How Fox News Creates Its

Own Insane Reality

If you’re a Fox News watcher, this is how your political reality is generated.

By Evan McMurry, Alternet

January 2015--Every once in a while a Fox personality says something so outlandish he shocks himself.

Such was the case when Fox Business host Charles Payne got amped up over Michael Moore’s American Sniper criticism and unleashed a bizarre reading of America’s overseas military efforts. 

“We have saved the planet,” he shouted at the camera, to the visible discomfort of his cohosts, “and if we go away as America’s policeman, it will be hell to pay.”

The statement was outrage click-gold, but its virality obscured a crucial quality: even a market-drunk paleocapitalist like Payne doesn’t actually believe the American-produced quagmire in Iraq was the real-world equivalent of the Avengers.

Payne’s outburst followed a solid week of escalating rhetoric against Moore, Seth Rogen and other critics of the film. 

Fox hosts first mounted defenses of Chris Kyle, then of snipers, then of the military, and finally of the Iraq debacle. 

By the time Payne was plied with Moore’s quote, the network had made the saintliness of the U.S.’s war effort a precondition of Kyle’s defense. 

Though it sounded outlandish to the rest of us, it was actually just Payne walking that sentiment one step further.

This is how Fox News tricks itself.

What begins as heated claims—a hyperbolic statement to hook a viewer, a vulnerable figure to be elevated to villain—is repeated and amplified until the outrage-inducing nonsense is churned into the network’s observed truth.

Call it the revenge of the talking point.

Partisan news is a repetitive business, and a talking point is grown over the course of several days and weeks. 

An errant comment quoted by one show out of context is then repeated by the next fully devoid of that context, until it becomes a self-referential outrage lever pulled by the evening shows at will. 

By the next day, the offending comment or subject is reintroduced as a preformed scandal which the network hosts respond to as if it were a piece of the discourse that rudely shoved its way into the studio and now must be dealt with.

If you’re a Fox News watcher, this is how your political reality is generated.

A fine example was the “Hobby Lobby Sharia law” talking point that emerged last July following the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. 

One tweet goofing on the Sharia/Scalia rhyme (“The Supreme Court #HobbyLobby ruling proves once again that Scalia Law is a lot like Sharia Law”) was volleyed between shows until Bill O’Reilly was rolling his eyes at the dissenting justice’s Sharia comparison (one obviously never made in the arguments) and Greg Gutfeld was whining that “They were comparing a narrow ruling to Sharia Law.”

The identity of “they” was purposefully left vague, because nobody had ever actually done it. 

Primed by hours of outrage bait, the viewer was left to interpret “they” as the entire shadowy cabal known as the left. 

It took Fox only 24 hours to convert a single jesting tweet into a fully functional and portable talking point.

Just a couple months earlier Fox News manufactured a new Clinton scandal out of whole cloth. 

When Vanity Fair published Monica Lewinsky’s rehabilitation piece, Fox News set about turning something arguably bad for the Clintons into an example of the Clinton machine at full steam. 

It was “part of the Clinton plan” a Fox guest said at 2pm that day. 

At 5pm, several Fox hosts cited “conspiracy theories floating around” about the article, though they were in fact referencing a theory voiced on their own network three hours earlier.

By 8pm, Lynne Cheney was warning Bill O’Reilly to be suspicious. 

“Would Vanity Fair publish anything of Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t want in Vanity Fair?” she asked.

“Probably not,” Fox morning host Steve Doocy answered 12 hours later, noting that the timing of the piece was “coming under question.” 

Indeed it was—but only by his own network. 

Through four shows over 18 hours Fox News had introduced, developed and perfected a piece of zany speculation, and then re-reported it as news. 

If you were just tuning in to Fox that next morning, you had the impression the whole world was wondering how Hillary Clinton had masterminded a Vanity Fair article by Monica Lewinsky.

It was in fact just a handful of people at Fox headquarters.

