by Tobin Smith
As a fresh Martini appeared, courtesy of Des, the owner, I asked, “So how do I do that?”
“Let me change the metaphor,” Gene replied. “To get this right you need to find a hot ember of irreparable cultural or economic injustice buried deep in the good ol‘ conservative grievance woodpile—and fan that ember with a storm of righteous indignation!
“How dare they?!! If you want to get your audience’s attention and keep it, your job is to find the burning, unfair, right-wing injustice of the day. Then stoke that ember and give them new reasons that validate their righteous grievance. And then pin that grievance to the ‘here’s another reason why you should blame liberals for all your problems’ narrative.
“How? Do what everyone else does here! Go to the Foxnews.com pod and ask them what moral or economic injustice against ‘real Americans’ is trending on Foxnews.com. Or go to Breitbart.com and Drudge Report and see which white right-wing injustice story has the most ugly and angry comments and now you have a monologue.” (PS—this is the reason why Drudge and Brietbart.com are on every Fox News producer’s browser to this day.)
Gene was right.
When you call out a widely shared perception of the unfair and the unjust, not only do you reconnect with the Fox News audience by acknowledging the moral righteousness of it is valid, but you also give them a few more easy-to-understand reasons to make them feel even more righteous (building their self-esteem from an “I’m so much smarter than those stupid socialist libtards” fist bump) and of course morally just.
It’s like Tony Montana’s line in Scarface: “First you show the injustice, then you get the grievance and pile on a few more and then you get their respect and keep their eyeballs!”
PS Ol’ Gene is the same producer who taught me that to become a prime-time host on Fox News, I needed to go watch a Pentecostal evangelist and learn how to deliver a hellfire and damnation sermon and learn to mimic their speech cadence. He also taught me that the basic evangelical fear-based grift and emotional manipulation are derived from another subconscious fear and reflex: that our species of animal is the only one that is cognizant we are going to die. For many people, that unresolved fear of death is resolved by a convincing evangelist selling the opportunity for everlasting life.
While hosting Fox News “fair and balanced” opinion debate shows I learned that mining true TV grievance gold comes from creating a new reason to blame the liberals for every economic or cultural atrocity narrative. The atrocity does not even have to be true on Fox News—as we all know now, subjective truth is objective reality to our entranced audience. The innocent victim narrative is embedded in our audience’s psyche. It’s a deep, visceral, bone-marrow feeling of not getting a fair shake from society and/or the government (or even better both) like they did in the old days when life was fair and just.
Remember, too, I told you the half-brother of cultural hate and blame is cultural sentimentality? The Fox News audience lives on nostalgic overload. You know the drill: “In their day, you worked hard, you followed the rules; kept your nose clean, paid your bills, and you retired with a pension and fat belly and doted on your grandkids.”
Our audience is deeply sentimental for that age gone by—to live once again in a country that has not left them behind. Obviously we did “Make America Great Again” before Donald Trump. I am dead certain that El Trumpedo learned how powerful white identity nostalgia porn is from watching ten thousand hours of Fox News.
In short, to engage an audience at a primal emotional level (which is what white tribal identify porn is designed to do) you have to meet the audience where their perspective already is, not where you want to take them. The lowest hanging fruit on the injustice and grievance tree is the simplest: when Obama got elected the old rules went to shit and the white middle and working class got screwed by the financial capitalist elites blah blah blah.
That narrative has the added advantage that it is based on a lot of actual fact.
Then just play the “unfair and unjust greatest hits” of the moment. In my day they were:
The Great Recession hit and the fat cats not only got bailed out but they got richer—and the real Americans got screwed—it was unfair and unjust and hard to argue against.
When a righteous conservative American opens the paper, turns on the mainstream TV, or scans their social media, all they see is the libtard/socialists/mainstream media screaming to everyone in the world that they’re racists, xenophobes, dopes, bigots, losers, and worst of all, whiners. That’s both unfair and heinously disrespectful, too.
From the typical Fox News viewer I met on the street/bar/ restaurant/airport, they felt they were presented in popular entertainment and culture on TV as low information-ignorant rubes that don’t defer to the expert Masters of the Universe who actually know how the complex world works and how to govern it.
When members of our audience became convinced liberal society violated the rules of the game and is not playing fair, they got insanely indignant. The implicit deal behind the American sociological and economic arrangement they understood was that the members of the American ruling and political class would create economic growth from which everyone would benefit.
But the reality is the flourishing ruling class and liberal elite drives home the message that their failures are no one’s fault but their own. They deserve their sorry fate. The rules of success in America changed and they should’ve got the memo and gone to college like they did.
Bingo—I had a monologue.
That night was around the fifth year anniversary of the 2008 bank bailouts. I talked about why they should never forget the holocaust-like injustice on the white working and middle class from the trillion-dollar bank bailouts during the financial crisis for banks and fat cats.
