What makes a top story at Fox

Frontpage news decisions -- for those of you who remember front pages -- aren't Telexed down from Sinai each night at 9:30 (for those of you who remember morning newspapers with "news"). They're made by small groups of people applying roughly equal amounts of arithmetic and witchery to a stack of reconstructions of the day's events, aiming to catch the audience's attention by explaining (a) what's new about what you don't know in the context of (b) why everything you already know is still true. The Fox News homepage -- above is the lead story from early Saturday evening -- doesn't necessarily show a different planet, but it does follow a very different map around the planet you woke up on, depending on what's plugged into the equation and how the "calculate" button is pressed.

That's more or less what drove the front pages in Max McCombs' and Donald Shaw's 1972 "The agenda-setting function of mass media." (This one's from Raleigh on the first day of the study.) Broadly following the textbook's list of news factors -- conflict, timeliness, impact, proximity, oddity and so on -- editors across town in neighboring cities could disagree radically about whether Nixon or Humphrey should save the country while agreeing that (a) the election is the top story and (b) Nixon is a bigger deal today because he's right down the road. Faraway places are most important when Americans are there, but an airline crash is still frontpage news if it's on a distant continent (ideally one with high proportions of white people, but you get the idea). This is issue salience, which combined with attribute salience -- whose fault the economy is, if "the economy" is the top story -- makes up the media agenda that the audience learns from

The Fox decision-makers are working in a different millennium and on a palette beyond the ken of the 1968 audience, but they're using a familiar set of tools. So what makes a top story in the sunny uplands of August 2024? It's still the elction, but ...

MSNBC host Chris Hayes fumed over new poll results showing former President Trump as the favorite to win the Electoral College and therefore the presidency in November.

Spoilers: The writer is a Fox associate editor whose beat seems to consist mainly of monitoring Twitter to see (a) what the good guys are saying about the bad guys (the "Twitter blows up" story) and (b) what the bad guys have been up to while you weren't watching. As in 1968, "the election" is still the top issue; on Saturday, it's driven by an actor from the bad side who's -- well, acting out on Twitter about news that's supposedly favorable to the good side.

On his X account Friday, the "All in With Chris Hayes" anchor blasted recent poll results from famed pollster Nate Silver showing that Harris would most likely beat Trump in the national popular vote if the election were held today, though Trump would win the Electoral College.

So clearly not a "this just in" story, but let's flash back to the headline for a moment. The who-did-what-to-whom clause is about an anchor who's enraged, but the "why" is in the prepositional phrase: "polls showing Trump would win." This, kids, is simply fictional. That’s not what “recent poll results” show, that's not what Nate Silver released, and Silver is a guy who messes with data to model election results, not a "pollster." (Our writer admits as much later: "The poll Hayes expressed frustration over was Silver’s latest election model.") This model, as Fox reported (ahem) Thursday, shows Harris more likely to win the popular vote but Trump with a 52.4% likelihood of winning the Electoral College. Make what you will of a model by someone who thinks a “polling day” is a thing, but back to our real point, which is the MSNBC anchor quote-tweeting a post about the Silver model:

"It’s clear as day the Electoral College is, to quote the great Justice Jackson a national suicide pact," Hayes posted.

The media pundit’s statement referenced a quote from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote in 1949 that the Supreme Court "will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact" if it doesn’t balance its "doctrine logic with a little practical wisdom."

The snippets are from Jackson’s dissent in Terminiello v Chicago, though Fox omits a lot of the contextually fun stuff that — oddly — seems to presage the peaceful and patriotic protests of Jan. 6: “This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means … that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrine logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

So how does a lone day-old tweet from an anchor at a rival network, presented in a breathless text that bollixes up dubious data from an even older tweet, become OUR TOP STORY? Because the bad guys hate the Constitution, and POLLING GURU SAYS the Constitution is about to return our hero to his rightful position (at least, once the story has been worked over by a more senior writer), and the liberals’ delusions are dissolving in tears of rage, and there you have it. Almost makes one wish for some nice uncomplicated coups and earthquakes, to steal a better title.