That’s how Fox News snookers its viewers. 

The network has gotten so good at the talking point relay race it quite often fools itself.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the network’s battle against what it calls the race hustlers. 

Fox’s belief that there are Democratic foot soldiers secretly plotting racial division in the streets is omnipresent, but it was given a jump-start following the turmoil in Ferguson and New York City. 

For the past few months, Fox has been busy sowing the seeds of racial fear, warning its viewers that the United States is one race riot away from backsliding into the crime-rusted urban hell-scapes that haunt its older viewers’ minds.

The catalysts of this always-impending regression vary, but the New Black Panthers are a network favorite.

Fox hosts have made a trope of tying the group—a fringe-of-the-fringe organization with infinitesimal impact on even local, let along national, politics—to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Deputized by Obama to speak openly on racially charged situations from voting rights to Ferguson,

Holder has become one of several racial bête noirs for the network.

Fox has repaid Holder’s candor on race by portraying him as a Malcolm X in a bureaucrat’s clothing.

But Fox’s Holder fixation is nothing compared to its mania over Reverend Al Sharpton. 

For a Fox viewer, Al Sharpton is a man of superhuman time-space-political abilities, capable of inciting a race riot in Ferguson only to teleport to the White House to mastermind Obama’s race-division strategy, from which he magically appears whispering anti-NYPD invective in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ear.

In the last month, Fox News mentioned Al Sharpton almost 400 times, or more than 12 times a day.

That was six times the rate of its competitors. 

The network devoted more time to Sharpton than CNN and MSNBC combined—and Sharpton has a show on the latter.

Once Sharpton and Holder were convenient, accessible villains to prop up segments. 

But the extent to which the network has covered them seems to have fooled its own talent into believing the men to be more powerful, omnipotent and devious than humanly possible. 

Enough of this winds you up in some very strange places: it’s how you get people honestly advancing the notion that the Obama administration masterminded Ferguson to foment racial discontent.

Fox News has aggrandized Holder and Sharpton until the two men form an illusion of omnipotent race-hustling puppet masters. 

Such aggrandizing can sometimes pull the rug out from under the network. 

See, for instance, Fox’s love affair with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

After months of calling Obama the Ditherer in Chief, or the distracted executive, Fox turned moon-eyed at Putin’s will to power: the foreign leader wanted Crimea, shoved international opinion out of his way, and took it, the end. 

It was the sort of global antagonism the hawkish bench at Fox News wanted to see from Obama and that Obama, with some notable exceptions (cough, drones), was refusing to give them.

It got to the point that Fox hosts wanted to trade chief executives. 

"Can I just make a special request in the magic lamp? 

Can we get Putin in for 48 hours, you know, head of the United States?" asked one Fox News host. 

“I just want somebody to get in here and get it done right so that Americans don't have to worry and wake up in the morning fearful of a group that's murderous and horrific like ISIS.”

This was the culmination of months of Putin-praise. 

He was “a real leader.” 

He provided a telling “contrast in leadership” with Obama. 

And so on.

That was then. 

Putin’s star has plummeted since, as in a virtual replay of the last decades of the Cold War, Russia’s bellicosity was revealed to have been functioning as misdirection for its flailing economy.

Too late: Fox had already worked itself up into a froth over fantasies of geopolitical muscle. 

“Do something” is a favorite of the Fox News hosts, who often have to improvise on late-breaking geopolitical moves without any expertise. 

This leads to action bias, the logical fallacy in which any action, even a dunderheaded repeat of past mistakes, is perceived as better than no action at all. 

Putin acts; Obama doesn’t. 

Under the “do something” imperative, the former is always better, even if one winds up with a collapsed currency saddled with a whole new province to pay for.

Fox repeated “Do something” to itself so many times it came to believe Putin’s aggression really was better than Obama’s give-'em-enough-rope strategy—to the point that the network had no idea what to do when Putin’s do-somethingism was hollowed out.

