by Tobin Smith
But just like any porn, the Fox News safe place for self-identified conservatives or Deplorables is a seduction to get you into the Foxhole tribal identity spiral. The tribal identity porn spiral is similar to the softcore-to-hardcore sexual porn spiral. They both deliver the same powerful and pleasurable neurochemicals we humans have in our massive brains. They also both create and activate conditioned emotional response (CER) pathways which are easily activated again and again.
What is a CER? Simple—if you are a committed conservative, how do you feel the nanosecond you see a picture of Hillary or Obama? If you are a committed liberal or NeverTrump conservative, how do you feel the nanosecond you see Mr. Trump speaking?
Revulsion? Hate? And hate’s half-brother, sentimentality for a past age when everything made sense? That was the plan, man; that was always the plan. If you know how to manipulate and cynically exploit mankind’s hardwired involuntary emotional and cognitive vulnerabilities, you can do just about anything. In my years at Fox News, what I came to see as our tagline should have been “Raw emotions cynically manipulated to achieve maximum audience engagement and profit.”
Tragically on March 15, 2019, my message of how mentally dangerous it can be to marinate our emotionally sensitive minds for six hours a day or more in the most emotionally corrosive and traumatic emotions in humankind—fear, hatred, outrage, resentment, and blame—came to far-off New Zealand. It came from a white supremacy terrorist who was radicalized on the dark web subculture as well as on Instagram and YouTube.
I am not saying that daily binge-watching of Fox News opinion content will turn you into a white supremacist—don’t go there.
But in the case of the New Zealand Muslim massacre, the young man marinated his already deranged and psychotic brain binge-watching undoubtedly in thousands of hours of offline and online interaction with extremist ideological content. Call that separate extremist media ecosystem white supremacist version of the Fox News white tribal activation Hot Pot.
But most worrisome to me—most of his radicalization came from within the world’s most powerful political and cultural identity amplification Hot Pot—algorithmicized and hidden identity social media. This tragedy was unfortunately an extreme but real-life example of the white tribal identity amplification spiral on steroids.
While the murdering white supremacy terrorist was not a tribalized Fox News hyperpartisan by any means, the political and cultural digital radicalization spiral effect is exactly the same.
And it was working for more than a hundred years before it was digitized.
THE FOXHOLE SPIRAL EFFECT IS NOT NEW—JUST THE TECHNOLOGY IS
The psychological construct of the digital tribal identity amplification spiral I now call the Foxhole spiral goes back to the 1960s “Deviancy Amplification Spiral” and South African sociologist Stanley Cohen. Cohen noticed how the UK tabloid press at the time took a small story about a set of dueling teenage gangs and amplified the little nothing story into a big national invasion story that induced what he called a “moral panic.”
This thoroughly contrived panic spread like wildfire in the press and emotionally traumatized people to the point of Brits hating either one or both of contrived narrative protagonists: the “Mods” and “Rockers.”
Voila! The fake contrived moral panic turned into real emotional trauma—“What are we going to do about these hoodlums—they are ruining Great Britain—we have to stop them from invading our homes!!”
Later on in 1967, prominent sociologist Leslie Wilkins came to more accurately describe the power of mass media to amplify marginal news into a national moral panic as the “Deviancy Amplification Spiral.”
As journalism commentator Matt Taibbi writes in his book Hate, Inc., the deviancy amplification spiral was “an academic term for using invented problems to drive people actually crazy.”
Taibbi reports the Deviancy Amplification Spiral worked like this:
LESS tolerance
Leads to
MORE acts defined as crimes
Leads to
MORE actions against criminals
Leads to
MORE alienation of deviants
Leads to
LESS tolerance of deviants by conforming ingroups
In other words, the self-reinforcing nature of a contrived moral or tribal panic—when fed by breathless, contrived political or cultural media reporting—can amplify and “spiral up” small incidents into national panics.
Britain’s tabloid newspapers dreamed up these moral panics because they discovered they sold a ton more newspapers during the half-life of these contrived crises. In other words—they manipulated and abused their sacrosanct “news reporting” status with a contrived illusion to monetize fear by selling more papers and more ads.
Hmm . . . that grift sounds familiar doesn’t it?
And who owned the most tabloid eyeballs in the UK?
Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch of course. He invented the modern tabloid newspaper, and his editors perfected the deviancy amplification spiral.
WHAT IS NOT NEWS ABOUT THE FOXHOLE SPIRAL?
Media sophisticates understand the original sin of America’s tribal political warfare-as-entertainment complex was when we chose to convert America’s political and cultural nervous system (the independent news and journalism media) into a tribal warfare-as-entertainment product. That occurred when the FCC canceled television’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the last year of the Reagan presidency. (I’ll get to this important regulatory transformation in a bit.)
