by Tobin Smith
Did they really think this stuff happened by accident?
My dear, longtime friend and host of my weekly Bulls & Bears program Brenda Buttner answered me one night while enjoying our post-performance victory cigar and martini when I ignorantly asked her, “Hey B—why do we always get such liberal morons on our show, and why do the guys like me always outpunch and beat the shit out of those poor folks?”
Brenda told me, “Jeez, Toby—what the hell do you think our producers get paid for? It takes a lot of work to make you guys look so smart and our liberal of the week so dumb!”
She left out “token window dressing prop,” but she had her reasons.
So there you have it. If you for some reason watched me on Fox News and had not yet figured out my whole act and our “fair and balanced” “opinion debates” were rigged, well, they were (and they continue to be).
We duped the audience, the guests, and many contributors too.
But until late 2012, I didn’t really care enough to understand why this viewer Rain Man act happened over and over again with the elderly audience members I met. The fact that I got a $5,000 check every week for working a few hours, plus weekly first-class round-trip tickets from DC to New York City, was a very effective curiosity de-stimulant.
And honestly, for most of my years at Fox News I really thought our little faux debate programming charade was just harmless entertainment—you know, like a nerf-gun battle with words as the foam missiles. Nobody got hurt and nobody’s eye got popped out.
But eventually, the result of my three-year journey into discovering why Fox News opinion programming had such a universally powerful psychological and emotional impact on our deeply and tribally right-wing enculturated fans led me to this conclusion: All my assumptions about Fox News’s tribal warfare programming were dead wrong.
I first discovered how deeply ignorant I was about the polarizing cultural impact of Fox News on Retro Americans in early November 2012. I was on a Fox News personality speaking tour of south Arkansas the day after President Obama won a second term. There, over three days, I met and talked extensively with more than a thousand members of our core small city and rural Retro America audience. Those seventy-two hours were the very first time I had actually conversed with the Fox News Retro America core audience beyond the obligatory airport or restaurant handshake.
Also bear in mind that until Donald Trump ran for POTUS and won, for a number of reasons that we all now understand are highly correlated to FNC’s tribal fear and hate programming grift, I considered myself apolitical and happily lived my entrepreneur/capitalist life behind my gated “one-percenter” bubble (which now I understand makes me hated by Retro America as part of the “elite.” Who knew? I thought I was their hero!).
When I actually visited Fox News/MAGA/Retro America flyover country, it was to do a corporate speech to rich corporate Republicans, play golf, or hunt some great BBQ. When I talked politics for free, it was only with my rich country club conservative friends and not the FNC viewer hoi polloi. First rule of being a TV contributor/tribal identity mercenary—you never open your mouth near a microphone without payment.
But on that late 2012 speaking trip to south Arkansas and after many speeches and Q&A sessions with thousands of real, true blue Fox News folks of all ages, I discovered the other hiding-in-plain-sight truths about my adoring, virtually all white working and middle class Fox News followers.
My epiphany was this: The operative issue for understanding these fine Retro America folks whose eyeballs we sold to catheter and dried food end-of-days advertisers was not that they were just clueless bumpkins duped by our highly choreographed emotional manipulation grift or duped by our fake “fair and balanced” debate deception. What spooked me was that these adoring folks of all ages looked at me and talked to me just like the old white-haired people in the airport did—like I really was a living apostle from the hallowed monastery of hatred toward liberal latte sippers.
More shocking: After I told thousands of these true believers in the lecture halls and Q&A sessions time and time again that they (like the proverbial poker game) were being played as suckers in Fox News’s fake fair-and-balanced opinion panel grift and all we were doing was a seven-minute pro wrestling match in $2,000 Brioni suits, they:
Didn’t care.
Or didn’t believe me.
Or didn’t understand the concept of grifting.
And in most cases all three.
Like most said to me after my “big reveal” about Fox News: “Toby, what am I going to do, watch MSNBC or CNN?”
Why didn’t they care? Why were they not outraged in the slightest about being lied to and manipulated by me and Fox News and monetized to the tune of billions of dollars every year in profits?
Why do these same mostly Evangelical people not care a lick about the integrity or mendacity or immoral behavior of the person they undoubtedly voted for POTUS in 2016?
Cue Vince McMahon, Dr. Phil, Joel Osteen, and Donald J. Trump—they all know the answer. Hell, any professional grifter knows. These tribalized Retro American Fox News addicts don’t care because—well—it’s complicated.
And that is what the rest of this book answers:
What are Fox News’s tribal warfare “plays” in the FNC tribal warfare playbook?
What are the other innate human psychological vulnerabilities that Fox News’s unfair and imbalanced grift preys on?
Why do so many people fall for it hook, line, and sinker?
But to steal a great insight by political strategists Salena Zito and Brad Todd in their book on the 2016 presidential election The Great Revolt, “the history of the American electorate is not a litany of flukes; instead it is a pattern of tectonic plate-grinding, punctuated by a landscape-altering earthquake every generation or so.”