This is the revenge of the talking point. 

The convergence of the right’s ideological insistence and cable news’ structural repetitiveness, it is a trap the network lays for itself, over and over again, until hosts proclaim Mideast wars to be “saving the world” and wonder how they ever came to say such a thing.

Anatomy Of A Political Campaign (Lee Atwater Style)

The Trashing of John McCain

By Richard Gooding

November 2004—John McCain found himself simultaneously stumping for Bush and defending Kerry against attacks by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,

McCain must be haunted by the vicious South Carolina smear campaign (he was crazy, a traitor, he fathered a black child) that helped Bush win the 2000 Republican nomination.

Has McCain joined the team that engineered his destruction?

One day he was being courted as John Kerry’s running mate; another day he was rumored to be replacing Dick Cheney on the Bush ticket.

On many days he was defending his Democratic friend against the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; at the same time, he was campaigning side by side with his newer friend, the president, once even hugging him and getting a kiss on the forehead in return.

Both candidates have used his image to their advantage in their TV ads.

And with nearly every report about Senator John McCain and the unprecedented tightrope he’s navigated, there’s been a reference to the ugliness of four years ago―the South Carolina Republican primary of 2000, the do-or-die battle of George W. Bush’s political life to that point.

McCain says “it’s over,” he’s buried the hatchet, it’s no longer worth revisiting.

But the evidence of this political year says otherwise: the ghosts of South Carolina―the power of going negative and the quandary of how to respond to it; the role of consultants and of surrogate groups; the question of a candidate’s responsibility―just won’t go away.

What really happened and why?

Was it really as bad as accepted wisdom has it?

Who did the dirtiest work?

How did they get away with it?

And how does it relate to the walk in the political gutter that we’ve witnessed the last few months?

As you drive south, the first thing you notice is that the roads aren’t as well paved as farther north and that there are fewer state troopers.

Budget cuts have made the odds of getting caught speeding in South Carolina among the lowest in the nation

People there want government to stay out of their pockets, and their lives.

In Columbia, you see the Confederate battle flag flying smack in front of the State House and wonder: Wasn’t that problem resolved?―only to learn that the solution was to take it off the capitol dome and plant it where it was far more visible.

On Confederate Memorial Day, it is like the elephant in the room: not one word about it in the Columbia paper. Government offices were shut, streets emptied, a few overheated old-timers in gray wool did holiday duty around their flag.

South Carolina is overwhelmingly conservative, and even the taste in barbecue is party-weighted; a poll last year found local Republicans prefer mustard-based sauce by a two-to-one margin over the Democrats’ pick, made with ketchup.

But the real political taste is for blood.

South Carolina is where Republican strategist Lee Atwater, the Dark Prince of negative campaigning, spent his childhood and learned his craft, and where he is now buried.

There’s barely a political operative in the state who didn’t either work with him or go to school on his tactics.

Reviled in much of the nation, he is all but universally revered at home.

Here dirty politics was born in the South.

It provoked pride: “You’ve come to the right place!” Politics don’t get any bloodier than the kind Lee Atwater practiced.

On February 2, 2000, John McCain arrived in South Carolina red-hot, a 19-point-upset victor in New Hampshire over George Bush.

In the final days there, some of Bush’s aides had pressed him to turn aggressively negative.

Bush resisted.

His political guru, Karl Rove, overconfident for too long, had agreed.

Now, in South Carolina, Bush had lost close to a 50-point lead.

With just 17 days before the vote, his back was firmly against the wall.

“Desperate people do desperate things,” Warren Rudman, the 74-year-old former New Hampshire senator and one of McCain’s national chairmen, told me.

“When you look at a lot of campaigns, not just that one, when front-runners suddenly fall behind, their campaign consultants just go off the deep end.

People going down for the third time, they grab on for anything they can get hold of, and if it happens to be something nasty, rotten, and false, that doesn’t make much difference.”

