most powerful person in the world is the epitome of the classic conspiracy theory nut profile.
Reassuring, no?
If you deconstruct the word “unfair” regarding feelings and emotional context to an insecure conspiracy theorist like Donald J. Trump, psychologists will tell you the term unfair is indicative of high levels of insecurity and (not shockingly) highly narcissistic. To a person like DJT, any criticism of him, his behavior, his business record, or anything else that forms his delusional personal sense and construct of self-worth and importance is intolerable.
Sound familiar?
For an extreme narcissist with insecure conspiratorial delusions of grandeur, no criticism, however slight, is left alone. Just read reader comments on InfoWars.com or Breitbart.com; disagreement or name-calling is returned with an attack many times stronger than the perceived insult. That is why the POTUS sits in bed at 4:00 a.m. and counts up what he considers to be the most egregious personal “attacks” on him and returns tweeted grenades and insults back at any comment made on CNN or MSNBC or the mainstream print or magazine media or tweeted for that matter.
The level of insecurity is breathtaking for anyone, but for the POTUS and leader of the free world to turn petty slights into full-scale wars of words? The unfortunate answer for America is that behavior is perfectly aligned and correlated to the personality profile of a conspiracy theory addict.