Just go ahead and say 'CACKLE!!!'

OK, if your question is "Does the Times have its thumb so far up its own ass it could pick its nose from inside?", the answer is an unqualified "yes." But it's not as bad as it looks! National Review editor Rich Lowry is actually trying to offer some theory-based advice:

For as long as Mr. Trump has been in the ascendancy in the G.O.P., he will go off on some pointless tangent and Republicans will urge him — perhaps as they hustle down a corridor of the U.S. Capitol* — to talk about the economy instead of his controversy du jour.

A close cousin of this perpetual advice is the admonition that Mr. Trump should concentrate more on the issues in this campaign. Neither recommendation is wrong, but they are insufficient to making the case against Kamala Harris.

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Time out for a quick summary of Bill Benoit's functional theory of political communication. Campaigns are about winning, and campaign messages are focused on making the audience compare you favorably with the other guy. Messages do this with one of three functions -- acclaim (why you're good), attack (why the other candidate is rotten) or defense (why you're not as rotten as the other candidate says you are) -- using one of two topics: policy or character. Comparing how function and topic proportions vary by incumbency, ethnicity, gender, level of office, national political culture and so forth can be a pile of fun.

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

But this gets things confused. Attacks aim to "disqualify" the other candidate, but they're not definitionally more effective -- or more attack-y -- if they aim at character rather than policy. Attacks can address qualifications ("my opponent spent a mere six months as dog-catcher") or personal shortcomings ("my opponent is a felonious old sex offender"). And Lowry hasn't explained how he would support his claims about the empirical world of measurable data.**

... Mr. Trump isn’t going to beat Ms. Harris by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border.

Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that Ms. Harris is weak, a phony, and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class.*** The scattershot Trump attacks on Harris need to be refocused on these character attributes.

To wit: Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.

None of which bear on the idea of fitness for the high office once held by (ahem) Donald Trump. But there's more!

… Mr. Trump isn’t ever going to become a buttoned-up campaigner who sticks closely to script. There will inevitably be lots of static and wasted time and opportunities. But there’s plenty of room for Mr. Trump, as he insists he must, to do it his way, and still get a better handle on the campaign.

One of his talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power. Everyone knew in 2016 that he wanted to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. It would be quite natural for him, if he settled on this approach, to call Ms. Harris “weak” 50 times a day.

For (ahem) empirical analysis, those would be acclaim/policy and attack/character. This coding scheme doesn't get into whether a policy claim is an out-and-out lie, but you may draw your own conclusions about Lowry's values on that question. 

He has also, in the past, been able to pithily and memorably nail core weaknesses of his opponents. His nicknaming may be a schoolyard tactic, yet it has often been effective tool, whether it was “Crooked Hillary” (underling Hillary Clinton’s ethical lapses) or “Little Marco” (diminishing a young primary opponent who lacked gravity). Even people who don’t like Trump or his nicknames would end up using these sobriquets.

The Times is right, in its own little way: Trump can't win by saying "nonfarm payroll job creation," but he could win by bellowing "CACKLE!!!" -- or "PANTSUIT!!!" or "MARXIST!!!" -- as often as the moderators let him. And that seems to be the point of Lowry's advice.

* I didn't say Lowry was going to magically turn into a good writer overnight, did I?
** Or that he was no longer prone to randomly making things up.
*** Or that Bill Buckley wouldn't slap him upside the head for the parallel structure fault. 

Style wars

 
This isn't just another cautionary tale from the opinion pages of America's Newspapers®. Look a bit more closely and you'll find a familiar right-wing complaint: If you people in the media won't help us be a little more racist, it's going to go ill for you. Here's Douglas Murray in the New York Post:

If one of your allies starts to fall apart, you should notice it. And learn why.

This past week, Great Britain has been racked with riots and disorder. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics even came out to riot alongside each other for once.

At Fox News, corporate bedmate of the Post, this was "some of the worst unrest in the United Kingdom's history." (Oh, child.)