Look, the introduction of a round-the-clock tribalized white conservative political/cultural TV channel was indeed a tectonic earthquake in America. The introduction of two hundred highly demographic and psychographic targeted cable TV channels in every home was a tectonic media earthquake. The demise of highly profitable city newspapers (that lost their want ads and classified ad cash cows to Craigslist and LinkedIn) was a news media altering earthquake that continues to send even stronger aftershocks today.
But what I found more than anything feeding the demand for the Foxocracy Hot Pot of white tribal identity porn is the radical decline of the income, health, opportunity, and social fabric of the once highly functional Retro America. That and the creation of the working poverty class (the ALICE households we talked about earlier—Asset Light/Income Constrained/Employed class). The creation of a 115 million strong American working-poor class is the biggest cultural and economic earthquake to hit the nation in a hundred years.
And by now you should understand this—real news and real journalism are not grifts—they are highly valuable services. That is why most people watch their local news station. They want to know what is happening with the weather tomorrow, who won the game tonight, and what parts of town are experiencing bumper-to-bumper traffic from road construction.
But the term “news” serves as the cloaking device at Fox News. In between the tribal emotions grift programming there is some real news broadcasting.
What makes the Fox News tribal warfare grift so successful is the audience demographics—many tests have proven old white people can’t tell the difference between “the news” and “tribal fear and hate porn.” Almost 80 percent of Fox News viewers think Sean Hannity is a “journalist” even though Sean himself will tell you he’s a political talk show host.
That’s how a great grift works—the person being grifted doesn’t know it, doesn’t want to believe it.
Most FNC viewers grew up with three channels of TV and authoritative high integrity news anchors—think Cronkite, Huntly, and Brinkley. Recent social media sharing data shows that the worst forwarders of truly fake news (from Russian trolls, etc.) are—wait for it—people over fifty-five! Peo
ple over fifty-five are also the fastest-growing population on Facebook—see a pattern?
Does Fox News have a plan to target the younger Gen-X and Millennial “cord cutters” conservative audience? They have started a streaming Fox News Nation app with young glorious hosts and cameos from the older hosts. They do not release subscription data, but insiders I have talked to say the subscriber count is “a rounding error and mostly older ‘super fans.’”
I visited a Fox News Nation event in Phoenix recently—I can tell you there was not a person under age fifty to be found.
Just like Donald Trump’s electoral coalition smashed both American political parties to the chagrin of the political news punditariat, the media experts analyzing Fox News and Trumpism continue to blow it every time they predict the coming demise of each entity. Clearly something big was going on with Fox News—and all I read and heard was crickets and confusion from the journalists (with a few exceptions as noted).
To get some answers, for three years after the 2016 election I went on a personal journey deep into the minds and hearts of Trump’s Deplorables and Fox News addicts to discover and define what we call in consumer marketing “the target audience persona.” What emerged is a group of citizens who cannot simply be described by terms like “angry,” “male,” “rural,” “bigoted,” and “racist.” Fox News addicts, defined by me and addiction professionals as people who watch more than three hours of Fox News opinion programming per day, span job descriptions but share income brackets, education levels, and geography.
What unites them is not their shared “isms and ists” but the innate DNA-driven need to:
Build and feel positive self-esteem, and rebuild shattered or bruised egos in a world that does not fit their worldview and calls them scum for their non-PC sins.
Feel they are part of an important cause much bigger and more important than themselves.
Put traditional white culture and Christian Evangelicalism before Inside-the-Beltway “swamp dweller” conservative ideology.
Put “localism” before globalism.
Get respect for their Retro American culture, which is disrespected constantly by traditional political media, from Behind-the-Beltway Washington, from the “liberal” political news media, the television entertainment, and movie industry, and of course the higher education academic industry.
And, most important, to have all their nonpolitically or culturally correct non-PC words/feelings/beliefs normalized and proven righteously correct on the most powerful thing in their lives—their home TV set.
Everyone in the media seems to think this “crazy right-wing Fox News uncle” syndrome and estranged family situation affects just a small group; but the actual data tells a much different and frankly shocking story.
It turned out selling white tribal fear, hatred, blame, and resentment as a cathartic entertainment product under the pretense of news was just what a whole lot of Retro Americans needed in a new century that many don’t really understand.
It turned out that providing a hermetically sealed alternative digital universe where Retro Americans feel safe and sheltered from being stigmatized as bigots, racists, homophobes, or backward-thinking twentieth-century dunces by self-proclaimed “color blind” and heterogeneous “we’re the all-inclusive party” liberals is one hell of a business model.
MY FINAL LESSON LEARNED
By the end of 2012, I had learned what the Fox News tribal warfare playbook was and how it worked. What I did not know is why it worked so well and what real damage it was inflicting. Truth be told, I still thought the whole Fox News thing was a harmless partisan World Wrestling Entertainment spin-off network: a highly choreographed show for lonely old flyover state right-wingers with nothing better to do.
