by Tobin Smith
What I learned was the genius of the Fox News “fair and balanced” grift: Under the pretense of news and patina of a traditional TV newscast, we could claim to our audience that ours was the only even-handed approach to politics and search for the common good via “reasoned adversarial civic debate.”
But on the second floor (in the executive offices) and in the seventeenth-floor halls of opinion-programming production teams, those who needed to knew that we at Fox News were really just in the original business of the Atwater and Ailes political ad agency. Politics as weaponized, scripted, rigged performance art was not just politics as monetizable entertainment, but was also a call to arms for the right wing of America to fight back against “the darkness”—the hated and feared liberalism sold every day by the vile and evil liberal media.
“TOBY—DON’T GET WONKY—FOX NEWS VIEWERS AREN’T POLITICAL THINK TANK JUNKIES—THEY ARE IDENTITY JUNKIES”
The final lesson I got from my FNC executive producer friends was after I hosted a few shows on Fox Business Channel. At FBN I got to write my own live opening segment copy, unlike at FNC where I performed my Fox News hit man job according to how my segment producer wanted me to lay into our token liberal prop-of-the-day.
I had always thought of our Fox Business audience as somewhere high on the spectrum of political junkies. I simply thought that to spend so much of their time watching us duke it out with the liberal guests/props, they were into the big ideas and my job was to stone my opponent with fabulous policy and ideological correctness.
While a few Fox News viewers are, I am sure, legit right-wing political junkies, I was mostly wrong. What I learned from my executive producer friend was a very important lesson about the conservative Fox News tribal audience: They are old. They are more interested in validating the righteous superiority of their social identity as a conservative and me defining the inferior “otherness” of the enemy tribe than in listening to me being ideologically wonky.
This idea is what associate professor of government and politics Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland describes in her paper “Ideologies Without Issues” as the “ideology of identity” vs. “issue-based ideology.”
What another executive producer told me was pure tribal and cultural identity TV gold. “First off, the idea that people vote for or don’t vote for what they ‘want’ is wrong. What they vote for is who they feel they are—who they consider their home team to be. White conservatives are proud tribe members, so they believe in all the same orthodoxy and liturgy they hear over and over and over again. If you know a person is a self-identified ‘conservative’—you also know where they stand on guns, on abortion, on the military, on taxes, on immigration, yadda yadda.”
Key Point: “Toby, you gotta write and preach down to who these white middle class people are and write to that persona—not up. For your sermon to connect you gotta stop writing to your country club buddies. Here’s what I give my producers when I hire them so they can write compelling teases and emotionally powerful openings. I call this process ‘Emotional Target Practice’—to aim your tease and sermon to where their emotional and cultural orthodoxies were and compare and contrast to how different and scary liberals and liberal orthodoxy are today. Because their cultural and political orthodoxies are so permanently affixed to their sixty-five-year-old psyches, hitting and triggering their emotional targets ain’t that hard, pal!”
He was so right. That was the best description of the Fox News tribal identity porn production process I ever heard—emotional target practice. I define the process as targeting the audience’s latest and rawest open emotional wound or deepest rooted and most sensitive cultural raw nerve and analyzing the current news flow for the widest delta or amount of change from the way the Fox News audience was culturally raised and most likely still believes.
After writing dozens of show opening “sermons,” I came to think of my goal as panning for emotional gold. Here is Fox News’s audience persona playbook I was taught to write and “preach” to as an FNC talk show host. The important issue here is this is FNC’s emotional manipulation playbook for their Millennial and Gen-X aged segment producers to get their heads into the Fox viewer’s geriatric emotional operating system. The idea is simple—these are the potential deep-rooted emotional targets for the emotional target practice required to find the cultural nerve of the day and hit it!
As mentioned, the segment producers get the Daily Target List that goes out to all executive producers and producers every morning—the new emotional heresies/issues of the day. Think of this audience persona guide as the “evergreen” emotional hit list—these are the deepest-rooted beliefs and cultural morals that people over sixty were born and raised with and, most important, still hold dear and believe in.
We at Fox News create and produce our tribal identity programming specifically to emotionally manipulate the most vulnerable people in America: elderly, red state, small city, and rural living folks who self-identify as political/cultural conservatives. Think of Fox News as the vote hackers that came before the Russian vote hackers!
The geriatric Fox News audience is unified under one global emotional umbrella: They viscerally feel the country they morally, culturally, politically, and economically understand isn’t here anymore. They are both pissed off about it and, at the same time, scared existentially shitless about this sorry state of affairs they viscerally feel and perceive.
To understand how to produce weapons-grade right-wing tribal identity fear and hate porn, you first have to know how our age sixty-eight or older target audience are culturally imprinted and wired with the old school “OG” cultural rules of mid-1950s and ’60s.
Back then, all of us WASPy white folk had the same baker’s dozen of basic cultural norms, family rules, and off-limits taboos that you followed or your parents kicked you out of their house—and you went to hell too:
You went to church on Sunday unless you were Jewish (like you knew any?)—and as Martin Luther King said, the “most segregated place in America was a church pew at 11:00 a.m. Sunday.”
