Not Just Fox
Yes, they are outright liars, but facts can be undermined in other ways than outright lies
Most of us know that Peggy Noonan wrote Ronald Reagan’s speeches. But before there was Noonan, there was Roger Ailes, the founder and guiding light of Fox News. Ailes, then a freelance consultant, was called in to coach Ronald Reagan before his second debate with Walter Mondale. The GOP think of Reagan as “the great communicator” now, but the first debate had been a disaster: Reagan seemed tired and confused, and there was anxiety among his team that his age was becoming an obstacle. Against all advice, Ailes urged Reagan to go right for it rather than avoid it. And so a line that may well have won Reagan the presidency was prepared:
“…and I want you to know that I will not make an age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and experience.”
It was probably Ailes’ most successful application of his philosophy of television to politics: People don’t want to be talked down to by politicians or newscasters. Rather, they want “to be made comfortable in every communications situation…So when you and I communicate, we are unconsciously judged by our audience against the standards set by Johnny Carson and Dan Rather…relaxed, informal, crisp, and entertaining.”[i]
This became Reagan’s signature style, and it had nothing to do with expertise, experience, intelligence, or ability to solve problems. He was our first television-trained POTUS, who knew how to make viewers feel comfortable. And while Trump scoffed at “feel good” liberals, the fact is that he too was a master at making his “base” feel good, as Reagan was before him. And it was the secret of Fox News, too: not just the ideology, but the creation of comfort and warm, listened-to feelings among those huge audiences feeling alienated by the “coastal” elitism of stations like MSNBC, which Roger Ailes argued, “left a lot of America on the outside.” [ii] Taking advantage of an already-existing duality in values and deliberately appealing to those who felt dismissed or looked-down on, Fox ultimately widened the chasm that characterizes what pundits now refer to, casually, as our “polarized” political culture.
Fox also changed—for the entire cable news world, not just the crowd that frequented Hannity—what was permissible, what was familiar, what kept people from changing the channel, rivetted to sensational “breaking news,” out-size personalities, the excitement of politics as horse-race, the “optics” of gaffes and everything else that makes me despair of what tv news has become. Previously, the news came to us via newscasters like Walter Cronkite who at least tried to stay faithful to the ideal of the “news that’s fit to print”: non-sensationalizing, non-dramatizing, and as grounded in established fact as possible. By the time of Bill Clinton’s troubles, tabloid news had begun encroaching into “liberal” broadcasting now feeling the need to compete with Fox. It hardly seems startling nowadays, but it was unprecedented in 1992 when CNN broadcast live Gennifer Flowers’ press conference detailing her affair with Clinton.
But the blame isn’t to be placed only on Fox. Culturally, we had been blurring the line between the restraint of “the news that’s fit to print” and creating entertaining, sensational stories for some time before Fox made it official protocol.
When I was still teaching, one of the films I began my “TV Culture” course with was James Brooks’ 1987 Film Broadcast News. I happen to love this film, but I used it in this particular course for illustrative purposes.
The film poses an ethical dilemma. Attractive, good-natured, and morally flexible anchorman Tom (William Hurt), filming an interview with a survivor of date rape, tears up as she tells her story. The entire crew realizes it’s a powerful moment; the problem is, the interview was shot with only one camera, and when Tom’s eyes filled with tears, the camera was pointed at the woman telling her story. After a moment of disappointment, Tom comes up with a solution: He can bring himself to tears again and they can film it this time. Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s not as though his reaction was a fiction. “After all, I did it the first time,” Tom reassures the crew. But old-school journalist Jane (Holly Hunter), when she finds out, doesn’t see it that way. In fact, she’s outraged, calls his action “god-damn awful,” and breaks up with Tom over his breach with broadcast ethics. In faking tears—even though it replicated what actually had happened—“You crossed the line,” she tells Tom. Tom’s reply is probably the most trenchant point in the movie: “The line? They keep moving the little sucker all the time.”
My students, as if proving Tom’s point, found Jane’s actions ridiculous. Here was this handsome hunk, offering a trip to Hawaii during which they could have fun sex, drink tropical drinks, and argue the respective merits of their positions, and Jane was turning him down? Over faking some tears? What was the big deal?
We had this discussion in 2005. And I have to say, I would have gone with Tom. But my students wouldn’t even have argued with him. By then, the idea that Tom’s actions were morally questionable was a quaint—and quite boring—relic to them. They had just watched a clip of Anderson Cooper, wandering through the rubble of Hurricane Katrina, picking through people’s scattered belongings. We see his anguish mount as he picks up personal items and children’s toys. He begins to choke up. He gestures to the cameraman to stop shooting. It’s a version of the Tom moment, and none of my students found anything “wrong” with it. At first, they couldn’t even see the comparison. True, Cooper isn’t faking emotion. But the segment is taped, not live. If Cooper really wanted the eye of the camera to back off, I asked my students, why didn’t he just edit the moment out? The answer is obvious: Anderson’s distress made the story more “human,” more moving, more compelling television. (And showed off Cooper’s modesty and “integrity” as well.)