What has gone on has huge lessons for America. (Yes. And one of those lessons might be found in the proportion of Britons who turned out to say, in effect, we're not having any of that.) And our politicians here should take note.

The disorder in Britain began after three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, were stabbed to death as they took part in a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. In the immediate aftermath, locals in Southport were shocked, angry and looking for someone to blame.

In the UK, as in America, the authorities do not just release information about suspects and culprits. They “manage” the release.

In Britain, as in America, if there is believed to be a racial component to a crime, the authorities are even more careful about what information comes out.

It might have been a while since Douglas Murray tended to the police beat. Neither Fox News nor the local affiliates that provide so much of its episodic crime coverage seem to have any trouble finding and publishing the ethnicity of crime suspects on short notice.

But the British public, like Americans, are used to this process. And the longer they sense information is being kept from them, the angrier they can get.

This time the authorities were clearly holding back something about the identity of the suspect. Soon rumors went around online. All from completely unreliable sources. But they caught on.

A rumor went around that the attacker was a Muslim who had only arrived recently with one of the illegal boatloads of migrants who keep pouring into southern Britain.

In fact, although there have been plenty of crimes and terrorism committed by illegals, this was not such a case.

This time, the person who carried out this appalling crime was the 17-year-old son of Rwandan migrants. His motive is not yet known.

See? It's all your fault, media. If only you'd told us it was a UK-born Black guy in the first place, we wouldn't have had to attack all those mosques and hotels!

Time out for the stylebook here. It's a widely accepted, if fairly recent, principle of style that matters like ethnicity and gender aren't supposed to be attached to people unless they're clearly relevant to the story. That implies a stylistic consistency that isn't there in real life: for example, the 1942 textbook that says, on one page, "it does no good to mention under certain circumstances that a Negro committed assault," then a few chapters laters offers NEGRO ATTACKS WIFE as an example of how to cram the "essentials" into a tight headline count.

As with many style points, knowing the rule isn't nearly as interesting as figuring out who gets to break it under what circumstances. Your shop might have a firm rule that it's not a "miracle" until God confirms it by phone*, but everybody knows which Star Reporter can blow past that stop sign without mussing a hair. More relevant are the examples that "everyone" understands because they meet the Man Bites Dog rule of tabloid days; that's why "male nurse" and "female drunken driving suspect" still populate the general news pages, and why, in the right-wing press, the headline tells you to blame a "nonbinary Biden official," not one of the boring old binary ones.

Now, it's not always the cops', or the press's, job to prove the negative. When the mob knows damn well it was nine-legged Muslim ammonia beings from Planet Mxyzptlk because it says so RIGHT HERE ON MY PHONE, they probably have other things to do (putting out fires, for example) than tell you "nah, it's a Black guy from some unspellable place in Wales." So in a way, following a rule -- even once it's been overtaken by the commonsense idea that the "complete physical description"** of stylebooks gone by is irrelevant when the perp is already in custody -- is beside the point. Our columnist has a bigger point in mind: 

But all this happened in a very dangerous context. And it is one that American politicians would do well to understand. Even if their British counterparts fail to.

In the UK — perhaps even more than in America — there is great dislike of the rule-breaking illegal migration.

... The authorities house the illegals in hotels (sound familiar?), and in short, absolutely nothing is done to punish people for breaking the law by breaking into the country.

Put a Smokey Bear hat, some mirrored sunglasses and a dime-store Southern accent on Douglas Murray, in short, and you can almost hear him saying "Reckon he done stole more chains than he could swim with."

* Or a "tragedy" unless someone kills their stepdad by the fifth act. I've got a million of 'em. Don't forget your server, folks!
** The idea here was that if it wouldn't help the cops, or the public, identify the baddies-at-large, it was irrelevant. As an editor I used to work for put it, "two Black men with sticks" doesn't count.

Fox and the rules of news

 

A brief lesson on how the Rules of News® work, by way of explaining how the public agenda is set by the homepage of the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.

