by Tobin Smith
By turning their one-minute attack ad formula into seven-minute “opinion talk show segments,” the cumulative effect on a partisan conservative watching all that attack ad content over and over again for thousands of hours would be the eventual conversion of non-radicalized partisan into a radicalized hyperpartisan.
A big point to remember about Fox News is that it is not in the business of monetizing politics or tribal partisan engagement, per se. What Fox News is in the business of is monetizing mankind’s native human psychological flaws—emotions, behaviors, and physiology hardwired into our brain which we have little or no control over.
Now it just so happens that the biggest tribal audiences are formed on the basis of politics, culture, and religion. That means non-college-graduate, social and political conservatives are by far the easiest to dupe and manipulate with this strategy. One of the reasons why liberals (until Trump) were hard to build a significant TV audience from is they never were big political hate porn radio listeners or TV watchers and are wired to not be very susceptible or reactive to fear-laden imagery.
HOW SCIENCE PROVED THE FEAR PORN FORMULA WAS BUILT-IN FOR CONSERVATIVES
Neuroscience discoveries on our brain’s hardwiring are clear: Cultural and political conservatives are much easier to frighten and seduce into a cloud of emotions.
As mentioned, that “secret backdoor” to your brain is fear. Long ago, social science proved that personal-safety stimuli and fight-or-flight feelings, instincts, and emotions are prioritized to be delivered to the “switchboard” of the brain ahead of the other core emotions.
Televised fear-and-hate-porn content works fabulously well for ratings because it engages human beings both consciously and subconsciously. Why? Neuroscience tells us it’s because our prehistoric fight-or-flight brain region (our “fear chip”), called the amygdala (ah-MIG-dahla), is specifically wired to process personal safety information first.
Conscious and unconscious fear for safety override all other stimuli to the brain. In other words, fear content causes the amygdala to react automatically and involuntarily, before the cerebral cortex (the thinking and rational part of the brain) can apply logic. That “secret backdoor” or wormhole to your brain is fear.
Fortunately for Fox News, self-identified conservatives are almost twice as reactive to fearful and enraging content than self-identified liberals—who knew? One group knew for sure: Roger Ailes and his merry gang of right-wing tribal fear and hate porn producers.
In twenty peer-reviewed scientific studies since 2005, cognitive and neuroscience researchers found that liberals and conservatives actually have different brain structures, different physiological responses to fearful stimuli, and activate different neural mechanisms when confronted with similar fearful situations.
Deep down in your heart you knew that, right?
What the neuroscientists found when self-identified right- and left-wing people were subjected to fearful disgusting images was amazing; they found in study after study that self-identified conservatives actually have a larger amygdala region in their brains than self-identified liberals.
This means that conservatives really do feel and react to fear far more deeply than liberals, and their fight-or-flight response time is actually faster. (Fight-or-flight response comes up a little later as one explanation why Fox News addiction and desocialization is so unhealthy too.)
Even more fascinating, in hundreds of blind tests of self-identified conservatives vs. liberals, researchers could identify the conservative 86.2 percent of the time just by how their brain reacted to fearful stimuli via the latest functional MRI (FMRI) technology.
So yes—neuroscientists and social psychologists have determined that right-wing conservatives’ brains really are different than liberals’ brains—and especially sensitive to feelings of fear and disgust! There is also significant amounts of research that show liberals have a much higher rate of the so-called “empathy gene” than conservatives do. That genetic fact explains a lot about how liberals react to events vs. conservatives too!
Now you know the secret to why right-wing tribal fear porn is so effective with self-identified conservatives: The larger amygdala in self-identified conservatives is vastly more sensitive to fearful images than left-wingers.
This neurology is the main reason Fox News emphasizes and leads with fear segments in its tribal “opinion programs.” People who self-identify as conservative react almost twice as much to fearful images and content than liberals. As such, they are consistently terrified of Muslims and Islam and being murdered by jihadists and all the other tribal fear buttons Fox News hosts push a hundred times a day.