The narrative was not difficult to conjure. Many real Main Street Americans of course did lose their homes and savings and were left for dead in an economic flood without a paddle. I emphasized how liberals constantly tell them the Great Recession was their fault—they are the ones that took out loans they could not afford.
I told them if they live in places without jobs, if their neighbors are dying from addiction to painkillers, if their houses are underwater and can only be sold at a loss, the liberals tell them they should just move (even though for most that was and still is impossible).
I told them that it sure is easy to look down upon real Americans when the elites were born on third base and they all feel like they just hit a triple.
But the greatest injustice? How Wall Street got a socialist solution where failure means a bail-out while Main Street got the cold-hearted capitalism medicine where failure means bankruptcy and foreclosure.
Boom. Long story short—ratings killed that night. I found a perennial ember of injustice and I ginned up a new way for the viewer to see and hear how they got screwed (socialism for the rich, cut-throat capitalism for the white middle/working class). It was the Fox News tribal warfare playbook played to perfection. I got asked to come back and host a whole week when the host went on vacation.
I was jacked—the playbook worked! It worked because human nature is indeed immutable and our primal emotions are indeed primary—they are just too easy to trigger, fan, and ignite into a self-reinforcing moral spiral if you know how to produce TV for that moral spiral result. The digital-video era of communication thrives on rage and passion—and passion is the enemy of objective analysis—that’s another reason why the playbook is so powerful and so lethally entrances the FNC audience.
Maybe Donald Trump was listening that night. He may be a pathological lying, sociopathic ignoramus, but he has a much better intuitive and feral grasp of the psychology of grievance than his establishment critics do. Most Fox News addicts are not just pissed off—they have an inferiority complex boulder building deep inside. They want payback and revenge—and many want to watch a cathartic blame-shifting TV show that delivers a very real “it’s not your fault and here is why” cathartic moment.
That night I learned another important play embedded in the Fox News tribal warfare playbook: a cathartic seven-minute TV segment that mines the raw emotions of class and cultural grievance and feelings of injustice. It’s the conservative TV vein of emotional gold that never ends.
TOBY—THIS IS HIGH-DEF TV—PEOPLE SEE YOU—YOU HAVE TO SHOW THEM YOUR RIGHTEOUS RIGHT-WING I.D. BADGE IN EVERY SEGMENT
As mentioned, perhaps the most impactful audiovisual production technique within the FNC conservative tribal warfare playbook is the simplest one—the viewer at home gets to see your emotions via your facial cues and that of their cultural and political tribal enemy. Not so with audio-only radio.
Yes, eighty-plus percent of our emotions are communicated by our eyes and hand gestures. But there is another critical part of making high-impact white tribal identity porn; it’s the casting of the right- and left-wing actors.
Social psychologists and anthropologists have for years told us we still have an innate caveman reflex for in-group/out-group bias and an automatic instinct for “ethnocentrism” (i.e., how we automatically evaluate other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one’s own culture).
This reflex is a) universal, and b) encoded in our reptilian brain. Thus it’s instinctual and automatic. Nothing shocking here—walk into a cocktail party with people you don’t know and see how you find people to talk with and gravitate toward.
But a big part of understanding the Fox News tribal warfare playbook is to realize that when it comes to creating must-see tribal identity TV, 1) each of us, in essence, occupies the center of a set of concentric social and cultural circles that we have created in our own likeness (i.e., an egocentric circle), and 2) all of us need to immediately recognize that someone on our tribal TV screen is a member in good standing of our social circles—and in the case of Fox News one of those circles is a white cultural and political conservative circle.
In other words—is Tobin Smith on my team or not? How do I, the viewer, know he’s on my team? If the viewer does not sense immediately, does not consciously and subconsciously judge that we are on the same right-wing cultural, economic, and political team, the viewer’s innate cognitive bias reflexes take over and they tune that segment (or me) out.
As social scientist Joshua Greene writes in his book Moral Tribes, “humans pay exquisitely close attention to where we judge people reside in our egocentric social universes.” After the election of 2016, that may be the understatement of the year.
It turns out the primary way we make these instantaneous judgments of whom we trust and who we want to listen to in a cultural/political talk show comes to us via verbal or linguistic clues. Greene describes this process like a “social I.D. badge” in that people naturally look for reliable markers of cultural group membership. Greene reminds us of the Hebrew Bible and the term “shibboleth” as “any reliable market of cultural group membership” or, more plainly, in-group/out-group Us vs. Them tribalism.
Research by sociologist Katherine Kinzler shows us that this predisposition starts in early age and goes back to our most basic automatic instinct for protecting personal safety. Her research concludes that our caveman brain, even before we can speak, uses language cues to distinguish the trustworthy Us from untrustworthy Them.
What does this have to do with the Fox News tribal warfare playbook for opinion programming? The answer is: a ton.
First, if you understand this innate reflex, you understand how and why on Fox News the right-wing and left-wing panels are selected and why guys like me who understand right-wing role playing succeed and otherwise conservative panelists fail.
