The Fox that Gnaws on America's Brain

A Cult of Fear and Paranoia That Could Swing 2024

ILLUSTRATION BY PETE REYNOLDS FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” HL Mencken delivered that scornful observation on our national brain back in the early 20th Century. It was not a very nice thing to say then, and today Mencken is pretty much banned from the canon for his many other prejudices. But his penetrating insight about the riches to be had in dumb America is at least as true now as it was then. The modern American infotainment industry from Hollywood to the lowliest social media influencer is built on this understanding. Many have indeed grown wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of anyone alive even during Mencken’s Gilded Age era.

Think of Mark Burnett, the reality show creator of “The Apprentice,” a capitalist-hero-puppet-show starring a failed New York real estate scion. Burnett styled and then fed a fake businessman to lethargic, overfed, sugar-doped couch potatoes - here at the Freakshow we dispense with the euphemism “low-information voters” - who then voted a sociopathic nepo-baby into the most powerful position on the planet.

Mr. Burnett reportedly still maintains ironclad control over a vault of outtake video that shows his fake businessman and America’s 45th President-to-be using racist and sexist language and behaving in curious and atrocious ways (harassing women, snorting Adderall? see here) that might still shock enough of what’s left of the American conscience to sway the so-called independent voters who will decide whether we become an autocracy by January 2025.

But besides that Evil Dr. No shit, Mr. Burnett is really a piker at the great game. A British emigre who got his start in LA selling t-shirts on Venice Beach, he is reportedly worth half a billion dollars now.

But that’s just a centimillionaire .. not even a uni-billionaire!

The king of Underestimating American Intelligence for riches is another son of the Commonwealth who came to America to try his luck, Rupert Murdoch. Today he is worth $18 Billion, a pile earned and growing off a network that hourly broadcasts lies about everything from the 2020 election to life in the cities to the price of eggs in America to Biden’s ties to China to climate change, straight into the propagandized commie-and-migrant fearing, outrage-addicted American cortex.

Murdoch brought his plan for creating a fourth commercial broadcast network to America in the 1980s and was met with open arms by conservatives who had an inkling of what he was up to. He’d already made a fortune in confirmation bias journalism - giving consumers “news” they wanted to read or hear, not the news itself - in the UK and Australia. He arrived at a fortuitous moment, as the FCC had ditched the Fairness Doctrine which, since 1949, required broadcasters to reflect differing viewpoints on matters of public importance. One immediate result of the end of the Doctrine was the rise of right wing talk radio. Another was the birth of Murdoch’s monster.

Aided by DC politicos and libertarian / conservative consiglieri eager for a broadcaster of “news” that wasn’t “liberal,” Murdoch smoothly navigated the regulatory challenges facing a foreign-owned media company, hoovered up more than two dozen local broadcast licenses in markets around the country, and then picked up the rights to broadcast Sunday NFL games.

Football. The clincher. As one former FCC president observed to me, combining football with rightwing ideological spew was magic on par with Circe turning Ulysses’ men into pigs.

Murdoch then hired larval-white doughball Republican strategist and lifetime predator Roger Ailes to create a television version of (equally larval-white doughball) Rush Limbaugh’s enormously successful toxic masculinity-fluffing rightwing insult comedy . Limbaugh had proved that a man could get very rich warning Americans about the liberal media, commies, and feminazis. Ailes constructed Fox as a TV “news” source for Archie Bunkers coast to coast. Eventually, as technology advanced, Fox became a cable network, and now, incorporated in its brand, is that it is the “most watched” cable network in the country.

Fast forward three decades: Murdoch worth estimated at $18 billion. His company, Fox, recently got dinged with a $787 million verdict for knowingly lying about the Dominion Voting machines as part of its role in the MAGA effort to overturn the 2020 election. The Big Lie cost the company a lot of money - by our plebe standards anyway - but still, a mere fraction of the Olympian Murdoch fortune.

Not a Cartoon, a “Fox News Alert” Beamed to Millions

During the last few months, I have dipped eyeballs into prime time Fox for the purpose of researching a long article that is the cover story in the January issue of The New Republic. I don’t think we can understand what’s happened to America’s brainstem without tuning in at least once to Fox. It is not just the Republican messaging machine, or a right wing disinformation behemoth: Fox pushes a level of paranoia that is the hallmark of cultishness. The screaming red chyrons beam never-corrected lies into passive eyeballs; selectively edited video of Biden pausing during a speech, looking demented, loops on a third of the screen for an hour at a time; Tucker Carlson’s replacement Jesse Watters spews word salad about vaccine conspiracies and Biden and China; I-phone videos of any urban crime event, loop in a corner of the screen all day while guests spread fear about rising crime (it’s not), always committed by Black, brown or migrant (again, not).

For my article I interviewed dozens of sources including former Murdoch advisors who have turned against him like the man who helped him get licenses in the US; former FCC officials; the first editor of one of his American publications, Bill Kristol, now fighting against Fox at the FCC; also, anti-Fox activists trying with limited success to drain the company of money or viewership; heroic professional Fox watchers like Juliet Jeske, who logs the lunatic broadcasts daily for her site Decoding Fox News; political advisors to Biden and the Democrats who should be trying to come up with a Fox defense strategy for 2024; other journalists like Jake Tapper; media entrepreneurs trying to formulate new platforms for messaging that penetrates and breaks the cultural power of Fox; filmmaker Jen Senko, whose 2015 documentary “The Brainwashing of my Dad” coalesced a community whose relatives had morphed into silo’ed off unrecognizable paranoid cranks; and many others.

“It’s a tsunami of fear, it’s all about scaring people,” Jeske told me of her overall impression of what Fox serves up. Her biggest category of Fox topics is a title she took from one of the chyrons: Democrat Cities Are Hell. “They move it around: LA, Seattle, Chicago, sometimes it’s all of California,” she said. “Look at all this crime! The joke is as much as they praise Florida, every Florida city has much higher crime than New York.”

Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, editor of the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of mental health professionals’ assessments of Trump, called Fox News a “cultic programming” vehicle. “Fox News viewers are isolated in their own information, and it’s all about generating fear. They are exposed to a continuous expansion and repetition of a certain way of looking at the world. The ideas themselves are not as important as feeding certain emotional needs.”

You can read my full story on the origins and effect of Fox on American politics and various strategies and schemes for combating it, at The New Republic here. The article is not paywalled but I hope you will consider subscribing to TNR. I am a contributing editor and the magazine will be an essential guide to understanding American politics in election year 2024.