PS: This has to be why MSNBC and CNN do not emphasize fear program segments except for fear of Trump. Fear of Trump is visceral—but in general the liberal mind is not nearly as reactive to fear as the conservative brain.
Key Point: Tribal instinct is involuntary, and that is how the Fox News tribal social identity porn formula manipulates conservatives—producing involuntary emotional responses. There is no more powerful stimulus to your brain than fearful stimuli. That is why even though a Fox News “opinion program” is not in any way a hard news program, most of the highest prime-time tribal hate porn programs open with a “Fox News Alert!” in bold red colors with the anchor/host sitting behind what looks just like a hard news anchor desk.
Another part of Roger Ailes’s genius was to not stop at just fear porn. Over the years, he added rage, blame, and plain old hate porn to the formula so Fox News programming would touch every involuntary emotion and reaction in the tribal partisan’s innate portfolio of human emotions.
After the restrictions on partisan opinion broadcasting were lifted in 1987 with the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine and the end of personal anti-disparagement restrictions in 2000, Fox News tribal hate porn had the green light to produce and broadcast (and later stream) the conservative tribal identity porn that Roger Ailes had dreamed of thirty years prior.
But Roger’s dream of converting his one-minute tribal fear and hate political ads into half hour and one-hour television programming really took off with the election of President Obama and the financial crisis of 2008–2009. Obama and the Great Recession created the Promised Land for right-wing tribal and cultural social identity pornography.
WHY FEAR IS THE CURRENCY OF CONSERVATIVE TRIBAL IDENTITY PORNOGRAPHY
Soon after my Fox News awakening about the power of fear-based images, I began strolling into Kathy’s office every week to chat. I was fascinated to find her office jammed with hundreds of books sent to her by publishers. She primarily read the conservative political and cultural books, she told me.
My first question was, “So what do you really do here at Fox?”
She answered, “I do what I did for Roger and Lee at their old right-wing advertising agency. I let them know what issues are pissing off or frightening to right-wing conservatives today and how we should frame the narrative.”
Later on, I figured out that what she really did was help Roger put together his daily segment talking points and ensure his emotional-engagement-angle memo was distributed and followed to the letter by all the Fox News opinion executive producers and production teams.
In essence, my take was she led the daily tribal fear patrol looking for the next big fear and rage triggers. The term “fear-and-rage porn” is a nice way of hiding the obvious: Whether you are a Fox News opinion-program producer, direct-response copywriter, or social media guru, we are all in the business of exploiting the innate human psychological weaknesses and involuntary instincts for profit.
The American Constitution was intended to act—and has indeed acted—as a restraint on humanity’s darkest tribal impulses for more than 240 years. In contrast, Fox News opinion programming post-Fairness Doctrine was expressly designed and choreographed to encourage and monetize humanity’s worst impulses toward tribalism.
How is that for a company mission and business model?
HOW DO
YOU LIKE YOUR TRIBAL IDENTITY PORN: SOFT OR HARD-CORE?
Just like sexual arousal pornography, there is “soft-core” and “hard-core” tribal identity arousal porn. Here’s a good explanation of hard-core tribal porn that I heard early in my career from a producer/drinking buddy after my inaugural appearance on Hannity & Colmes in 2002 (which in 2008 became just Hannity because the right-wing audience could not stand the liberal Alan Colmes any longer, I was told): “Toby, you gotta think of the [Hannity & Colmes] show like it’s tribal snuff porn. Our viewers hate liberals and liberal politics and culture with a passion. My job is to make sure the viewer at home watches enough liberal shit-slinging to get their blood boiling and then BOOM watches that dude snuffed out on air. Watching liberal snuff porn frigging rocks our tribal right-wingers’ world!”
Okay, class, why on earth would Fox News terrorize its own audience?
