by Tobin Smith
He was right. From the beginning to the end of every opinion segment that any of us paid pundits participated in, Fox’s paid lefty contributors all knew there was only one goal for the segment: to make the viewer at home have the righteous sanctity of his political and cultural conservatism mindset once again validated; they all knew the whole point of the segment was for the liberal to “get whupped” in the eyes of the typical Fox News viewer.
Fox employed Mort Kondracke, one of the nicest milquetoast “liberals” you could ever find, as the sparring opponent for the alpha-male conservatives on these rigged panels. Mort was a prim and proper professor type who was the perfect gentleman, always. In other words, he was a professional liberal Fox News opinion-panel piñata, and he couldn’t care less. He was on air daily, so that was $10,000 per week he made, maybe $20,000, since he was so senior.
When I left Fox News, Juan Williams was making $2 million a year as a liberal Fox News piñata. I’d take a beating every day for $20,000 a week at thirty-five minutes of cumulative weekly airtime. Wouldn’t you?
THE LIBERAL PANEL MEMBERS ON FNC ARE DELIBERATELY RHETORICAL MINOR LEAGUERS
Another big part of Fox News’s “fair and balanced” opinion-programming scam is that the “Democratic strategist” label is often a ruse. Let’s call them what they are: fake analysts. When you hear someone on Fox News described as a “Democratic strategist,” it is almost always code for a third- or fourth-string liberal wannabe paid contributor crash dummy/piñata.
For example, Kirsten Powers (now an experienced contributor for CNN) was promoted and touted in the early 2000s by Roger Ailes as a Democratic strategist with experience in the Clinton White House. In reality, she was a prime example of the fake political analysts Ailes launched with fudged or outright fake resumes.
This kind of fraud still goes on today. Fox News may have hired Donna Brazile as their new token heavyweight Democrat, but according to what I see on Media Matters (which tapes one hundred percent of Fox News programming) she is sparingly used to say the least. Anyway, although she claimed she worked in the Clinton White House, Kirsten had merely worked in low- and mid-level jobs in a non-cabinet agency called the Office of the United States Trade Representative. For years, I heard from actual Democratic strategists in my hometown of Washington, DC, that they had no idea who Kirsten was and that she had no significant political experience.
This blowback got back to Roger, so voila! Kirsten was given a column at the Murdoch-owned New York Post and was then introduced as a political columnist instead of as a Dem strategist.
Liberal female antagonists on Fox debates (known as “props”) have always been selected for their looks or ethnicity, not for their rhetorical chops or subject matter expertise. “Democratic strategists” with dark skin are always desired and are seen as important to liberal/enemy typecasting; just about any African American liberal or Hispanic American who calls herself a Democratic strategist will get at least one call from segment producers for a segment tryout.
On Bulls & Bears our favorite third-string Democratic strategist for years was Jehmu Greene. (After years on Fox News, she became a first-string Democratic strategist, and when she got too rhetorically strong, she was, of course, let go by Fox News.)
She is now a CNN contributor. Jehmu was straight out of the casting for “smug ethnic liberal antagonist.” She specialized in the sour look that the director would constantly show when I or another right-wing protagonist was chopping her liberal dogma to pieces.
But you understand her value to our highly choreographed fear-and-redemption melodrama. I’m not saying all our primarily white male audience was prejudiced or didn’t care for black folks; what I am saying is after the Obama election, there were enough racists in our audience to make a difference.
In fourteen years and two thousand segments at Fox News, I had only one fair fight. It was with a whip-smart, left-wing hard-ass attorney named Julian Epstein from San Francisco. After beating us all up pretty well with arguments he had never disclosed to the producer before the show, he never came back on the show again (and soon was banned from Fox News altogether after a tiff with Editor-in-Chief Neil Cavuto).
FNC FIXES ITS WARRIOR AND INTELLIGENCE PANELS TOO
Rigged outcomes and the selection of demonstratively weak opposition is part of all opinion-debate programming at FNC, including military and geopolitical intelligence panels. The military opinion segments all follow the same script: The liberal antagonist spews ideological heresies in one TV “box,” and the host directs the conservative protagonist to “clean up the liberal mess” and tell the audience the real truth.
My fellow Fox News contributor Bob Bevelacqua recently shared his story with me: “Tobin, I read your Medium.com article on ‘fixed debates’ at Fox. I can 100 percent say the same thing happened on the military analysts’ side of the house and is the main reason I tore up my contract in 2005 with Fox. Thank you, Toby, for telling the truth!”
Many of the ex-military contributors I worked with quit when they finally figured out that Fox News used them as pawns in its predetermined-outcome performances.
Recently, Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters (retired), whom I have had the pleasure of interviewing many times for FBN, finally hit the wall after ten years (again, not the same as Fox News opinion programming, but getting closer every day with Trump bootlickers like Lou Dobbs and Stuart Varney). Ralph was an expert on Russia—trained on the history and culture, the language, and having met Russian intelligence officers in the Kremlin and elsewhere.
The conversion of Fox News into Trump TV from 2016 to 2018 was the final straw for him. When Ralph quit on March 20, 2018, he was quick to denounce the network and President Trump in a classic email to colleagues:
“Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.”
Join the club, brother.
He went on:
Four decades ago, I took an oath as a newly commissioned officer.
That oath did not expire when I took off my uniform. Today, I feel that Fox is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. . . .
To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.
Ralph, too, had been blocked by producers from expressing his opinion and sharing his primary field of expertise: Russian intelligence operations and strategy. As he shared in a 2018 Washington Post article after leaving Fox News:
As early as the fall of 2016, and especially as doubts mounted about the new Trump administration’s national security vulnerabilities, I increasingly was blocked from speaking on the issues about which I could offer real expertise: Russian affairs and our intelligence community. I did not hide my views at Fox and, as word spread that I would not unswervingly support President Trump and, worse, that I believed an investigation into Russian interference was essential to our national security, I was excluded from segments that touched on Vladimir Putin’s possible influence on an American president, his campaign, or his administration.
You are not the only one, Ralph, who is ashamed of aiding and abetting Fox News’s crimes against America—not by a long shot.
YES, MANY OF FOX NEWS’S WHITE GERIATRIC VIEWERS ARE A BIT RACIST
On one show in 2004 during Passover, for some reason, I used some Yiddish expressions. I grew up with a gentile mom who somehow loved Yiddish. She would often let loose an “oy gevalt,” an “oy vey,” or some other Yiddish term. Frankly, until I was much well into adulthood, I had no idea what she was saying or trying to express—or even that the words were Yiddish!
Many years later, after living for more than twenty years in a very heterogeneous DC suburb (my Jewish friends used the phrase “living behind the Hebrew Highway” to describe my neighborhood),
I learned what the terms meant and found myself using them all the time. We had many close Jewish friends in DC and New York City, and it just seemed natural to me to use the terms. On this particular show, for no real reason, I threw out, “Oy vey! Look, you’re making me gevalt with all this mashugana,” to one of our willing liberal piñatas, who happened to be Jewish.
The next week, I was sitting in our production area when my Jewish executive producer came over and said, “Dude, we got all kinds of email from last week’s show. What was up with all the Yiddish? All these emails said, in essence, “Tobin Smith is Jewish? I had no idea. I used to like the guy.” (By the way, the show hardly ever got an email. Our sixty-eight-and-older audience was not the emailing kind.)
My executive producer said, “Look, I’m Jewish, and I don’t use Yiddish around here or in public. Take it from me—our audience ain’t exactly the most progressive. If you want to stay here, lay off the Yiddish and stay with your Scots-Irish crap, okay?”
At the time, I’d had no idea. Until I started traveling around to Southern towns to give speeches as a Fox News personality, I’d never really met our core audience. Later on, my executive producer’s advice and the rise of Fox News-led Trumpism made total sense.
OF COURSE FOX NEWS TALK SHOWS ARE GOP PROPAGANDA BROADCASTS TOO
In 2011, George W. Bush’s press secretary Scott McClellan admitted publicly that the Bush administration coordinated with Fox News to give Fox News Republican talking points to be discussed on air. I can tell you this: Fox News had been acting as a GOP infomercial since the 2000 elections—most extensively on the prime-time Fox News partisan opinion programming—more than anyone outside Fox knew until McClellan fessed up.
In 2004, I was at Langan’s Pub on Forty-Seventh (now sadly gone) after doing the then Hannity & Colmes show. One of the show’s producers was there with me, and he had an envelope labeled “Office of the President.” I asked, “BT, you get love letters from the White House?”
He answered, “Nah, I get ’em from Karl Rove. Whenever Rove wants to drive home a point or sell some new policy, he sends Sean a package. Sean skims it and hands it to me and says, ‘Make this the open tomorrow.’ We get envelopes from the White House all the time. It’s nuts, but Sean is the boss and I produce what he wants to air—simple as that.”
Several months later, still in 2004, I was in the producer’s pod at Fox on our Friday taping day, looking for a desktop computer to check email on, and I saw another envelope with the “Office of the President” label. When the producer got back to the desk, I asked, “So, J, are we doing what George Bush wants us to talk about, or what?”
She replied, “Nah, that’s for the O’Reilly show. I’m helping out. They have a few folks out.” When I asked, “Is it a standard operating procedure that FNC gets talking points from the White House and puts that shit into our show?” she gave me that look like what are you, an idiot?
Then she told me, “I’m only going to say this once: For your own good, you did not see this, and we did not discuss this. Got it? You could call Fox News the White House press office. Half the shit we talk about comes from the RNC or White House or Karl Rove’s office. It’s friggin’ insane.”
Fact: Since 2000, Fox News opinion programming has always been nothing but an unpaid GOP infomercial—and that was before FNC became Trump TV in 2017. At least Fox tried to hide the fact before Trump; now the unpaid Trumpian infomercials on Fox News opinion programs are just insane.
And to think, in 1949, Congress was afraid of a television network “imposing its political bias on the general electorate” and created the Fairness Doctrine expressly to prevent the potential for this reality.
My personal experiences with the almost daily White House propaganda directives to Fox News producers and hosts continued after I left. In August 2019, a literal trove of Treasury Department emails with Fox News was released to the non-profit organization Democracy Forward and provided exclusively to the Hollywood Reporter. To say they “paint a picture of a close, friendly bond between the Trump administration agency and two news organizations, Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network” is like reporting that Donald Trump once met Stormy Daniels—there is a lot more to that story.
For example, on April 25, 2017, my old buddy Fox Business Network host David Asman advised then–Treasury Department spokesman Tony Sayegh (a former Fox News contributor) on how the administration should pursue a key policy goal: achieving a major tax cut. After sharing a quotation from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Asman wrote in the email: “Take the BIG TAX CUTS NOW . . . a long-term deal with small cuts is useless. NOTHING IS PERMANENT IN WASHINGTON. Big tax cuts now give the economy the push it needs.”
Four days later, Asman wrote to Sayegh to tell him that a significant block of his FBN show would focus on the administration’s tax policies. “You’ll like it,” Asman told him.
“Awesome, David,” Sayegh wrote back. “You’re the man.”
Democracy Forward concluded in their statement that “the Trump administration is a revolving door for Fox News personalities and our documents expose the network as the administration’s communications arm. Trump administration officials revising Fox News tweets, and Fox News rewriting stories to suit the administration’s whims are not journalism, it’s propaganda.”
Like I said, when it comes to being the State Media and Propaganda arm of a GOP White House, nothing has changed at Fox News since my day except instead of working hand-and-glove with the White House, that pretense is gone. Fox News is just a good old lapdog obeying its master.
CHAPTER 10
Why Fox News’s White Tribal Superiority Shtick Is So Incredibly Powerful
Okay. Now you and I need get real about why you and I and everyone else with a political or cultural tribal identity are so susceptible and eager to consume content that supports our tribe. Until I became a NeverTrump tribe member, I really never personally understood the addictive nature and gravitational pull of seeing “just one more story that confirms my analysis and judgment that Donald J. Trump is the worst human being on the planet!”
In other words, why did I run video after video on YouTube about some new Trumpian apostasy and immediately exhale with “God it feels so great to see yet another brick of evidence that tells me how much smarter and better person I am than those schmucks in those stupid red hats.”
The answer to that question is Social Identity Theory (SIT). In case you skipped social and humanist psychology in college—SIT says individuals in addition to a self-identity possess social identities—that part of their concept of who they are and how positively they see themselves is also derived from their meaningful group memberships.
Social identity theory is based on the fact that humans are hardwired and driven to try to improve and build their self-image/self-esteem/self-pride through two vehicles: self-identity or personal accomplishments and their social identities.
In other words, humankind has two paths to improving our concept of self and self-pride:
Your self-identity/image building achievements and psyche building status trophies (i.e., your family, friends, things, and achievements that you are proud of and make you feel self-pride when you see them or talk about them).
And your social identities or the groups you feel proud of (i.e., “I’m a proud ___”).
Henri Tajfel (“Dodge-Fell”) is a Polish social psychologist who created social identity theory in 1979. Tajfel proposed that the most important groups that people belong to (social class, family, alumnus, conservative, liberal, etc.) are an important source of pride and self-esteem. Tajfel’s experiments proved our in-groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the superior groups in the social world. Key word here is superiority—the feeling of intellectual, spiritual, moral, or physical superiority over “others” is the mother’s milk of social identity (and the psychological engine that powers Fox News tribal identity opinion segments).
Social identity in fact
fills two core psychological needs. One is to feel the positive personal self-esteem that comes from group inclusion and the other is a more positive and meaningful sense of who you are and what you stand for.
Now here is where this SIT thing gets interesting and where Fox News’s tribal identity porn programming strategy rocks the world of self-identified right-wing tribal partisans.
First, categorization of our “in-groups” as superior and “out-groups” as inferior is a big part of the self-esteem and self-pride building from social identity. In short, you get a big dose of feel-good superiority and self-pride from the exclusion, demonization, and objectification of out-groups or “them.” But here is the key to the Fox News emotional tribal manipulation playbook: It’s the degree of contrast that counts the most to your social identity based self-esteem boost. In other words, the greater and deeper the good/bad, smart/stupid, righteous/unrighteous contrast you see between your righteous in-group and your hated enemy’s out-group, the greater the shot of self-esteem and ego gratification your psyche gets.
So in terms of Fox News’s white tribal identity porn, the more the Fox News hosts, contributors, and guests demonize and objectify the right-wingers’ tribal out-groups like “the libtards,” the greater the contrast between “the good guys” and the bad guys. The bigger the contrast between your homogenous white right-wing in-group and the heterogeneous out-group of liberals, the more powerful the self-esteem booster shot you get.
Given that innate psychology trigger, guess what we did at the Fox Hate Network—of course we would go out of our way to demonize and objectify our white tribal audience’s identified out-groups as much as humanly possible. If we did, our audience got the most powerful self-esteem boosts we could deliver.
This chapter has one intent: to help you get your head around the immense power of “tribal identity” and “tribal identity activation media.” Too few people understand that our political and cultural social identities fill two very important, unstoppable, and powerful emotional and psychological drives which we all share no matter our political or cultural identity.