At a meeting of Bush’s top staff that first day, the signal went out “to take the gloves off,” Time magazine reported at the time.

“I always knew that if Bush got in trouble he’d push the doomsday button,” a respected Washington figure with solid ties to the religious right told me, asking that his name not be used.

He said he’d been told the strategy called for an “underground campaign” by all the heavyweight groups of the Republican and Christian right, a campaign that would be modeled on Ralph Reed’s infamous, Atwater-like boast about his Christian Coalition work: “I paint my face and travel at night.

You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.

You don’t know until Election Night.”

Luckily for Bush, the source said, the showdown was in South Carolina, where the Christian Coalition had its greatest strength.

They’d work through word of mouth in the evangelical community, and it’d never be picked up by the media.

“Reed had pledged to Rove that he could deliver.

Ultimately, it was all about power.

They were all attaching their fates to Bush.”

If Bush had everything at stake, the religious right had nearly as much.

From a power high after the 1994 Gingrich revolution, it had been humbled in the ’98 elections for going overboard with the Clinton sex scandal.

In 2000 the key leaders passed over one of their own, Gary Bauer, and put their money, literally, on Bush.

Lee Bandy, of The State newspaper, who has seen it all in 43 years of covering South Carolina politics, told me, “I’ve never seen the Christian right so energized.”

History was on Bush’s side.

And, in a way, so was Lee Atwater, nine years after his death at 40 from a brain tumor.

Stopping an insurgent like McCain was just what the master strategist envisioned when, in 1979, he persuaded the South Carolina G.O.P. to abandon its presidential-preference convention for an early and open primary that would be the gateway to the South.

The next year, he directed Ronald Reagan’s landslide there over George H. W. Bush.

Later, the South Carolina primary became known as the “fire wall” for the party establishment.

In 1988, after Vice President Bush (with Atwater in his prime, steering his national campaign) lost in Iowa to Bob Dole and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, he managed to turn it around in New Hampshire.

But it was only after his romp in South Carolina that he was home free.

In 2000, George W. Bush was the clear choice of the state’s bosses―known as “the Campbell machine,” after Carroll Campbell, governor from 1987 to ’95 and still popular.

It could as easily have been “the Atwater mafia,” since Atwater and Campbell, as a team and starting virtually from scratch, had all but achieved one-party rule for the G.O.P. in South Carolina.

Besides Campbell himself, the Bush team was chockablock with Atwater debtors: Senator Strom Thurmond, who owed him his tough 1978 re-election; local strategist Warren Tompkins, who had been friends with him since the fourth grade; and communications czar Tucker Eskew, who’d apprenticed under him.

From the religious right there was Robertson, who’d gone to Atwater’s hospital bedside shortly before his death in 1991 to try to clear up any bitterness left by the ’88 race.

He believed Atwater had been behind the leak of the sex scandal involving fellow TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart; it broke days before the South Carolina vote and damaged Robertson by association.

And there was Coalition executive vice president Roberta Combs, an old South Carolina pal, and Reed, who used to say that all he ever really wanted to be was a “Christian Lee Atwater.”

In 1997, Reed left the Coalition for Enron.

It’s been alleged that Rove arranged it, to keep him loyal to Bush; both Reed and Rove deny this.

He then set up his own political-and-corporate-consulting firm in Atlanta, which in 2000 had a multi-million dollar contract to mobilize voters for the G.O.P.

Reed declined repeated requests to be interviewed.

Even Texans Karl Rove and George W. had their own quirky Atwater histories.

In 1973 a 22-year-old Atwater ran Rove’s campaign for chairman of the College Republican National Committee.

During Dad’s 1988 race Junior had been assigned to Atwater as a sort of family watchdog and sidekick.

“It turned out they were on the same wavelength,” said a mutual friend), giving him a front-row seat as the hatchet man engineered the destruction of Michael Dukakis with the notorious Willie Horton racial-scare campaign.