Now you get it—because that is the fastest way to bypass the rational brain and get to the amygdala! When people are afraid, they don’t reason. When people can’t think rationally, they’ll believe anything, and they’ll be afraid of whatever they are told to fear.
Leave it to the great screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin to get this concept right! Sorkin brilliantly conveyed the innate power of tribal identity fear porn in his movie The American President. The monologue of POTUS Andrew Shepherd in this movie captures the Fox News tribal hate porn strategy in all its “glory.”
In this scene, POTUS Shepherd (played by Michael Douglas) is fighting his GOP opponent, Senator Bob Rumson (played by Richard Dreyfuss), and Rumson’s unabashed use of fear and rage to capture votes in national elections:
We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious men to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, friend, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income and blue-collar voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and personal character.
LESSON LEARNED: HERE’S HOW WE KNOW FEAR WORKS BEST
Social scientists tell us that the primary emotions are anger/rage, fear, joy/pleasure, sadness, and contempt/disgust. As you’ve now learned, fear is the key to the success of tribal hate porn in right-wingers because when someone feels fear or anger/outrage, that person is in tribal mode, not in rational mode. That is when they can get hooked into the segment.
But how do FNC producers know that fear-based content works best today? By looking at real-time viewer data from Nielsen and then engagement data (streaming, clicking, and comments) from Foxnews.com.
TV production teams know which segments are working because of the Nielsen two-minute audience ratings. Every two minutes while the program is broadcast, network leadership and executive producers get a read on the audience numbers. What they are looking for is simple. They want to know if the new show builds from the audience it got from the last program or if it loses audience count. They want to see if the first segment holds the audience it inherited. On Fox News, even on markets and economy shows, fear was more potent than greed.
One of the best examples of this was our opening and closing segments for many months after 9/11. After we got back to our regular programming, week after week after week, Brenda would end the opening segment by asking all the stock-market pros, “Given the terrorist risk in America, does the threat of terror change your trading on Monday morning?”
I was running a mutual fund and hedge fund at that time, and every week, I would say the same thing: “No, Brenda. Buying stocks when people are fearful of temporary events is a great time to make money. I use irrational investor panic and fear to make money off of irrational fear.”
The next week, the same question. And the next week. And the next. Finally, after a month of the same question, I lost it. “No, Brenda! Only the idiots watching us scare the crap out of them will be selling their stocks on Monday! Please don’t stop it. I’m making a fortune off Fox News ginning up our viewers’ collective paranoia and them selling their stocks in panic!”
Boom! The show taping stopped because someone—me—had screwed up. I apologized, and when the segment was re-shot, I, of course, said what they wanted me to say.
Why did we start every opinion segment with a Fox News Alert and a fear/anger- or disgust-inducing B-roll video and script on terrorism? Because the first two segment ratings reports show that fear works.
I later found out that it was Roger Ailes who commanded that we end our first segment with the fear-of-terrorist-attacks pitch because the data said it worked. One day, to learn why some of my great segment ideas always wound up nowhere, I asked Brenda, “So, B—who do you have to sleep with to get a segment pitch approved here at Fox News?”
She responded, “Well, it’s Roger, and you are definitely not his type!”
I heard the same thing from hard-core Fox News addicts for decades: “Toby, I wanted to throw a brick through my TV at that libtard last Saturday, but you came through and handed him his head on a platter. Thank you for sticking up for capitalism/‘Murica’/the good guys!”
Again—have you ever wondered why there is no moderate/centrist tribal cable TV network? Think about moderates like me. I don’t have tribal imprinting and wiring—other than my visceral disgust with Trump and Trumpism—to be manipulated.
I want to know what’s going on in my country and my world. But moderates, by definition, are not tribal; they consider themselves pragmatic and self-identify as not being part of either the left- or right-wing tribe, whom they hold in contempt as mindless partisan ideologues. But make no mistake: Our non-partisan tribe feels superior to partisan tribes simply because we think for ourselves versus becoming right- or left-wing “sheeple.” Being a proud non-tribal is a social identity too and definitely a self-esteem booster for centrists/Independents. Trust me—centrists do feel superior to those grubby tribal right- or left-wingers.
