by Tobin Smith
Replaces the very negative feelings of the self-esteem mutilation and resentment the average Fox News viewer gets from the various economic and cultural traumas they have endured.
And is a psychological antidote and prophylactic that protects their feelings hurt by the endless cultural beat down they viscerally feel from “the liberal” media, entertainment, and academic world who can’t help but rub their face in yet another of their moral or behavioral deficiencies.
The magic draw of the Fox News tribal identity activation and validation grift is that it delivers to the viewer the positive self-esteem feeling that measurably gives their damaged ego a genuine boost. The Fox News junkie gets that shot of self-esteem when they see their cultural hero prove their political, social, class, racial, and religious resentments are not only justified but righteous.
After I understood this reality, I had one more question to answer: “If right-wing talk radio was the gateway drug to Fox News/Trump TV addiction, what is high-def tribal activation TV porn a gateway drug to?”
Unfortunately, in the most extreme cases we now have the answer—letter bombs and synagogue murder. Full stop.
I hope Foxocracy, in a small way, gives Fox News advertisers a dozen or more undeniable reasons why they must run, not walk, their valuable brand identity away from their association with FNC’s destructive lifestyle brand of political tribalism as well.
What we know more than ever today is this fact: If you have the tribal identity activation and validation playbook and have the money, there are billions to be made in the tribal fear and hate video porn business. The endless supply of emotionally traumatized viewers hungry for revenge and cathartic blame shifting is just too easy to seduce and addict with the ultra-powerful drug of self-esteem salvation.
Let’s be real about this—these are huge for-profit public corporations; creating and distributing tribal activation video content is now extremely profitable.
And at the very least, let’s all finally admit that when nearly a third of American adults have stopped speaking to hopelessly estranged parents, brothers, sisters, and longtime friends, we have a large and genuine cultural crisis (and a public health crisis too) in America of our own making.
CHAPTER 5
Why the Emotional Impact of Fox News Is Ten Times More Powerful than Conservative Radio
First, I don’t mean in any way to deny the political power of traditional conservative radio—it is a large wing of the American Foxocracy. I had a talk radio show for many years and did a lot of radio with the one and only Steve Bannon before he went bat shit crazy—I know the impact of talk radio—but it pales in tribal impact and mind share comparison to Fox News.
Many people have asked me, “Yea Toby—I get your Foxocracy thing—but man—Rush, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage—those guys are on for many hours every day. The ratings say they cumulatively reach forty million. Rush has been on since 1988—he makes $70 million a year—even O’Reilly at the top only made $8 million a year. Why isn’t conservative talk radio the real powerhouse?”
The number one reason for the smaller emotional impact is that most talk radio is consumed in a car while the driver is driving. Obviously performing the most complicated activity the vast majority of human beings perform in life while listening to Rush Limbaugh is different than sitting in your favorite chair watching a wide screen TV with an adult beverage.
Second, there is little or no social media redistribution or retargeting—and that is where 90 percent of Fox News content is consumed and how they get to one hundred million Americans per month. If you see Levin or Beck in your social media feed, it’s from a TV program.
ADDICTIVE POWER AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
To be fair, Fox News is by no way the first entertainment company to gamify its content for user addiction. (Can you say Candy Crush or Words with Friends?) In fact, Sean Parker, a co-founder and former CEO of Facebook, admitted in late 2017 that the entire premise of Facebook was explicitly to exploit the well-known vulnerabilities of human psychology.
As this book points out in significant detail, Fox News was engaging in mass exploitation of our psychological flaws and human nature a long time before the first line of Facebook code was ever written. My beef with Fox News is unlike Sean Parker of Facebook, no one from Fox News has ever owned up to its exploitation scheme.
Parker also revealed that the addictive premise of Facebook—he too calls it a “social-validation feedback loop”—is “exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like me would come up with.” A like or a comment on a post sends users “a little dopamine hit,” he said, encouraging them to post again. “The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway,” he said.
Parker’s Big Point: “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or two billion people and . . . it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
I’m certainly not God, Sean, but I can tell you the magnitude of addiction to the Fox News tribal hate-and-blame-porn feedback loop and what that addiction is doing to the brains of millions of mostly elderly white right-wing viewers: It’s addicting and desocializing them by the hundreds of thousands.
Third, Nielsen says nearly 58.8 million people listen to AM radio per week. About seventeen million of them listen to at least one conservative talk show according to Arbitron ratings—which is about 80 percent less reach than the combined cable/online/social media platform for Fox News.
Fourth, as mentioned before, cognitive science research for decades has found that when it comes to emotional intensity, TV is ten times more emotionally impactful than radio because humans communicate emotions through facial expressions and gestures, not voice (conservative radio jocks aren’t singing!).
Control of our expressions and gestures lies in the brain stem and the amygdala which are beyond consciousness (and we will get to the big role the amygdala plays in Fox News’s fear-based engagement strategy in a few pages). Even the tiniest of facial cues are important—60 to 80 percent of people can recognize an emotion just by looking at the eyes of another person. The most powerful emotions recognized by most cognitive scientists are fear, anger/hate, sadness, joy, surprise, and disgust. Voice only discloses an anger/hate emotion and in a significantly less impactful way.
Fifth, our brain has “mirror neurons.” When we see our tribal hero happy or distressed, it makes our mirror neurons cause similar feelings. That is why the Fox News host in the cold open almost always has a look of distress and unhappiness on his or her face.
Sixth, the conservative talk radio demographic is aging. It’s the seventy-year-old, white, Protestant farmer in a small-town Retro America who’s listening to these guys because he’s driving in his car.
But from a psychological level, the most important difference is seeing the eyes, facial cues, and gestures of your partisan enemy that ramps up the emotional engagement a hundred times. Conservative talk radio is a monologue—with a few fellow angry right-wing callers. All the right-wing anger jocks may sound like demagogues (because they are), but there is no antagonist on set and on the air. It’s seeing the tribal enemy’s face and observing all the emotional cues that make the Fox News white tribal identity performance art so impactful to white tribal partisans.
From a political, cultural, and now White House mindshare perspective, there is no contest. Congressmen and senators and the Beltway Foxocracy members are not listening to talk radio unless they are driving to work or home. And certainly no conservative radio hosts have the ear of the POTUS like Fox News hosts—except Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, who have daily radio shows. But to left- and right-wing politicians and political operatives, they a
ppear on Fox News as a free branding event.
Why do Rush and Hannity earn so much more money than top Fox News hosts? Because their programs are syndicated to more than two thousand radio stations. Syndicated means that each radio station pays a monthly licensing fee—but more importantly, the distributor for Rush or Hannity’s radio show gets an allocation of radio ad inventory to sell nationally. Those national spots go for a much higher gross cost than a local pizza joint with a two-for-one pizza special ad.
The big radio syndication networks have relatively low production costs—a jock and a mike—and their biggest cost by far is the revenue split with their syndicated radio hosts.
But here is the biggest issue of all that separates tribal radio hate porn with TV: There is no Foxhole offline/online tribal identity porn spiral. I have messages from many Foxhole victims that say “yea my dad or brother listen to Limbaugh or Savage while they are driving, but they don’t come home talking about the show. The show keeps them company while they are driving. But after the nightly Fox News binge-watching, my dad/brother/mom is on fire—they are all spun up and loaded for libtard bear. Then they get on social media to chat with their Fox News buddies and vent more steam.”
This is the enormous difference in conservative radio and the Fox News white tribal partisan identity activation and amplification radicalization spiral—it’s so much faster and has so much more intensity in general.
And look—I am not even talking about the Alex Jones conspiracy nuts or Breitbart.com “alt right” counterculture groups. I am not talking about the white supremacist hate groups—they too have online radicalization spiral feedback loops—but they are extreme zealots. America has always had significant counterculture conspiracy nuts and KKK and more extreme white supremacy hate groups.
What is most striking with the Foxhole white tribal partisan intensity spiral is how normal these people were before they fell into the predatory Fox News seduction. Here is again the Foxhole spiral in real life.
I first saw the scope of the epidemic of family isolation and estrangement caused by Fox News brain in the 2016 documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad by filmmaker Jen Senko. When I saw this movie, it sickened me that I had been a part of the Fox News “fair and balanced” scam for so many years. As David Alm of Forbes concluded in his review of the film, “The Brainwashing of My Dad isn’t really about Frank Senko or even the media that hijacked his mind for thirty years. It’s about all of us, and how easily manipulated we can be under the pretense of information.”
The massive difference in the emotional and behavioral impact of conservative angry rant monologue radio and Fox News white tribal identity porn is:
The FNC white tribal warfare performance production playbook.
The emotionally powerful impact of seeing the face of your white tribal partisan hero and more importantly your mortal tribal enemy.
The cumulative power of consuming thousands of hours of emotionally predatory white tribal identity porn.
The cumulative emotional power of the offline-online Foxhole Hot Pot moral, cultural, and political digital spiral effect.
And finally, conservative talk radio does not produce sad stories like these for millions of American families living with Foxholes:
“My mother is hooked on this tribal hate porn stuff. She lives alone and watches Fox all day every day and it has changed her so drastically that it has made my brother and I essentially cut off all contact. Any remark counter to the right-wing media narrative will cause her to turn into a vengeful crusader on a quest from God to purge those thoughts from her children.
“To explain the depth of the hold this stuff has on people, especially older people, I’m an Iraq vet (2003–2004) and she called me a conspiracy theorist for making the entirely true statement that there were no WMDs there. What would I know, right? Sean Hannity apparently got more classified briefings than me, or something.”
—Christopher Cramer
“Brother and Dad. And Mom and other brother. And extended family. It started with my brother, but he kind of infected my parents with it. My mom got more into it when she learned to use email and communicated with my Aunt, who is completely slavishly devoted to Fox News. They say I’m the brainwashed one, yet my brother bought every one of Glenn Beck’s books. Both my father and my brothers bought guns after Sandy Hook. I’ve never given a dime to any political organization. It’s hard to see them manipulated so easily. Just today my dad started laughing at his own insinuation that a housekeeper was an illegal immigrant, I couldn’t say why.
“It’s been the most painful thing in my life watching this happening to my family.”
—Mick Smith
“I lost my mother and brother to Fox News. Dad, thankfully, seems unscathed, but he’s always been more logical, whereas my mom and brother are much more emotional. I love my family, but I find it difficult to interact with them. We have an unspoken agreement to never bring up politics and religion, but sometimes one of them will go off on me, call me a ‘stupid unthinking liberal,’ and proceed to lecture me on how Obama is a Muslim intent on ‘destroying the glory of America.’
“It’s frightening and incredibly sad. I’ve had to hang up the phone on my mom once, when she started screaming at me because I couldn’t see how Obama was using ‘illegals’ to bring Ebola into America so that he could wipe out all good Christians.
“I miss my family.”
—Danielle
As mentioned, in researching this book and in response to my blog article “Confessions of a Fox News Hitman,” I have read thousands of comments from people with geriatric parents or relatives telling a story about the destructive impact that Fox News social derangement syndrome had on their families.
I find many Americans, like I was, are completely unaware of the extent and virulence of Fox News social derangement and the sheer number of Foxholes.
A lot of elderly grandparents and older parents are going to find that if their choice is yelling along with Bill O’Reilly vs. having a relationship with their children or grandchildren, well, it’s a choice they’ve made.
I would only add that based on my own in-depth research on the issue, Fox News addicts suffering from desocialized Foxhole syndrome truly are not consciously aware that their desocialized behavior is the primary cause for their estrangement from family and friends. In fact, my research shows quite the opposite: These poor folks can’t for the life of them understand how they gave birth to or became friends with “such idiot libtards.”
Reader John Dore talks in the same thread about how Fox News addicts who turn into those with Fox News derangement disorder “flip a switch” and accelerate from normal everyday conservatives to tribal-grade partisan fanatics:
I deal with this regarding my grandparents. We were always close and, despite being conservative, they never really brought up politics—we always talked about history or art or the trips they took or other interesting things. They volunteered in the community, worked their gardens, supported NPR, and were active in the church. Always loved hearing from them. . . .
The election of Obama timed with some health issues really flipped a switch. They now spend a lot more time at home watching Fox, listening to AM radio, and getting caught up in email forwards. I used to get one interesting, thoughtful, interesting, even funny email from my grandparents a week about family or whatever was going on in their life. . . .
I now get, no joke, 10–15 emails a day about the coming Communist takeover of the country, or how we’re already doomed because of Hispanic immigration, or whatever.
The change in the child-parent relationship with a toxically radicalized parent is the most common theme in the letters I have received. This comment in the American Conservative thread, from “Another Matt,” is prevalent in most forums and comments I have read:
It’s understandable not to want to be around a toxically unpleasant person. It’s even worse when that person has a temper or violent tendencies. My dad is one such p
erson.
He’s going through a divorce due to the Fox News playing 25/8, his now extreme religious views, and the temper and lack of care for any of my mom’s thoughts or feelings. My brothers blame her for not putting her foot down or not going head to head with him; the latter always just made him angrier. . . .
In my dreams, though, we have fist fights.
In forum after forum, many readers have poignantly summed up the Foxhole derangement spiral and the brutal impact of learned tribal fear, rage, blame, and hatred on family dynamics.
Key Point: Foxhole social derangement is heartbreakingly sad. And worse, if our survey research is at all close to accurate—if one in five Americans knows at least one person who exhibits toxic Foxhole radicalized behavior as a result of their Fox News addiction—this degenerative disorder is far more present in the families of Fox News addicts than has ever been reported.
If pollster Frank Luntz’s numbers are correct, nearly 33 percent of American adults report they are estranged from at least one close family member or friend over “irreconcilable political differences.” That adds up to over eighty million adults in our country.
I cannot overemphasize that the comments and evidence I’ve shared above about the impact of the real-life toxicity of Fox News brain disorder in American families are hardly unique. Google the phrase “How to survive the holidays with a Trump supporter” and you will get 2.4 million hits.
Social scientists used to describe radicalized and militant political rhetoric on both the right and left as isolated extremism, but clearly, another reason for the explosion in Fox News brain is what I and others at Fox News have done to America: We normalized and mainstreamed radicalized right-wing political tribalism and brought the most powerful televised tribal identity activation porn to the most emotionally vulnerable people in America.
What did we think would happen?