by Tobin Smith
In other words, after the financial wreckage in Fox Country, we had a new large and politically/culturally engaged tribal market in America. Broke, angry, and resentful white working-class Americans, living mostly in the 2,626 Trump-voting counties, would channel their tribal, cultural, and racial hate and resentment into watching Fox News to see the faces of the hated East and West Coast elites who they deeply believed had screwed up their lives.
Key Point: Fox News’s new audience was already fearful about the continuity of their jobs, their way of life, and their future when they discovered Fox News post-2008. Our job at Fox News was to give audience members a name and face to blame for their economic trauma, their anguish, and their fears. When we did, Fox News viewers got the most powerful feeling and drug of all: permission to stop blaming themselves for the downward trajectories of their families’ lives.
Ah, relief and endorphins. You know that great feeling of relief you get when you find out you did not do that stupid or careless thing you thought you did (you know—like leave your kid in the car)? Or better—that the dumb thing you did or said did not have the bad consequences you feared?
Well—that feeling of relief actually comes from a rush of the brain chemical endorphin. Endorphin is nature’s pain relief chemical—it’s stimulated by physical or mental pain. It evolved for survival; we needed it to switch on when we got hurt but need to scramble out of danger, for example.
Neuroscientists tell us the addictive power of an endorphin rush is second only in power to the opiate-like power of serotonin (released when you feel your judgment and belief is proven right). Here is a perfect example of how Fox News produces a tribal fear-and-blame pornography segment.
HAZLETON, PA, AND THE FEAR-AND-BLAME PORN DELUGE
Yes, the election and Great Recession came in 2008, but I see FNC’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Hazleton, Pennsylvania, “Immigration Act” in 2006 as the watershed moment for Fox News’s new kind of right-wing tribal porn programming.
For what seemed an eternity, one segment we did over and over and over again on the Saturday shows and prime-time opinion-porn programs was, in effect, various riffs on the fear and blame theme of, “Is your small city about to be Hazletoned?”
In case you don’t remember, Hazleton was one of the many small towns in the Steel Belt that lost its steel plants and good-paying hourly middle-class wage jobs. Hazleton was merely emblematic of the end of America’s twentieth-century economy and of the rapid ascension of America’s post-industrial economy; we could have used two thousand other small Steel Belt cities as examples.
In Hazleton in 2002, the mega-meat processor Cargill Industries opened a large beef-processing facility near the town along with some distribution centers including an Amazon distribution center. In 2006, Hazleton’s mayor, Lou Barletta, championed an ordinance—the first in the nation—penalizing employers and landlords for dealing with illegal immigrants. The courts blocked the ordinance from taking effect, but Mayor Barletta became an overnight folk hero in upstate Pennsylvania. For weeks, Fox News loaded TV screens with pictures of this small town because of Barletta’s actions. Other small-city mayors looking for Fox News face time followed the same script.
In a National Geographic story about the incident, Michele Norris of All Things Considered radio fame dug into some of the feelings that white Americans expressed to her:
It is an indisputable fact: All was not fine and dandy in Hazleton before legal Hispanics started moving to Hazleton from New York and New Jersey to take the low-paying meatpacking and warehouse jobs.
But by 2006, the town had been rescued from economic disaster by lawful and much-needed out-of-state immigration. Lo and behold, new jobs begat new home purchases, which begat new service stores, and then Dominican and Puerto Rican dining establishments opened.
The problem was the original white townsfolk not only did not share in much of this new prosperity, they “felt they did not recognize their hometown and were not safe downtown.” (The townspeople in the late nineteenth century must have felt the same way when those dirty and disgusting Irish, Italians, and Germans—the great-grandparents of the 2006 white Hazletonians—first emigrated to the city for the brutal steel-working jobs, but I digress.)
The good Lord knows we showed the same damn Hazleton stats and B-roll video every week on Fox News. These stats come from Binyan Appleton’s New York Times article on Hazleton in 2016: “In the 2000 census, just 4.9 percent of Hazleton’s population had identified as Hispanic. A decade later, that figure was 37 percent. By 2016, the most recent data available, 56 percent of the city’s population said they were non-white Hispanic. Hazleton today is now a majority-Hispanic city, just like the nearby cities of Reading and Allentown.”
Look at the fear and blame themes in the Hazleton story. This is pure tribal-fear-outrage-blame-porn gold at Fox News, as reported in a recent NPR article.
On change being uncomfortable, no matter where it’s coming from: “When people talked about it, it was often the notion of suddenly being outnumbered—that’s a word that I heard over and over and over again. Going to the doctor’s office and suddenly looking around and realizing that everybody else is Hispanic. Going to the local Walmart . . . and realizing that, ‘Boy, the things they’re selling in the produce aisle are different,’ or ‘There’s a whole aisle where everything is in two languages, and I never noticed that before.’ . . . ‘Suddenly it feels like this community that I knew so well’—so what they were saying is that they don’t feel like it’s ‘theirs’ anymore.”
On race as the subtext: “They wouldn’t necessarily say ‘those brown people,’ or ‘those Latino people.’ There would often be sort of proxy for that—‘the food is different, the music is different, the town feels different.’ There was a large ‘threat’ narrative—safety is a big issue here.”
Hazleton became the poster child for the next twelve years of Fox News fear-and-blame-porn segments in all its living brown color. Tucker Carlson even did a whole show in early 2018 on Hazleton eighteen years later. For Fox News, Hazleton is the tribal fear-and-blame-porn gift that keeps on giving.
Note: Despite my lengthy macroeconomic background, as a paid analyst and contributor on Fox News I was expected in our right/left opinion debates to toe the right-wing line on this “terrible injustice of immigrants taking the jobs of white working class Americans” (read: white working class Americans).
From an economist’s perspective, I argued the side of “creative destruction” and how the natural regeneration of blighted regions is the normal process in free-market capitalism, in which new, hungrier immigrants are willing to take hard physical jobs that the establishment citizens don’t want.
To my dismay—but not surprise—my contribution time to these segments was always cut short by the segment producer and EP. Many times, the “Hazleton again” segment producer would tell me, “Tobe, I need you to play ball on this segment. Tell your viewers how this economic horror is coming to their small town soon too. I need ya to play ball with me on this one.”
My fellow former FNC contributor Linda Chavez tells the same story. Although the former Reagan White House official was a longtime Fox conservative contributor, Linda told me that as a paid conservative Fox News contributor, she basically became a nonperson if she made a case for an ideologically heretical position on live Fox News TV.
Linda took a position in favor of more legal immigration—a position that had been consistent for more than thirty years and that was based on what she told me was her “strong belief in markets over central government planning.”
As Linda told me the story: “One producer basically told me that it was ‘confusing’ to have me on to discuss the subject because conservatives were supposed to be for less immigration and liberals for more. Another time, O’Reilly spoke in my earpiece from New York when I was in the DC studio to warn me not to confuse everybody with a lot of facts and statistics. ‘You have your facts and I have mine, so keep it general.�
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Key Point: If you are paid to be a conservative Fox News contributor, you are expected to play your role in Fox’s performance art episode. If you are an unpaid conservative and don’t speak the accepted conservative talking points on air, your number is lost and your career as a Fox talking head is over. Period.
QUICK KEY FOX NEWS LESSON LEARNED: “THE BALL GAME”
Now is a good time to take a break and get into the ways Fox News producers fix the outcome of our “fair-and-balanced” debates for the right-wing contributors to win the “debate” in the eyes of the home viewer.
On the seventeenth-floor hallways of the FNC opinion-programming cubicles, I would constantly hear the phrase, “So here’s the ball game.” At Fox News, “the ball game” is the institutional euphemism for the conservative-vs.-liberal debate set up to ensure the conservative side wins by making sure the viewer hears what the producer knows or was told the audience wants to hear to feel the self-esteem rush from being once again tribally validated and victorious.
Yes, folks—you could say FNC tribal identity porn is really nothing more than highly scripted and choreographed confirmation bias performance art with introductory notes of fear and blame added to the recipe.
The Hazleton segments are a perfect example for a basic overview.
In order to have an optimal ball game—a segment in which the left-winger comes off as a bleeding-heart liberal the Fox News viewers love to hate and watch us right-wing heroes mop the floor with their snowflake’s liberal tears—the producers manipulate a set of multiple outcome levers.
The first lever of rigged opinion program production is the selection of the liberal crash-dummy prop du jour. One key to the stacked-deck Fox News opinion panel ball game is that the segment producer at Fox News is not trying to find the world’s expert on labor economics or post-industrial economics to debate us right-wing tribal heroes. The producer actually does the opposite—trying to match the weakest and lamest but most stereotypical “libtard” crash dummy prop against the most reliable conservative contributor possible (or sometimes against an unpaid right-wing guest who is on the show because she is a bona fide expert on the topic). This strategy is all about setting up the right tone and cadence for the choreographed emotional roller coaster of fear followed by tribal validation required to deliver the right-wing happy dance. It’s fair to say that one of the big differences between tribal identity porn on MSNBC or CNN versus that on Fox News is the quality of the opposition.
Key Point: At Fox News, the liberal is always just a prop for the scene that has been carefully written and choreographed. Remember, a big part of the Fox News opinion-panel scam is not just the strategy to never stage a fair fight: The strategy is to make sure the stereotypical liberal character is beaten before the segment ever airs.
Take the normal Hazleton debate segment. The cold-open B-roll video shows the town overrun by Hispanic businesses, and audio plays of the mayor spouting off to the effect of, “We will not let our town be taken over,” followed by a few shots of Hispanic-looking young men sitting around doing nothing. In tribal TV these images are called the “racial dog whistle shot.” Dog whistle shots are meant to silently communicate non-PC things that the producers believe many partisan audience members believe—in this case that Hispanic men are mostly lazy and prefer to sit around doing nothing.