The Fox homepage has a clear agenda-setting hierarchy: 10 top stories, with a clearly identifiable lead and the rest in an easy top-to-bottom, left-to-right layout, before you get to the promotional content. Here's the No. 6 story as of 11 a.m. Eastern US time (it's moved up a notch since 8 a.m.). 

Time -- the "THIS JUST IN!!!" -- element -- has been a central component of news ever since we had to out-shout the balladeer on the next corner in Elizabethan London. In US headline dialect, the time rules are well established. The present tense ("removes") signals the "immediate past": the "since Thursday's edition" or "since we updated the homepage" that tells you why today is different from yesterday. That's part of a bundle of practices that, in turn, help the audience sort events into issues. In basic agenda-setting terms, that's how "the news" tells the audience whether a campaign stop is "about" crime, the economy, foreign policy or whether the candidate laughs at the wrong time.

Here, the time element helps us sort this into a "culture war" basket: An "airline" has added to a set of daily outrages against the icons of American life that indicate -- oh, what's the phrase? -- a "nation in decline." Except that Fox is cheating. Watch the pivot foot: 

Over the last few years, Delta Air Lines has embraced the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda under the purview of a chief officer who believes that the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" isn't inclusive. 

Delta's Chief Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Social Impact Officer Kyra Lynn Johnson has said publicly Delta is striving to "boldly pursue equity" which has impacted every level of the company, from its hiring practices to the language it uses in gate announcements. 

"So we're beginning to take a hard look at things like our gatehouse announcements. You know, we welcome ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ And we've asked ourselves, ‘Is that as gender inclusive as we want to be?’" Johnson said during a February 2021 panel with other DEI insiders. "You know, we're looking at some legacy language that exists in some of our employee manuals. And getting to the root of the way some things are described and saying, ‘Does that actually send a message of inclusivity?’"

Delta released an inclusive language guide in December 2020 which advised employees and leaders against using terms that reinforce the notion that there are only two genders.

See the move? We've gone from "THIS JUST IN!!!" to a panel discussion in 2021. Nothing in the text, even the comments Delta provided to the inquiring Fox reporter, indicates that a decree has gone out from Caesar Diversus to stop saying "ladies and gentlemen." If you're a reader, you have a right to be annoyed -- though if you're a Fox reader, you might more likely be filled with existential dread, because that's the proper slot on the agenda.

An important takeaway from the agenda-setting enterprise is that agenda-setting isn't a practice; it's an outcome of practice. The "media agenda" is what happens when practitioners commit journalism on Lippmann's "blooming, buzzing confusion" of daily events. Fox isn't really a different world; it's a different map with HERE BE GERBLINS drawn in different places.

Today in random fearmongering

 Dear local fishwrap:

If you want me to take the bait in your lede seriously:

Four men from Chile were charged last week in connection with robberies and assaults at two jewelry stores in Oakland County, according to police in Auburn Hills and Troy.

Try not to knock it down in the second graf:

The charges, involving retail stores, don't match the scenario of "transnational gangs" targeting upscale houses, as described in a recent warning by Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard.

But ... but ... there's still a trend here, right?

On Thursday, Oct. 5, President Joe Biden said he was suspending federal regulations to allow adding about 20 more miles to the controversial border wall begun by the Trump administration, although Biden said he was required by law to approve the construction and did so reluctantly. On Oct. 1, the governor of New York, a Democrat, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” she strongly favored a tighter border.

“It is too open right now,’’ Gov. Kathy Hochul said of the U.S. border with Mexico, where an estimated 200,000 to 260,000 migrants entered the U.S. in September alone, according to national reports.

On Sept. 29, Bouchard issued a warning about migrants that made national news in conservative media. Bouchard warned of “transnational gangs” of migrants, which he said were breaking into upscale houses that back up to golf courses and wooded areas in Oakland County and elsewhere, although he said he couldn’t reveal whether any such suspects had been arrested in metro Detroit. 