Ailes’s gift to right-wing candidates was creating TV advertising that carpet bombed their opponents with enough antipersonnel cluster bombs that they eventually were rendered unelectable. The building of Fox News’s right-wing cult was more than just an attack in a congressional race—Fox News attacks “those people” or simply the “others” as an existential enemy that must be overcome in a great, white, right-wing tribal crusade.
Key Point: At the end of the day, Fox’s tribal partisan identity porn is really just a hybrid mash-up of:
Ailes’s attack ads.
low-brow reality TV.
a soft-core porn cable channel.
a rigged outcome WWE TV wrestling match.
a Christian TV network.
IS THIS THE TOBIN SMITH SHOW OR THE O’REILLY REPORT?
This story is about the power and nature of blame-based messaging with self-identified conservatives. FYI—blame porn (just like in the Evangelical pulpit) is another superpower of tribal TV because it is blame-shifting, and blame-shifting (“it’s not my fault, it’s their fault”) is massively cathartic.
So here I am in DC waiting to do a TV “hit” about rising energy prices on the O’Reilly Factor show. I’ve been interviewed on every news and business channel over the last twenty years. Bill O’Reilly is the only talk show host who talks to the paid contributor talent before you go on air to basically tell you what he wants you to say.
Normally at Fox News as a New York City based contributor, my experience was it’s the segment producer who tells you what they want you to say and the context in which they want you to make your argument.
Anyway, O’Reilly is in my ear with this classic O’Reillyesque exhortation. “Smith,” he says—in dozens of segments on his air he never called me by first name—“here is how this is going to go. Last year you said oil prices were going down and now they are going
up. I know that oil prices are rigged and manipulated by all the major oil companies—they short oil futures”—i.e., they make money betting on oil prices going down—“and make billions when prices plunge. Then they all get together and cut marginal supply and boom—the price of oil jacks up. Exxon, Mobil, Shell—they are all in this shit show together in a big worldwide conspiracy, and I know it and am going to blow the whistle on it.”
I also must add that in my years of dealing with O’Reilly he always thought himself to be an economics and market genius—if you didn’t put up with his pedantic, cult-leader-like pre-segment lectures on whatever was the segment topic, you were not invited back.
He continued, “So I’m going to call you out on being dead wrong on oil prices and educate the audience at home about how they are getting ripped off by big oil and Wall Street guys like you stealing money from their pockets.”
I responded, “You know, Bill—my forecast was right last year—oil prices did go down with the 2009 recession. Now they are rising because actual end demand is rising. And the oil majors are colluding to raise oil prices? You mean OPEC right? Mobil/Exxon and Shell are not part of OPEC, as you know.”
O’Reilly responds, “I’m confused—is this the Tobin Fucking Smith Show? Until it is, this is how we roll.
“You don’t understand what I do—I scare the shit out of Joe and Mary six-pack sitting all comfy at home, and then I show them how you Wall Street carpetbaggers are to blame. You don’t know what you are talking about and how Wall Street is nothing but a conspiracy against the little guy. Fear works—resentment works—blame works too. Me coming to their rescue and telling ’em I’m on their side and how the big guys work against them is what I do—comprende amigo?”
“Roger that, Bill—thanks for the education. I thought it was your good looks that made your show click.”
There, my new friends, is Fox News in a tiny capsule: At Fox News, empirical fact is worthless; triggering our base emotions of fear, anger, blame, resentment, and hate is the currency of the tribal identity porn game and what the tribal performance art at FNC is all about. Subjective opinion flows like water into the minds of the Fox News fanatic because, of course, no empirically proven fact ever enters their self-curated digital echo chamber.