In this sequenced performance art segment, the host turns first to the liberal pundit and asks, “How can you defend the hostile takeover of Hazleton by outsider immigrants from New York and New Jersey?” Before the segment is taped, the panel members have submitted their points of view (POVs) on the issue, which the producer has theoretically distributed to all the participants so they know what both their competition and their allies are going to say in the segment and don’t duplicate their talking points.
All political and business talk shows practice this protocol, but what was different at Fox News from the other networks I have appeared on was that my producer often asked me to “play ball,” meaning to take the side against the liberal, especially when I agreed with the producer’s chosen narrative. When I said yes (which was almost always), I got a whole set of new facts and figures from the producer right before the segment was taped that were never shared with the designated liberal for the segment.
The POV protocol at most TV networks is sacrosanct—everyone on the panel assumes they got the same opinions and talking points shared preshow. Not at Fox News—for more than a decade I got new data and talking points from the office printer an hour or less before we taped my show in New York City at 6:00 p.m. Friday night. In fact, I was contractually obligated to be in NYC for 90 percent of my appearances—as what I found out later was the “designated hit man” or the one the producer and host could count on to knock out the normally pathetic libtard.
Why did I play along? Because they were paying me $5,000 a week to be the sure-thing “hit man.” The hit man’s job is to make sure the segment audience got what they came for: yet another validation of their tribal beliefs and a dramatic exciting-enough victory to get the happy brain drugs automatically flowing.
I was the segment producer’s hit man most of the time because, unlike the other paid non-left-wing contributors, I was contractually obligated to be in New York every week for the live and taped shows, and I was available to the segment producers up to the last few minutes. That meant if they were not sure they had choreographed a “famous death” for the always solo liberal on the panel, they needed me to be the designated liberal “hit man” on the segment—again the guy to whom they would give data that was not passed on to the liberal crash dummy. As I mentioned I was also slipped the Ailes/Moody talking point memo when I came into the NYC offices—most times I knew the slant the producer was looking for.
Many times, I was tapped on the shoulder at the last minute and ordered to say what the producers felt was the most convincing case to be made for the right-wing ideology to once again be validated based on some new reporting or late afternoon Friday events.
Key Point: Again, in almost every opinion debate I participated in at Fox News, the token liberal was only a prop. The liberal came in with the talking points that I knew were coming because I had already read and studied them. If the liberal guest deviated much from the line of argument he or she had submitted before appearing, they were left off the producer’s call list in the future.
In contrast, my talking points were usually new and refined because they were scripted, and I had been coached by the segment producer and had received my hit-man lines. One of the reasons was our show Bulls & Bears was the first show in the 10:00–12:00 “Business Block” and thus the most important show for keeping the audience from the 7:00–10:00 Fox & Friends weekend program.
Repeat: At Fox News, there was no such thing as a fair-and-balanced fight on most segments I performed in; almost all were staged debates. The liberal antagonist most often was not aware of my case because, unlike the cases of the other right-wing heroes, it came from the segment producer and had not been shared with anyone else before the show.
So in other words, we not only duped our audience, Fox News also duped the poor left-wing piñatas we invited to our weekly show. They were nothing but ritual sacrifices at the altar of right-wing tribal confirmation-bias performance art. Make no mistake: Fox News is very good at audience duping—it was almost an art form. We told ’em one hundred times a day what we brought to their living room was a “fair and balanced” discussion of the week’s most important issues to right-wing partisans. I was there for fourteen years and two thousand episodes of “fair and balanced” opinion debate—I never was in one of the rare times the producers screwed up and we actually had a fair debate.
Blinding Flash of the Obvious: Today, the core Fox News viewer—and its proxy, the Trump base—holds a view of the world and life that is virtually 100 percent different from that held by the top 20 percent of Americans, who live primarily in the thriving knowledge and innovation reg
ions of the country. And, lest we forget, the top 20 percent of American households by income also control 95 percent of the wealth in America and pay 95 percent of the income taxes. They, obviously, are not the target today of FNC’s tribal identity and angst programming.
I’ve come to call the geography containing Fox News’s core viewers “America’s Desperate Households” to represent the spectrum of dashed and damaged hopes and dreams that this subgroup of America has dealt with for the past thirty years.
Key Point: By far, the most potent and addictive feeling I delivered for too many of the Fox News core middle-class and white working-class elderly audience was not the momentary feeling of tribal victory or vindication. For the Fox News viewers living from day to day in financial distress, the most intense, longer-lasting feeling is the dopamine and serotonin rush they get from personal absolution.
Absolution is defined as “the formal release from guilt, obligation, or punishment.” All religions are built from a stone quarry of absolution, and I have found that the devotion for Fox News felt by a majority of financially struggling Fox News addicts is based on the absolution they grant themselves after watching Fox News.
Key Point: Evangelicalism, Fox News viewers’ religion of choice, gives many the feeling that they will experience spiritual absolution from their sins in the afterlife. Here on earth, however, Fox News’s version of right-wing tribal Evangelicalism gives its viewers profound feelings of personal absolution while they are still breathing. The belief that your lost opportunity and dimmed hopes for prosperity are not your fault is one of the most addicting feelings of all.
Fortuitously for Fox News, that feeling of absolution needs constant reinforcement.