by Tobin Smith
Bingo—Chuck Todd gets it. Roger Ailes had never produced a minute of TV news. When Roger Ailes first proposed a Republican Party TV channel to Richard Nixon in 1974, and then pitched it again to Rupert Murdoch in 1995, it was the same pitch: “What if we took my emotionally powerful, fear-inducing right-wing political attack ads and turned them into mostly scripted, highly choreographed, and rigged outcome half-hour and one-hour right-wing political and cultural attack ads? We could call these ‘fair and balanced’ opinion debate programs” (but as Mr. Todd also pointed out in his article, what does balanced have to do with the presentation of facts?).
In my mental recreation of Ailes’s Fox News sales pitch to Murdoch, Ailes says: “You see Rupert—one minute by itself is not enough time to emotionally manipulate and hook your average voter—we learned in political advertising it takes the cumulative effect of hundreds of minutes of tribal fear and hate attack ads to work. Here’s the beauty of a politically and culturally conservative TV channel—what if we created thirty- and sixty-minute liberal attack ads, called them ‘fair and balanced’ news and opinion programming, and ran them all day and night? What if we reached over ninety-five million American households and then got TV distributors to pay us for our tribal fear and hate content and advertisers to pay to advertise on it? Can you imagine how much damage we could inflict against liberalism with sixteen hours a day of right-wing tribal fear, hate, and resentment attack ads disguised as TV programming? Can you imagine how much money we could make from monthly Pay TV distributor fees and selling ads every seven minutes into millions of homes? Conservative radio reaches forty million right-wingers a day (at the time) selling ads for almost nothing—we could net a billion dollars a year profit in just three million homes!”
Murdoch did imagine—don’t forget he was already the king of tabloid newspapers in Australia and the UK. Fox News was imagined and created to be a mashup of Murdoch’s tabloid journalism instinct and Ailes’s fear and hate attack ads. The product was intended to become a conservative talk radio hybrid where the audience would actually both see and hear their tribal heroes and their tribal partisan enemy—it was psychologically brilliant.
With the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine abolished by the GOP in 1987, there was nothing to stop Murdoch from investing nearly one billion dollars of public company money he controlled to build their mutual dream—a liberal-destroying Death Star that would indeed soon become the scourge of left-wing liberalism and champion of right-wing tribal activation the size and reach of which none of them could have ever imagined.
In July 2018, according to newswhip.com user engagement data, Fox News retained its top dog position on the social media giant Facebook with 38.6 million user engagements and increased its lead over second-placed CNN. Growth has been rapid: In 2010, Facebook unique user engagement with Fox News content was 95 percent less than 2018.
But now it is much more rapid: In 2019, total engagements in just forty days on Facebook eclipsed 2018.
When you add in (1) Fox News’s daytime and prime-time cable daily viewers of 3.5 million, (2) FNC’s digital platform reach of 78 million, and (3) the other 40 million or so Fox News social media engagements recorded on Twitter/YouTube/Reddit every day (and then subtract for estimated duplicate users), Fox News in 2018 engages as many as one hundred million Americans with its right-wing tribal identity activation and validation programming every month.
Fox News is, of course, a cable TV news channel in name only. But what most people outside of TV and advertising miss is that Fox News really is the first and most powerful commercial tribal identity brand in America. If you define a brand correctly, the definition is simple—it’s a “valued emotional promise kept.”
Fox News Channel is the first major white tribal partisan identity national media brand. Its promise and value proposition to its audience is “Watch Fox News and you are going to feel better about yourself via validation of your tribal identity superiority every day. You’ll feel righteous about all your anti-PC beliefs and absolved of personal responsibility for your withered household economics. In fact, if you watch thirty hours of Fox News tribal identity porn a week, we’ll take that wimpy self-esteem you arrived with and make it stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger!”
The GOP’s social identity brand has been fuzzy and shapeshifting for fifty years. Fox News’s tribal identity brand has been pitch perfect for nearly twenty years.
WHAT DO A HYPNOTIST, A TELEVANGELIST, AND A FOX NEWS OPINION PROGRAM HAVE IN COMMON?
As I hope you understand by now, the sole mission of this book is to expose and teach you how to not let Fox News’s predatory brand of white tribal identity porn infect your mind and soul and turn you into a desocialized Foxhole (or how to save a loved one who is). I also hope you will spread the news about Fox News’s tribal warfare playbook-driven content to self-identified conservative fifty-plus-year-old Americans so they too can learn how to consume this psychologically predatory content in a healthy way.
PS—you are a mentally healthy consumer of Fox News opinion white identity content if you remain an “agree-to-disagree” or “Hey—let’s change the subject, okay?” proud Republican or Intolerable. Multiple family therapists have reported and shared with me that Foxhole syndrome is when the person who used to be able to discuss his or her political or cultural views with someone who did not share those same views just no longer can do so.
The mentally healthy heavy Fox News viewer 1) knows when to stop, 2) knows when to call a truce and move on, and 3) in the healthiest scenario can say, “Hey I hear ya—I don’t agree but I respect your right to your beliefs (no matter how idiotic I think they are).”
The mentally unhealthy Foxholes exhibit the complete opposite behavior. And like I said—unless their family and friends are all basically Foxholes, too, they are headed toward family and friend estrangement.
By now you understand how the FNC’s playbook of tribal warfare was carefully developed and designed to hack and exploit our DNA-encoded psychological and emotional weaknesses and vulnerabilities. It starts with our constant need to feed or refill our ego/self-esteem reservoir and feeling of superior self-worth. How to feed the need? Through an audiovisual presentation of convincing visual and rhetorical evidence of our chosen in-group/tribe’s intellectual and moral superiority over our out-group enemy (the other tribes). It’s about our caveman and tribal emotions, instincts and reflexes for personal safety and protection from fearful people, places, and things.
FNC’s plays trigger and manipulate our involuntary “fear reflex.” Fear works because it causes stress, and stress causes the desire to do something. Fear suggests loss. Fear paints a picture and creates a mental state that seeks a necessary response. Fearful images tell and show the viewer how he or she will be damaged in some disgusting and unacceptable way—and this threat of your being damaged triggers feelings of imminent danger.
This carefully choreographed, fear-inducing imaging and rhetoric most importantly makes the viewer react and involuntarily move into his or her tribalized white identity state-of-mind—and at the very moment, Fox News owns your brain stem and thus owns your attention, as well.
In fact, in their study, Age of Propaganda (2001), social psychologists and authors Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson argue that fear based content is most visually and rhetorically effective when:
It scares the hell out of people (i.e., it’s existential).
It offers a specific recommendation for overcoming the fear-arousing existential personal or tribal threat.
The solution or recommended action presented by the trusted authority figure is easily perceived as reducing the imminent existential threat.
The viewer believes that he or she can fight the threat and can personally perform the recommended action.
But now let’s move beyond the fear card.
Let’s dig a little deeper into some of the other core predatory manipulations I learned at Fox News.
In short, there are many powe
rful reasons other than personal or tribal fear that FNC opinion debate segments are so profoundly impactful and why it is so easy to manipulate FNC’s self-identified conservative or Deplorable cable or social media audience into a basic hypnotic trance.
MEET MY FRIEND THE PROFESSIONAL HYPNOTIST
Speaking of hypnotic trances, meet my buddy Tommy G. He is among other things a professional hypnotist in New York City who does bachelor parties, office parties, and everything in between. People love him because he is so funny and so fast—it takes him about sixty seconds to put me under via just his soothing voice and technique—he is a total hypno pro.
But the reason to meet Tommy G is to gain his insights into how and why Fox News is quite literally hypnotic and renders many viewers into hours-long hypnotic trances. Tommy and I discussed this issue of TV hypnotic trances for years—here are my notes from his professional summary.
Hypnosis is a way of communicating with people too.
Here’s the deal: TV is hypnotic, like anything where you focus your singular attention to the exclusion of everything else. If you stare long enough at a candle flame to the exclusion of everything else, that is a hypnotic state. If you open your Facebook app and realize later you just lost an hour (or three) of time, you were most definitely in a hypnotic state of mind.
This is why TV is exceptionally and inherently hypnotic. The fact is that if a person is watching a TV program that totally absorbs their consciousness, they will be unaware of people around them, the feeling of their shoes on their feet, etc. In fact they are in a hypnotic state of mind and a deep hypnotic trance—an eyes-wide-open trance.
Does this state describe anyone you know? I know I have walked past my aging father-in-law while he is in his TV room and favorite chair watching golf or football and you could explode a bomb in there and he would not flinch. If you walked by me watching the last 9 holes of the Masters golf tournament, ditto: I am zoned out.
People in this digital hypnotic trance state are everywhere; the fast food restaurant, riding public transportation, at school—people are fixated on their digital devices. If you are engrossed in watching TV, YouTube, digital games, or social media to the degree that nothing else matters, you are in the state of an eyes-wide-open hypnotic trance, my friend.
But according to Tommy G, when Fox News addicts are in that eyes-open trance, they are extremely suggestible to all kinds of bizarre and hard-to-swallow conspiracy theories and contrived propaganda brainwashing because their analytical guard is fully down. That is another part of the how and why the Fox News white tribal warfare production playbook is so powerful—especially with men.
I know you will find this fact just shocking, but it just so happens that men are the most easily hypnotized by 1) sexual fantasy, aka video pornography, 2) war/action movies, and 3) sports, which are in a psychological sense really just the experience of vicarious warfare to men.
Now look with a critical eye at FNC’s white tribal identity porn. It really is not much more than a mashup of sexual fantasy (at least the opinion shows with sexy looking female hosts and guests) plus tribalized political warfare presented like an ESPN sporting event or televised gladiatorial warfare to the male brain.
Key Point: The other thing that gets male attention locked in is to show them that their family or tribe is in danger. Social psychologists tell us that men naturally scan the environment for potential danger at an unconscious level—that their caveman brain and amygdala/brain stem is always working and making threat assessments. It’s our genetic heritage. Ergo our unconscious male instinct is to still protect the women and children of the tribe just like back in the old tribal days on the savannas of Africa.
As Aristotle points out many times in his classic analysis of persuasive performances, Rhetoric, this fact of male genetic predisposition to protect their women and children has been exploited through persuasive political propaganda for millennia (read: how to induce men to wage war writ large). This is just one reason why televised personal and tribal fear moments are so hypnotizing for men—especially older men with multiple children and women in their life to protect.
But understand that a hypnotic trance is also an amplifying state—that is the key to Fox News hypnotic states and Fox News addiction and becoming a brainwashed Foxhole. It’s an amplifying state because when we humans focus our attention on just one thing, we are implicitly telling our brain that this is important—so our brains drive us innately to get more of what we focus on. Note to self—my golf game is in deep need of more trances!
Images of sex and violence and tribal or family threats grab our attention and then our brains fixate on them. That is why the Fox News tribal warfare playbook shamelessly creates these family and tribal threatening images—our brain is always looking out for potential danger at an unconscious level. As always, the deepest part of the human psyche’s role is to keep you and your family alive and well.
The really key insight into TV trance induction is that 1) the more a person enters into these eyes-wide-open trances, 2) the more his brain will spontaneously go into them. After thousands of these Fox News induced hypnotic trances, one literally becomes a Fox News trance zombie—and the more time one spends in a trance state, the more suggestible in general one becomes.
Tommy adds, “Toby, the key with Fox News is that people do not let you put them in a trance unless they trust you. And guess what? The really hypnotic voices are the ones that are modulated up-and-down—monotones don’t work. That is why the great FNC right-wing hosts like O’Reilly sound like a persuasive salesman—because they are!”
In other words, from a professional hypnotist’s perspective, the entire Fox News tribal warfare playbook is an overt and covert exercise in mass televised hypnosis: trance induction and retention.
A Fox News hypnotic trance allows Fox News to communicate with a person’s unconscious mind. That’s the part of your mind that you’re not aware of right now. Like—until I mention it—you’re not aware of your breathing. Or heart rate. Or facial expression. Or posture. Or the elements of “reality” that you take for granted as real.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Hypnosis is a way of communicating with the part of a person that takes care of all this important stuff (and most of your mental processes, too, like making choices, problem solving, imagining possible futures, and more). And hypnosis is a type of communication that does connect without needing to bring any of these things into conscious awareness—that’s why it is so amazingly powerful and manipulative.
Did you know this important but unrecognized aspect of the FNC white tribal warfare playbook?
Yea, I know—I didn’t either. Thank Tommy G.
BUT HOW DO YOU KEEP AN AUDIENCE WATCHING FOX NEWS? “JUST MINE THE RICH VEINS OF WHITE IDENTITY INJUSTICE AND GRIEVANCE, DUDE!”
This story is about one of the fifty-plus nights I was asked to anchor the live “America’s Nightly Scoreboard” on FBN. It starts about five hours before show time. On this prime-time opinion program, the process was that the host opened the show with an in-your-face demagogic editorial that was expected to secure the interest of the audience at home and glue them to their seats.
Of course, as you now know, in the Fox 2.0 post-2008 America, this meant the audience engagement strategy was another cathartic hour of Obama-bashing and liberal strafing.
Since I had not been preparing to host the show that night, I really had nothing in mind to write for my opening monologue. I was nervous that I would not convincingly fulfill my role as head blame-shifter for the “I-Hate-Obama” Fox News audience. I’d frankly run out of outrage-inducing or cathartic blame-shifting ideas. Even the Daily Memo, aka Roger Ailes’s topics of mass liberal destruction and outrage, that day was pretty weak. Nothing much on the memo hit me as particularly outrageous ammo. It was just a slow day of outrage and inflammatory injustice-inducing ideas for the Fox Hate Networks.
So as usual, I went to see one of my favorite Fox News prime-time producer friends l
ooking for a few ideas—the clock was ticking. Gene (not his real name—he is still at Fox News to this day) came from a political science background and was what Roger would consider a Fox News philistine. Gene did eventually sell his soul to the devil to produce a number of the prime-time populist conservative televangelists, aka FNC opinion talk shows. After all, even a philistine has to pay the rent and eat.
What he told me that night, though, gave me about one hundred hours of Fox News-style outrage televangelism gold. He also reinforced the now-obvious truth that Fox News was doing Trump before Trump was doing Trump. Whatever America we are living in now, we and Roger Ailes got there first many years ago to set the unreality show stage.
“Toby,” Gene said, “what you don’t seem to understand is that the primary animating psychology of our core viewer is the psychology of grievance, which is a fancy way of saying they want to see the blood-sport of injustice payback. Grievance from a conservative political perspective is basically pathological; it’s any widely held perception and belief of a cultural or economic injustice inflicted upon them by the hated liberal ruling elite class.
“The key part of understanding and leveraging this right-wing pathology is this: In the court of tribal justice, a tribal injustice requires tribal redress—what I believe you would call ‘payback is a mofo.’”
The cocktails kept coming and he was rolling. “So listen,” he said. “What you don’t seem to understand is our basic core viewer carries an almost debilitating sub-conscious inferiority complex. They feel judged and so overwhelmingly disrespected every friggin’ day of their lives by those terrible elites who do nothing but condescend and disrespect them twenty-four-seven. If you want to tap into the mass inferiority complex, you have to ask yourself two questions and then answer them well: One, what cultural or economic grievance has this guy pissed off most today? And two, how do I mine those feelings of deep-seated grievance and channel that anger for him like you are his mirror image on the other side of his TV screen?”