The members of a Fox News opinion segment are cast by the producers for their innate social-cultural-political I.D. badge. That “badge” must flash “right or left wing” with the first words out of their mouths and looks on their faces. In fact, before they say a word. It’s their race. Their clothes. Their faces. Their voices. Their language usage—it all morphs into a construct that the viewer/streamer is judging us as either “he/she is safe and Us” or “a threat and one of Them.”
Producers know that if the viewer doesn’t see and sense who the tribal villain is and who their hero is, the segment does not work. My point here is that people way underestimate how important selecting the cast is. It’s highly choreographed and important to suck in the older right-wing Fox News audience. I cannot tell you how often I would hear from a Fox News addict in public: “I know I can trust you Toby to tell it like it is—I appreciate that.”
What they did not understand is that this white Scots Irish 50-something guy who looks like them, sounds like them, speaks (mostly) like them is playing a well-rehearsed role in which I:
act angry when they are angry (cue my famous “scowl” look).
shake my head when they are shaking theirs (which the director instantly shows on screen).
roll my eyes at the same time I hear another tribal apostasy (cue my OMG eye-roll and forehead slap).
and widen my eyes when I am ready to lay into the tribal enemy.
It’s my right-wing TV pundit performance art: it’s all an act. From an acting perspective, my job on a Fox News panel is to mirror the look and the speech of the guy at home (or the husband of the woman who is watching).
If you can’t play the part of the white tribal identity hero, you don’t emotionally and tribally connect. As I mentioned, I had a very high Q rating (likeability). That just did not happen by accident.
I learned how acting the role was more important than what you said. The code words, the in-group smirk, and laugh. . . . Watch the longtime pundits on Fox News—there is a reason they have been there for ten-plus years.
The lessons here?
It is impossible to fool human nature—so Fox News, as a business model, manipulates and exploits the hell out of our innate human nature.
Deeply buried and repressed feelings and perceptions of class grievance and disrespect eventually ferment into emotional manipulation gold. They are the programming gifts that keep on giving to those who make their living producing and acting in white tribal identity porn programming. So, at Fox News we learned to mine those feelings and manipulate the hell out of them for our benefit too.
What I found meeting thousands of our audience members on various speaking tours in Retro America was that our Fox News audience in general carries a giant chip on their shoulder. They get it by being told for decades by mainstream television, media, movies, and entertainment in general that they are old fashioned, unsophisticated, out-of-touch dinosaurs who don’t really matter (except for growing our food and raising our beef cattle) and that they are really second-class citizens relative to the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley and the East Coast Meccas of intelligence and sophistication.
On the other hand, if you mixed in Hollywood showbiz with right-wing propaganda, sexy women, and angry older anchors who mirror the viewer/streamer like they were an identical twin they never met, you could conquer the white tribal identity world.
I learned later in my career what the successful Fox News opinion programming producers had been taught by Roger Ailes: that one of the reasons Fox News is so addictive to fifty-five-year-old-plus aged men and women is that we shamelessly manipulated their conscious feelings of tribal disrespect and perpetual grievance. That constant cultural beat-down would eventually morph into one helluva inferiority complex and grievances for us to mine 24/7.
If we could flip that inferiority complex into feelings of tribal superiority for an hour or two, the self-esteem blast of neurochemicals would be as addictive to the Fox News viewer as crack cocaine. And better—once addicted they’d always come back for their next hit
. The tough part was having to raise the intensity of our tribal fear/hate/blame and victimology rhetoric because like any addict they build a tolerance for “juice” and need a bigger dose to get the same feelings.
So we did. All Donald Trump did was take our Fox News white identity porn programming and add white ethno-nationalism with his “Get ’em out of here” and “Send them home” shtick, which unleashed levels of white tribal identity racism that even white identity tribalist Roger Ailes would not attempt to achieve.
CHAPTER 8
Your Eyes Do Not Lie: Fox News Is Good Old Soft-core Sex Porn Too
I am not disclosing anything remotely new in this chapter: The pornified look of Fox News takes about ten minutes for any first-time viewer to figure out and is done for the obvious fundamental reasons:
Conservative media competition for Fox News is sound-only radio.
The only other real competitor for right-wing geriatric talk show viewers is Christian TV televangelists.
Unless it’s sports, most old guys will take looking at attractive women over an hour of hell-and-damnation TV any day.
But let me give you an inside look at what pornified Fox News programming means. First, a short conversation with Roger Ailes—who by the way never appeared on a minute of Fox News programming.
I was on the second floor because FBN had established a movie studio there—the rest of the second floor was Ailes and top executives and a movie projection room to watch Fox movies for employees. Roger came into the movie room with a few guests—they were showing the Avatar film prerelease.
He said hello and I asked him, “Roger—a friend of mine asked me ‘Why are all the women in Fox News so hot?’ He told me, ‘Dude if I worked there, I would be an HR disaster!’”