True enough, in its own way. "Conservative media" (citing a Detroit TV station) even quoted the sheriff as saying a similar gang (similar to what, neither he nor the tabloid Post indicated) had struck in New York. “'They typically hit homes from 5 to 9 p.m., they seem to want houses where nobody’s home, and they usually come in through windows in the back,' the sheriff added."

But that doesn't deter (sorry) the local paper:

The four Chilean men arraigned last week in Oakland County have been charged with crimes that don’t fit Bouchard’s scenario but their arrests still add to unease about migrants. The four were charged with armed robbery, felonious assault, and malicious destruction at two jewelry retailers. The charges came after two smash-and-grab strikes, one at the MJ Diamonds store inside Great Lakes Crossing Outlets in Auburn Hills at 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 11, a second at the jewelry department inside Macy’s at Oakland Mall in Troy at 5:42 p.m. on Aug. 24, according to Auburn Hills police. 

True and -- OK, let's be charitable and say "crudely speculative in the manner of 'conservative media,'" respectively. In other words, they're unlikely to "add to unease about migrants" unless you tell people to add it to their unease. And if you're wondering why a robbery in August is related to a Biden statement nearly eight weeks later, hold that thought:

... Officers who investigated the robbery at Great Lakes Crossing Outlets decided the likely getaway vehicle was a black Kia Soul. Its ownership was traced to Aguilar-Mondaca.* Those officers notified the FBI/Oakland County Gang and Violent Crime Task Force, whose members include investigators from Auburn Hills and Troy police. They began conducting surveillance at Oakland Mall. Surveillance on Aug. 24 showed three subjects, all wearing masks, arriving in a black Kia Soul to enter Macy’s.

So someone owning reasonably spiffy SUV had it registered somewhere in or near the second-wealthiest county (by median income) in Michigan, and the cops set up surveillance at another mall, and ... tell me how this is related to the conservative-media-stoked "unease"?

In the days before the Oakland County sheriff issued his warning about gangs of migrant thieves, a nationwide coalition of sheriff departments — the American Sheriff Alliance — met in San Diego to issue a “call for action at the border due to the heightened threat picture,” the group said in a news release. The release said that the swelling torrent of migrants had brought a 906% increase in “individuals found to be on the Terrorist Watch List” since 2017, “and there are still three months left in 2023” to increase that number. 

If you're forming an impression that these characters -- and we can go ahead and repeat that they're charged in two violent armed robberies -- appear to have little to do with either the "swelling torrent" or the Terrorist Watch List, that seems fair. It's very much the impression given by the story, and it seems rather a shame that someone didn't notice that mismatch before hitting the "publish" button on this bit of random fearmongering.

* One of the suspects, but you've probably figured that out.

His fingertips around the cosmos curled

 A.J. Liebling is top of mind these days, what with management offering and the union demanding just down the road, so the Murdoch papers' coverage of the great man's retirement naturally recalled "The Man who Changed the Rules," Liebling's 1951 summary of how William Randolph Hearst's death was covered. This quatrain, from the Mirror's house poet, stood out:

The Chief is gone, the man we all called Boss ...
Colossus of an age that changed the world.
The galleons of his genius knew their course,
His fingertips around the cosmos curled.

It's echoed, these 70-plus years on, by Trevor Kavanagh, political editor  at the Super Soaraway Sun (his phrasing, not mine): 

I’ve enjoyed knowing the man we call The Boss both at leisure and under pressure as chief of the world’s greatest media empire. ... I have seen him prove time and again that democracy and free speech only flourish under a free, vigorous and sometimes controversial press.

Two things at least distinguish Rupert Murdoch from Citizen Hearst: One, Murdoch is around to see the paeans, and two, he's actually rather successful at the business of selling news. (As Liebling noted in 1961, Hearst "not only failed to create good newspapers but failed to make money out of bad ones -- something that conspicuous medioctities have succeeded at.") But Murdoch's employees, like Hearst's, are united in praise of the Boss's unique genius and ability -- take it away, New York Post -- to "redefine the media landscape."

Two traits stand out in the coverage, exemplified here by the Wall Street Journal's editorial: that dogged stand-up-for-the-litle-guy attitude mentioned by the Super Soaraway Sun and the insistence that staffers made up their own minds.