You got confirmed Protestant, Catholic, or Episcopal. Some went to Bible Study and became a born-again Baptist or Evangelical. But no matter what, you learned the catechism and rules of your faith or you got the paddle. By the way, Cassius Clay was not Islamic to you: He was a fallen Baptist. You thought Islam was from the story of “Aladdin and the Forty Thieves.”
You got married before you had children and strived to stay married for their sake because kids came first and your marriage second. Unless you lived in New York City, if you got divorced you were shameful and shunned. If you got divorced twice you were a closet homosexual.
You got the education you needed for gainful employment, worked hard, and avoided idleness. Vacations were a drive to see your relatives or camp in a national park. If your mom worked, that meant your father was a slacker and your family needed the money.
You voted how your parents voted, and if they voted for FDR and Harry Truman, then you voted Democrat, or you were in the doghouse at family holiday events for a while.
You went the extra mile for your employer or client—if you did you got a lifetime job and a full pension.
You were a patriot, ready to serve the country, and you knew your family and neighbors would be proud of your service.
You were neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable—God was watching and judging you.
You avoided coarse language in public and never talked politics, sex, or religion at the dinner table or with company.
You were respectful of authority and if pulled over by law enforcement you STFU except for “yes sir” and “no sir.”
Drugs were for ghetto thugs or jazz musicians.
TV time was after a sit-down dinner with the family except for sports and for special occasions approved by your parents.
LGBTQ was a string of capitalized alphabet letters. If you were gay or lesbian, tough it out and do that stuff somewhere else—I don’t want
to know. Oh yea—if you were homosexual, you’re going to hell.
If you’ve ever watched Fox News opinion programming, now you know one of the core ways they produce tribal and cultural identity segments. They take all those core, old school 1950s and ’60s cultural rules, values, and behaviors and then display in high-def living color how liberals and liberalism are destroying their beloved culture and country right in front of the viewer’s eyes with lots of sounds and moving graphics.
Frankly, it was too easy to manipulate these old geezers. At its core, Fox News is just Russia’s Internet Research Agency troll farm without the vodka and borscht.
Key Point: What Fox News shows its audience is the America Fox News wants them to see—an emotionally traumatic mirror image of the old-school world they knew, loved, desperately miss, and sentimentally wish they could return to.
In other words, the Fox News tribal warfare playbook was Trump before Trump. His white tribe supremacy normalizing shtick just expanded his brand by letting white ethno-nationalists take their masks off and be who they always wanted to be in public.
I really learned as a Fox anchor about writing and performing a live or “cold open” was what in 2019 we term cultural or political “trolling.” My job in the first sixty to ninety seconds of every tribal identity porn show is an example of:
their worst cultural and political nightmare.
all the most current sociocultural and political disasters and societal pathologies from the most up-to-the-hour white ethno-nationalist tribal grievance list which we repeat and dog whistle like a digital bumper sticker every few minutes.
What are the right-wing tribal grievance classics, you ask? Here is the list my executive producer and producer friends helped me develop (in no particular order):
Our working-class jobs are being stolen by illegal immigrants who live twelve to a house.
Legal immigrants are stealing high-paying technology jobs by taking lower salaries than what “normal” white Americans are paid or willing to work for.
Too few white Americans qualify for the jobs available today because the government spends the money that should go to retraining them for the twenty-first century on welfare and food stamps for lazy grifters.
Male working-age labor-force participation rates are at Great Depression-era lows because we shipped the good manufacturing and assembly line jobs to China, Mexico, and everywhere else so coastal elites could pay for their private jets and country club memberships.
Opioid abuse is widespread because the coastal and political elites sold white Americans down the river with their “globalist” hatred and lack of respect for the hard-working flyover America.
Homicidal violence plagues inner cities because those people are inbred animals—let ’em kill each other but keep them contained in their inner-city kill zone.
Almost half of all children in America are born out of wedlock because those people are inbred sub-humans who listen to rap music and smoke crack all day or are atheists who don’t go to church on Sunday.
Single mothers raise almost 50 percent of these out of wedlock half-breed children because white people pay for their food stamps, welfare checks, and subsidized housing.
Many college students lack basic skills because we spend so much money educating and providing lunch for illegal immigrants and chain-family immigration that we don’t have enough teachers for the real Americans.
Our high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries because they take care of their own and they have walls.
George Soros and other socialists fund every large protest in America.
Under Obummer, we weren’t even allowed to say Merry Christmas by the Obummer PC police.
Also, if we forgot something, blame Saul Alinsky.
However, Fox News never fails to play the “Primal Disrespect and Payback’s a MOFO” card: Watch the Tucker Carlson Show. All he does now is show the audience how the last of the good stuff remaining in their life is now being stolen, raped, and pillaged from them by their arch tribal enemies—those smug, disrespectful, and condescending know-it-all coastal elite libtards who brought you:
The Great Recession in 2008–2009 and zero after inflation working-class household income raises since 1982.