With the median age of Fox News viewers at sixty-eight, I still felt like we were giving them a cheap thrill and a way to get their heart started and blood boiling again. But by 2016, I was fairly stunned that no veteran Fox News insider or investigative media had come clean and told the real behind-the-scenes story about Fox News and our powerful brand of tribal identity pornography. Like all journalists I’d read and studied Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media. I understood exactly what he meant when he said, “The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium that is of any extension of ourselves result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
I understood what McLuhan’s “new scale” meant. I understood that he was specifically referring to electronic media, which shaped collective, “tribe”-based identities.
But what no one seemed to have yet grasped were the social and personal consequences and the sheer scale of this new ubiquitous feedback loop. This massively scaled, self-reinforcing feedback loop is truly, as McLuhan said, a very real extension of us. More accurately, it reflects our cultural and political identities.
It was created and mastered by the king of red state psychological warfare Roger Ailes and company, which now reaches (via social media multiplier effect) the one hundred million self-siloed Americans locked into algorithmically selected echo chambers of their own cultural and political cognitive confirmation bias.
I’d also read and reread Noam Chomsky’s classic book Manufacturing Consent. I thought any good journalist that had read his groundbreaking work was fully aware (to paraphrase Chomsky) that audience deception was baked into just about everything in American life. So why hadn’t some smart media reporter figured out and reported on our little scam?
As Matt Taibbi points out—with my comments in parentheses—in his 2019 book Hate, Inc., “Manufactured Consent’s central idea was that censorship (and embedded political propaganda and emotional manipulation) in the United States was not overt, but covert. The key to this deception (grift) is that Americans, every day, see vigorous debate going on in the press. This deceives them into thinking propaganda (and emotional manipulation) is absent. Manufacturing Consent explains that the debate you’re watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it. It’s a subtle, highly idiosyncratic process that you can stare at for a lifetime and not see.”
Tim Dickinson published “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory” in Rolling Stone and described the creation of the most profitable propaganda machine in history.
Okay, so Chomsky, McLuhan, Dickinson, and Taibbi get it—but what happened to the rest of the media? At this point, you must understand that I knew a lot more than the average on-air contributor about the real behind-the-scenes story and FNC’s programming shenanigans. I lived it, helped produce it, and I wrote it and performed it thousands of times. Also, since 2000, unlike other paid FNC contributors, I was required to be at the New York City FNC studios every week to tape my show, Bulls & Bears.
I saw up close how the sausage was made. I had a few insiders that leaked me the “forbidden” daily e-memos from Ailes and John Moody, our SVP of News at Fox News, that basically told the producers:
What stories to cover and not cover.
How Ailes/Moody wanted these big-emotion trigger stories covered.
What was the right-wing slant Roger/Moody and the White House wanted.
Who were the good guy heroes to praise and the bad guys to attack.
For eight years “The Memo” also told us what the Bush White House thought reporters, hosts, and producers should talk about.
I never asked why I was the only co-star of my weekly show required to be in New York City. I found out why later, and it will make sense, trust me. (It was not my stunning looks.)
I also learned a lot more than most about the Fox News tribal identity activation and validation playbook because I gladly served as a guest anchor for vacationing anchors. I wrote my own monologues for those shows—and I gotta admit that was a lot of fun.
And don’t forget—by using the secret Ailes/Moody Memo and becoming
a go-to guest host, it was actually part of my job to dupe the other journalists and liberal guests. Obviously, I had the whole tribal-identity porn-star televangelist act down cold enough for the producers to trust me to perform it on live TV. Still, with my real job as a financial journalist/equities analyst/newsletter publisher (www.transformityresearch.com ), the analyst inside me was always curious to learn more about Fox’s tribal ID TV production cult secrets. I knew there was so much more they were not telling me.
Money talks, too, of course, and I was hoping to position myself for a multimillion dollar cable TV hosting job when the next FNC opinion host blew himself up by saying something really racist or libelous on live TV and spooked brand advertisers (think Glenn Beck and his “Obama hates white people” gaffe in 2011).
About halfway through President Obama’s second term, my snooping and quest for a full-time Fox News opinion anchor gig had grown into a mild obsession.
Note: Although the original big bang for Fox News tribal identity activation TV was the late 1990s Lewinsky scandal/Clinton impeachment run-up—when thoughtful political debate in America transformed from “Who do you believe” to “Whose side are you on?”—it was the day after Obama was elected POTUS that Fox News 2.0, “The Obama Bashing Network” strategy, started and the ratings exploded.
By 2013 I had sponsored hundreds of late night/early morning cocktails and conducted off-the-record conversations with enough Fox News opinion show hosts, producers, and executives (plus I had hosted enough shows by then) to finally decode the last of the production and content secrets they were all sworn to keep silent. Those stories and lessons I have recreated here, focusing on the most meaningful.