It is not news either that Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of Messengers of the Right, a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.” Neither is it news that in America today it is not possible to know where the commercial enterprise of Fox News 3.0 ends and White House policymaking starts.
It should not be news to anyone with a reasonable grasp of media that, according to Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Professor Hemmer argues that Fox News “acts as a force multiplier for Trump. Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature. It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.”
Professor Hemmer is dead right—the rigged outcome opinion programming I performed at Fox News for more than a decade was conceived and produced from the beginning as a “right-wing tribal partisan radicalization model.”
But what she missed was how the FNC radicalization model works—and that is Fox News’s tribal warfare playbook described in this book combined with hyper-targeted social media redistribution. She also missed the now massive reach of the tribal activation and validation porn Fox News still calls its “opinion programming.” Professor Hemmer also missed the increasingly faster tribal partisan conversion speed.
Reality? The scale and scope of the American cultural and political battlefield expanded a hundred times or more from 1995 when Fox News started.
These once every hundred year tectonic shifts in digital communications created an enormous multiplier in both emotional force and audience reach.
WHAT’S NEW IS WHAT’S OLD IN TRIBAL ACTIVATION PORN
When you think about it, tribal identity capitalism has been with us since the printing press. If you define it as “the business of finding, activating, amplifying, and monetizing political or cultural partisanship via various media forms and content” you could say it goes back to the early transcriptions of the Bible.
The idea and strategy of tribal identity content is by no means new—it just reinvents itself with every new information technology. National newspaper printing and distribution was a new information technology—and America went to war with Spain over a right-wing war fever created by major newspapers (remember the “Remember the Maine” fiasco?).
The sinking of the USS Maine on th
e night of February 15, 1898, supposedly from hitting a Spanish mine hidden in Havana, Cuba’s harbor, created the opportunity to unleash a huge moral panic storyline that lasted months. “Remember the Maine!” was headline news in newspaper articles that urged the United States to “do the only moral thing we can do” and go to war against Spain.
Because of that newspaper-driven moral panic, we did go to war with Spain. We also destroyed seven-eighths of Spain’s navy (of which one unintended consequence was the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s).
There have always been serious unintended consequences from media-based tribal identity activation and amplification spirals.
Until the end of World War I, newspapers were highly partisan and the leading player in tribalized political or nationalist identity. A syndicated ten-week-long story on the rise of the KKK in the Deep South intended to warn people about the KKK actually helped the KKK recruit more than 100,000 new members. Before daily regional newspapers, there were “pamphleteers” who produced highly partisan arguments for the American Revolution. Ben Franklin was, among other things, a printer for crying out loud.
But then came electronic mass media. Electronic tribal identity capitalism started with the dawn of radio and was first mastered (not surprisingly) by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin—but also by a Catholic evangelist from outside Detroit. Father Charles Coughlin. In the 1920s and 1930s, democratic governments all over the world suddenly found themselves existentially challenged by this new information technology.
Both Hitler and Stalin discovered this new broadcast radio technology could be powerfully used to provoke tribalized anger, resentment, and violence. Father Coughlin in the USA took a different path. He started as a zealous supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, going so far as to call the New Deal, “Christ’s Deal.”
Hmm . . . sound familiar?
Later, however, Coughlin became disenchanted with Roosevelt’s leadership and began to espouse extreme right-wing views. By the late 1930s, he’d become an outright Fascist sympathizer with an audience of more than thirty million every week. He was eventually forced off the air in 1939 because of his pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.
So you get the point—Fox News’s tribal identity porn is not America’s first media-inspired mayhem or tribalized political partisan monetization rodeo.
Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita of the Harvard Business School and the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, captures the context well. “Originally there was a way to marshal radio for the purposes of improving democracy. One answer was the British Broadcasting Corp., the BBC, which was designed from the beginning to reach all parts of the country, to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ and to join people together, not in a single set of opinions but in the kind of single national conversation that made democracy possible. Another set of answers was found in the United States, where journalists accepted a regulatory framework, a set of rules about libel law, and a public process that determined who could get a radio and TV station license.”
TELEVISED WHITE TRIBAL IDENTITY PORN PROGRAMMING USED TO BE REGULATED?
In 1949, America saw the dawn of a new national broadcast technology that sent televised video through the air into your one TV in the living room (yes, if you are under the age of forty-five I must inform you that only rich people had more than one TV and your dad was in charge of the one TV).
Anyway—after seeing the immense political power and cultural impact of radio, Congress did not wait to regulate TV (the medium Roger Ailes told Richard Nixon in 1968 was “the most powerful thing in the world”).
Congress passed strict laws that highly regulated television content via local spectrum licenses that had strong “follow our public affairs debate rules to the letter or you lose your valuable TV license” teeth. The three national TV networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, were even prevented from owning more than a few local “affiliates” to ensure that no political partisanship bled onto the American airwaves.
