"Respecting the Audience"

How the cable news infrastructure creates zealots

The news over the last week has been dominated by the public release of Fox News’ internal communications as part of the ongoing Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against the network. Where previous lawsuits around Fox’s opinion side have rested on claims that opinion is not news and shouldn’t be taken literally, this suit feels different. People on the so-called news side and corporate leadership raised private concerns about how their viewers would respond to Fox calling Arizona for Biden and why they needed to continue to give oxygen to voting fraud claims they knew could not change the election outcome.

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Viewers were switching from Fox to NewsMax and OAN. The conservative online ecosystem was calling them out. Callers were critiquing the hosts. Most importantly, the stock price was falling.

The line that stuck out to me was how they needed “respect their audience.” The argument seemed to be that the audience loved Trump and he claimed there was fraud, so they wanted to hear more about it. To tell them that there was no fraud, as Fox leaders knew, would be insulting to them (and they’d go elsewhere).

Giving the audience what they want to see is what leads Tucker Carlson to share his “exclusive” that the January 6th crowd were mostly tourists with some radicals mixed in. It’s worth pointing out that this is the same Tucker Carlson who hyped George Floyd protests as destructive riots (even though a very small percentage of protesters were rioting). What might look like blatant hypocrisy can be explained by understanding that Tucker is just “respecting the audience”. This is how they prefer to see the world, so he provides it.

To be fair, the other cable networks also play to their assumed audience even if somewhat more tempered. MSNBC (which I watch regularly) can get consumed by the latest Trump imbroglio. From the Mueller investigation through two impeachments to Mar-A-Lago to Georgia to January 6th proceedings, it feels like something big is about to happen every day (spoiler — it doesn’t). CNN (which I don’t watch) wants to cover the current political crisis. They do so by making sure they have representatives “from each side”, resulting in a Hollywood Squares type of panel talking over each other and rarely reaching compromise.

Respecting The Audience creates true believers. They come to their preferred cable news channel hoping to have their priors confirmed. I don’t know what behind the scenes texts and emails might exist at MSNBC or CNN, but I’m pretty sure there would be some that give evidence of self-reflection and caution that doesn’t appear on the broadcasts.

The true believers want to see their preferred content, even if exaggerated. They thrive on the one school teacher in Arkansas who tells fifth grader Billy that he can’t write about Jesus as his hero. Or the right wing provocateur who wants to destroy the FBI. Or the politician caught flip-flopping or “embellishing” a resume.

Two years ago, Gregory Thornbury wrote about Kayfabe — a reference to the play-acting present in the World Wrestling Foundation¹. It’s a show and the audience picks their heroes to cheer and villains to boo². The actual wrestlers know it’s a show and play their parts.

As Greg Sargent observed in today’s Washington Post, the construction of an alternative voice to “mainstream media” has been a long term project.³ He quotes historian Nicole Hemmer:

Hemmer traces the genesis of this broader ideological project to the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the time, she tells me, leading figures on the right made a concerted decision to “create their own media outlets” in the form of periodicals such as Human Events, while spreading “the message that all nonconservative media are deeply biased.”

Even though these efforts to create bogeymen that scare conservatives are decades old, it feels like something important has shifted in the last decade or so. While politicians and pundits continue the playacting Thornbury describes, some subset of the true believers are taking them seriously. It’s as if those cheered-on wrestlers were now expected to destroy their opponents. The fans wouldn’t just boo the bad guys, they would threaten them online and dox them and their families.

So, for example, years of vague worries about “the gay agenda” has turned into people threatening drag shows, banning transgender surgeries, or accusing teachers of “grooming children”.⁴ Post-George-Floyd concerns over race in America get recast as “woke ideology” which, as I wrote last week, has prompted legislators to pass laws banning DEI offices and limiting classroom instruction about structural racism.

People missed the Kayfabe memo. So they create an ideology that is impenetrable.⁵ How do you help the true believer know that DEI has actual benefits for students and faculty? How do you help someone know that the legal system works slowly and needs specific kinds of evidence before indicting someone like Trump?⁶

The cable news industry is not well-suited to resolve the crisis that it has wrought. Perhaps traditional news media can step into the gap. But what is most likely to be successful are actual conversations between individuals committed to exploring the truth in non-combative settings.

I wish I was more optimistic in ending this piece but I’m basically just very concerned.

1. Ultimate Fighting Championships on Monday and World Wrestling Foundation on Wednesday! I promise this is not a theme of this newsletter.

2. Don’t forget that Donald Trump once appeared at a WWF match.

3. Historians will also point to the blatant partisanship and bias of early 20th century newpapers (Remember the Maine!).

4. Nobody’s actual classroom teacher is ever a groomer. It’s the unnamed teacher in some unnamed school district far away.

5. I won’t do it here, but I’m tempted to credit this to postmodernism.

6. The Matt Gaetz non-prosecution is instructive.