The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley
In the press this week was a 2020 study of regular Fox News viewers who were paid to watch CNN for 30 days. The study showed that after the participants eschewed the Murdoch media outlet they became more skeptical and less likely to buy into fake news and misinformation.
The study, titled “The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers” was conducted by David E Broockman (Associate Professor of Political Science USC Berkeley) and Joshua L Kalla (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University).
The study involved 763 participants, of which 40% were randomized to a treatment group. The study offered the treatment group $15/hour to watch 7 hours of CNN each week during the month of September 2020. The hours of CNN viewing were set during the time frame when participants typically watched Fox News.
The authors stated that “despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views.”
The researchers concluded that “partisan coverage filtering,” a well-known aspect of Fox News, leads viewers to learn a biased set of facts by selectively reporting news and events. Also, the researchers added that partisan media skews information to a certain electoral advantage, which may present a challenge for democratic accountability.
What captured my attention in this study is that it found that viewers didn’t necessarily tune into Fox News because they already agreed with such talking heads as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, but that their attitudes regarding various subjects such as COVID-19, masks, Putin, Donald Trump, and Democrats were actually shaped by the network.
There is a word for this: Propaganda.
Propaganda is information that is not impartial, and its purpose is to influence a group and further an agenda. We can guess what the Fox News agenda is, and it is obvious that the network presents “facts” selectively by either omission or by outright lies. Tucker Carlson is well-known for his emotional outbursts, his espousing of conspiracy theories, and attacks on Democrats, minorities, and LGBTQ+ citizens. His most recent tirades involve the condemnation of US sanctions against Russia and claims that the US has bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
On March 3rd, the Kremlin circulated a memo to state-run media outlets to run Tucker’s tirades. The memo read, “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally.”
Although propaganda has been around for a long time, the US is experiencing a shocking shift in the dissemination of information and facts, whether it be through standard media outlets or social media. Misinformation and “alternative facts” abound in almost every facet of media. From Facebook groups that openly recruit white supremacists to the far-right One America News Network (OANN) which openly supports Russian lies about Ukraine, to Gab, a right-wing alternative to Twitter, Americans are subjected to a barrage of propaganda and outright lies.
America’s right-wing groups and media platforms aim to have what a dictator like Putin has: Total control of information and news that flows to the body politic. In the past few months, we’ve seen a convergence of far-right and Putin propaganda. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, America’s far-right (including Fox News) denied the looming threat of invasion as a “deep-state” conspiracy theory put forward by Democrats, Biden, and centrist Republicans. Russian propaganda outlets gladly put such clips into heavy rotation on their networks.
Autocracies use propaganda to further their own interests and care not for the facts nor for democracy. They are known to blame certain groups, such as Jews, gays, or minorities for the collapse of “traditional values,” as well as for economic hardship or cultural unrest. An effective way to sway the populous and influence the electorate is to subject them to a barrage of “selective information” and skewed “facts” that attack such groups, seeking to polarize and misinform.
The Fox News study offers a glimmer of hope for America: That we can be deprogrammed somewhat from the clutches of propaganda and selective information. However, I don’t see the Fairness Doctrine being reinstated anytime soon, so it is up to us to learn to think rationally rather than emotionally and learn to recognize propaganda when we see it.
There is nothing “newsy” about Fox News.