In 2005, of course, no-one at CNN was arguing with him about the ethics of exploiting his emotional reaction to concoct what Daniel Boorstin, with great prescience in 1960, called the “pseudo-event”: reality configured and packaged for the viewer. Neither “true nor false in the old familiar sense,” the pseudo-event is reality transformed into a contrived image with is “more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.”
In 1960, Boorstin seemed alarmist. But by the time I taught my “TV Culture” course, the pseudo-event had become the coin of the realm—and not just on television. When computerized images first began to replace “air-brushing” we were shocked to learn how much digital alteration was seeping into the creation of magazine imagery. By 2009, Adobe photoshop had begun to market its digital software with the incitement to “Spread Lies” (remove those wrinkles, love handles, dog drool) in your photos. And today, 12-year-olds post glamour-shots on Instagram as artfully retouched and transforming as the covers of Vogue.
It’s important to distinguish the “pseudo” from the “fake.” When Donald Trump accused the liberal press of disseminating “fake news,” he means that they are lying, making things up out of whole cloth (just because they hate him, he tells the public.) The “pseudo,” however, isn’t exactly a lie, but occupies that territory that Boorstin describes, which allows for entertaining “enhancement” to dominate over the simplicity of fact.
In the same class in which I showed Broadcast News, we followed the coverage of Hurricane Katrina as it ravaged New Orleans. My students, while they found “nothing wrong” with Anderson Cooper’s “Tom moment” (as we called it in the class), were disturbed, rightly, to discover that the spin at the time “confirmed” every racist and classist assumption about the poor people forced to take refuge in the Superdome. Mayor Ray Nagin appeared on Oprah Winfrey, and described being “in that frigging Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.” On the same show, Police Chief Eddie Compass reported that “little babies were getting raped” at the Superdome. The headlines and tickers proclaimed “Complete lawlessness”, “People shooting at police officers”, “Growing gangs roaming the devastated area,”“ people stealing tv sets and microwaves,” “sniper attacks by roving gangs.“ [iii]
Of course, there were also the heroes: “Reporters risk their lives to get the story” was big. Jeanne Meserve: “It was a heroic piece of work by CNN employees…Big words of praise for them and for Mark Biello, who went out and ended up in that water, trying to get the rescue boats over partially submerged railroad tracks.” Aaron Brown: “Our thanks to you [Jean Meserve] for your efforts. It—you don’t need to hear this from me but you know, sometimes people think that we’re a bunch of kind of wacky thrill seekers doing this work, sometimes, and no one who has listened to the words you’ve spoken or the tone of your voice could possibly think that now.”[iv]
When the facts emerged, it was established that of the 841 deaths related to the storm, only four were identified as gunshot victims. And national guard spokesman Major Ed Bush, who was inside the Superdome the whole time, was aghast at the jungle stories: “What I saw was just tremendous amounts of people helping people.” He noted that most of those revelations, which also just happened to give the lie to stereotypes about poor African-Americans, never made it on TV or into the newspapers. [v]
We spent a good deal of time in that course looking at watershed moments in which compelling narrative waged a war against fact in tv culture. The Simpson trial, for example, was way up there. I had watched it all, as my husband and I had just moved to Kentucky, our new home was in the country, and initially we only had a few channels, one of which was “Court Television,” which had launched in 1991. We became addicted, mesmerized by how defense lawyers, aided and abetted by the sympathies and susceptibilities of jurors, were able to construct an alternative reality to counter the massive factual evidence that Simpson killed Nicole and Ron Goldman.
There was nothing especially new there in terms of lawyerly strategy. But televised gavel-to-gavel, it became available for all to see. (Court TV presented seven hundred hours; CNN six hundred. When the verdict was announced on October 3, 1995, it was covered live on every major network and drew an estimated 150 million viewers.) And although eventually the facts of this particular case did triumph, the mass media learned a powerful lesson about story-telling from that trial.
If I was teaching my course today, I would add many other examples—some of which I discussed in my very first substack piece:
Is there a world of difference between Fox’s cynical, outright lies about the 2020 election and my examples? Yes. But there is a fuller context here that has yet to be exposed—perhaps because the historical trajectory of our cultural undermining of the authority of fact is one that the mainstream media has participated in. They are all now feeling so smug about their own integrity, even as they take no responsibility for the false narratives (e.g. Hillary’s “email scandal”) that they have generated and given life to. Time for a little self-examination of that self-serving “narrative.”
Sources:
[i] Roger Ailes, You Are the Message (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 15
[ii] Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room, (New York: Random House, 2017), 187
[iii] Cal Thomas, “Rumors, hyperbole seeped into news,” Lexington Herald Leader, September 30, 2005, p. A13
[iv] Jeanne Meserve and Aaron Brown, CNN Reports, September 29, 2005, from author’s notes.
[v] Op Cit Thomas, A13
Wow Susan! Love this so much - you are a treasure and I am sure your students have gained such insight from your analysis and thought and the importance of facts and media manipulation. Loved 🥰 this post!