That's actually a well-tested observation in media sociology, dating at least to Warren Breed's "Social control in the newsroom" (1955). Breed, having worked for a Hearst paper, noted that the Chief didn't need to emerge from the box of earth from his home planet to tell you how many adjectives to deploy, or when a story should begin with "Bands playing and flags flying." If you didn't already know that by the time you signed on, a friendly senior reporter would tip you off before you covered the parade. 

Here's Kavanagh quoting Murdoch's farewell note:

“Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarified class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing truth.”

Which explains why The Sun stands alone as “the people’s paper”.

That seems to be the heart of the Murdoch con: convincing the Little Guy that you're standing between him and the mysterious elite, even as you're reaching into his pocket for his own good. Here's Liebling again, riffing on the cartoon image of the overburdened taxpayer as "a small, shabby man in underclothes and a barrel":

The man in the barrel is always warned that a frivolous project like medical care for his aged parents is likely to double his already crushing tax burden. The implication is that the newspaper owner is above worrying about his parents, and of course he is, because his old man* left him the paper.

* Sir Keith Murdoch, if you're scoring along at home.

Biden is coming

 So in what seems like big news around here, all my Fox data from 2022 -- 2,624 screenshots of the top five stories on the foxnews.com.homepage -- is now entered in a single spreadsheet. (Hautboys and trumpets off.) And the AEJMC deadline is still 19 days away.

What, you might ask, is the point? Well, it's not to say anything about Tucker Carlson and his guests; you don't need a spreadsheet to find the "off" button on the remote. It doesn't demonstrate that any specific, falsifiable utterance about Dominion Voting Systems' joint operating agreement with Beelzebub was made with actual malice under the Sullivan standard. Nor does it prove that Fox is a propaganda network and thus will lose its news license forthwith.* But it is a reasonable way to spend some time fleshing out the ways in which news routines, wherever they're practiced, allow all sorts of ideological skulduggery to sneak past the watchdogs.  

As that suggests, this isn't a study that loses sleep over what the opinion pages do. I'm not especially panicked by opinions showing up amid the news; if you don't like frontpage editorial cartoons (or large 1A doses of W.R. Hearst's views on life, the universe and everything), you shouldn't study security framing and the run-up to Pearl Harbor. And Fox is generally scrupulous about labeling opinions when they show up among the top five stories. It's not too surprising when two opinion pieces show up in a day, but when Joe Biden is coming for your retirement and the old homestead in consecutive screen grabs (above right, from about 10:45 a.m. and 1:15 p.m. Eastern US, Feb. 17, 2023), something cool is afoot.

Some of Fox's practices -- g-droppin', for example -- look like mere tabloidism. Across time, they point to some more entertaining questions: not just why "Not lovin' it" is the headline of choice for stories about miscreants at McDonald's, but why "Hidin' Biden" is a more frequent hed choice than "Cruzin' for a bruisin' " -- or why "California" in heds is followed not just by "dreamin' " but by "fleein' " and "leavin'."

Measures of sourcing and placement help address how frequently Fox's top political stories are rewritten from Politico or the frequently dericed New York Times or CNN. You can tell how often the day's lead story is based on a single tweet from Elon Musk or start to estimate whether anything Kamala Harris does is news before Fox has a chance to write a "Twitter erupts" hed about it. You can even count how many uniqure stories about the Idaho murders can lead the page in a single day.

Then there's some sheer nerdery: figuring out the correctness conditions of slamming and blasting, for example. (Hint: You can slam and blast pretty actively if you're a Republican or a CEO, but if you're a Democrat, be prepared to submit to a lot of passive blasting.) Melting down is almost exclusively done by two groups: (a) Black athletes and entertainers and b) liberals and the media. Done properly, even the occasional garden-path faceplant can take on a partisan tone.

A 2021 take on some of this has already shown up in the Big Securitization Book, but there's plenty more to be played with.

* Oh, stop it.