Bailouts of the bankers and mortgage thieves with nary a perp walk or jail time.
Spending $6 trillion in nation building and wasting tens of thousands of their grandkids’ lives and futures on never-ending wars.
But looking the other way when eleven million illegal immigrants swam into America to steal working-class jobs.
In short: At Fox News, we turned emotionally manipulating, trolling, and tormenting the crap out of our disillusioned and tribalized white audience into a sporting event. All that’s missing is a scoreboard on the direct hits and strikeouts.
At the end of my TV host training, I was pretty good at preaching the white and right gospel (if I do say so myself). I did over fifty shows as a guest host.
Key Point: Evolutionary psychologists tell us that all humans are encoded with an “immune system” against uncomfortable thoughts. So Fox News doesn’t broadcast uncomfortable thoughts or tribal heresies much past the first liberal salvo in the segment. After the opening ninety second or so rant, the host and script blows up and exposes the opening heresy for the “lies” they are. This fear, depression, anxiety, then rekindled hope and ultimate triumph protocol is what I later learned was the Roger Ailes right-wing tribal identity engagement-and-addiction formula.
It turned out that addicting old white guys to tribal identity porn is pretty damn easy. Sitting at home all comfy in your favorite chair mainlining self-esteem building tribal confirmation biased news, commentary, and opinion debates is literally the perfect emotionally addictive product.
CHAPTER 4
My Road to Fox News Enlightenment 2000–2018
I traveled a nineteen-year journey to Fox News enlightenment.
It took me that long to get the actual answers to the questions I could never answer completely during my fourteen years inside FNC. I had to step outside and engage with my direct personal experiences meeting Fox News fanatics, had to observe the Fox News Rain Man act a thousand times to find answers: What on earth would drive a normal human being to watch six or more hours of fear-and-hate-based anything without a gun to their head?
What unmet emotional need were we fulfilling?
It wasn’t news—as mentioned, Fox News viewers constantly rate as knowing less about American news than Americans who watch zero televised news.
Why did the thousands of people who have come to meet me in public over the years (and still do every day when I am out in public within a red state zip code) always say the same things to me, like a population of Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond in Rain Man?
Why did the people who seek to connect with me always act like we are all members of some cult?
Why did so many of them think they have a Spock-like mind-meld connection and psychic bond with me?
Why are the Fox News “newsroom,” news staff, and news bureaus about 50 percent smaller than those at CNN and CNBC, where I had also performed?
Why did Fox News not have an ethics and standards/practices/retraction/ corrections department like the other televised news operations I had appeared on (CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNNFN)?
Why did FNC’s opinion programming televangelists and their mostly twenty-something-year-old production staffers have actual offices on the upper floors of the News Corp. building at 1211 Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan instead of being jammed into shared cubes like the “news department?”
Why did every producer I ever worked with or met profess their fealty to right-wing politics as if they were trained seals afraid of not getting a sardine from their boss?
Why did we hire a real live World Wrestling Entertainment superstar to be a business and markets analyst on our business and markets show?
I mean really—what would you think i
f every time you got identified and stopped in public, you got the same identical routine from people who evinced almost no grasp of what they were actually watching and why they were watching it for six hours a day?
I just could not figure it out—why didn’t they know or understand that Fox News’s “opinion-debate” programming was just a scam—a very well-produced and professional televised grift?
It never made any sense to me until I broke the routine and my questions down and researched them one by one. These unanswered questions also led to other unanswered questions or conundrums:
Why were these Foxholes oblivious to the fact that their carefully programmed and choreographed climax (“Wow! That felt great to watch you put a body slam on that libtard idiot!”) was derived from a successfully produced and directed tribal cultural warfare-as-entertainment performance? Couldn’t they see that it depended on the producers of this scripted political or cultural shit show accurately following the Fox News tribal cultural warfare playbook and carefully selecting mostly white Anglo-Saxon heroes and hitting our marks and disemboweling our hapless “just glad to be here” liberal props?
Why were they oblivious to the fact that while performing that seven-to-eight-minute segment, our tribal fear-and-hate porn, we had made a quick visit to the viewer’s brain stem—you know the part of our brain still equipped with the primal/primordial caveman fight-or-flight limbic system programmed via evolution (sorry creationists) to involuntarily spit out seriously powerful and addictive fight-or-flight chemicals that control our involuntary fear/hate reflexes and blast a massive dose of the heroin-strength brain chemical serotonin (which is partly what Foxholes are unknowingly hooked on)?
Can’t the viewer/user/tribal warfare addict, ensconced in his favorite chair and drinking beverages in the comfort of his own home, understand why he always leaves the opinion debate segment with the same all-important self-esteem and ego building feelings of (a) smug intellectual superiority, (b) absolute moral and cultural righteousness, (c) the thrill of watching another stated gladiatorial bread-and-circus victory over “Them”—their Metro America, microaggression-and–cultural-appropriating, PC sensitive, latte and smoothie swilling sworn tribal enemy (as opposed to merely a person with a different political perspective and opinion)?