But Congress did more than just regulate. They also established a public interest standard that mandated companies using the public’s airwaves produce a significant amount of noncommercial “public affairs” content for the good of the citizens. They also mandated a Fairness Doctrine “label” that required news media journalists to seek out credible representatives of different viewpoints and political power for this clearly labeled editorial content.
In fact, both political sides had to be represented by spokespeople of reasonably equal political gravitas (which means no former US senator squares off against a twenty-eight-year-old Democratic strategist).
Furthermore, all the political or cultural back and forth—ironically labeled the “fair and balanced” rule—had to be included in one or more continuing segments and not one-minute sound bites. These public affairs editorial interviews had no commercial advertising and up until the late 1970s were performed live.
What happened? Well jeepers—all this TV regulation worked. The rates and size of political polarization and tribalized partisanship (according to social and political scientists) stayed within normal healthy ranges (that is, a normal percentage range of political hyperpartisans on both sides).
The late 1960s and the 1970s of course brought us cultural disruption and economic disruptions (did you ever wait two hours in a gas line?). A US president resigned in shame and a wimpy, cerebral Democratic POTUS ended the 1970s by losing the US Embassy in Tehran and a second term to a “disruptive DC outsider” named Ronald Reagan. Before he became the governor of California, Mr. Reagan was best known as a movie and TV star that played off of a chimpanzee in the movie Bedtime for Bonzo.
Man, history does repeat itself, does it not?
Reagan of course stepped up and eventually won the Cold War. But by far the most powerful political and cultural impacts in the 1980s came from the creation of three new information technology systems—national cable TV, the personal computer (which brought in the real information distribution and communication disruptor the World Wide Web in 1994), and the introduction of wireless digital voice and text communication devices.
So here we are in 2019. All this disruptive information technology did its job—it’s being used to create and distribute unimaginable amounts of emotionally destructive and tribally activating and validating content for hundreds of billions of dollars in profits every year.
This content and technology is as powerful and culturally disruptive as the printing press was back in the day but yet massively dispersed and distributed at the scale of running water.
Note: For you history buffs—Johannes Gutenberg died in 1468, a little over a decade after inventing movable type. But his invention set in motion a gold-rush-like fever for printing press entrepreneurs who opened print shops basically everywhere to cash in on his technological and culturally disruptive earthquake.
Why does this matter? Because we are seeing in real time what has to be considered close echoes of Gutenberg’s printing fever in the political and social tumult all around us, says Jeremiah Dittmar, the lead author of new research published by the London School of Economics.
According to Dittmar, the rise of tribal partisan activation and amplification media turned out a lot like the gold rush fever caused by Gutenberg’s press itself. Look at the major cultural transformations that followed that technology earthquake of movable type—the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Age.
You know—what we came to call the Enlightenment.
Today it should be as obvious as Donald Trump’s spray tan that we are in the middle of our own major disruptive and tectonic political and cultural reformation that is driven by three major technology earthquakes and two major economic and regulatory events.
In the biggest understatement of the twenty-first century, Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington, says that the wave of tribal partisan activation and amplification content in Ameri
ca is a key driver of the current political and social chaos we have in America. “The (internet and social media app) technology is an accelerant,” she says.
Wow—give her a cookie. I like my Hot Pot analogy better.
But most worrisome to me, I continue to find that most Americans have no idea how they are being played and exploited or that these massively powerful and destructive emotional, political, and cultural digital amplification spirals exist. They have no idea how the FNC tribal warfare playbook, which comes right out of the propaganda and direct response advertising playbooks, came to exist or why it is so powerful.
For some reason, most Americans somehow also fail to understand that it was the very same FNC tribal warfare playbook that was adopted by a seventy-something-year-old ex-reality TV star who, in 2016, simply added the previously taboo conversations about class and white supremacy to the Foxocracy playbook—and it tribally activated sixty-five million Americans to make him the single most powerful human being on the planet.
With our attention spans and emotional reactions captured, measured, intensified, and then amplified by social media (in return for selling $100 billion of digital ads), the good old Fox News run-of-the-mill televised tribal fear and outrage porn it pioneered turned out to be like that movie where a little yellow VW bug morphed into “Bumblebee” with destructive power that now reaches at least one hundred million Americans monthly.
Yes, in 2019 the media still reports the canard that Fox News is just a “niche cable network with only 2 percent of voters.” For mainstream journalists to suggest that there have not been major consequences from the emergence of a nuclear powered and fully integrated American Foxocracy is ludicrous.
And what about the total emotional targeting and manipulative reach of the complete American Foxocracy ecosystem? Well, friends—when you combine:
