by Tobin Smith
But the most important program issue of all? Getting the audience’s addictive brain chemicals flowing if we choreograph and execute the fixed outcome “debate” game plan correctly.
If we do, there is a fist pump “Yea!” ending for our viewer—that’s FNC’s happy dance drug deal with the viewer (we will dive deep into the neurochemistry of tribal identity porn addiction in a while—I promise it will be exciting!).
You have to understand that the language of tribal TV is fear, righteous tribal victory, and cult-like social identity beliefs repeated over and over again until they stick. Linguistic scientists call this verbal technique “generics.” Liberals hate America. Big oil is ripping us off. Liberals hate capitalism. In the tribal fear, rage, blame, and resentment porn business at Fox News, the entire performance art is built on the premise that if you scare the already frightened, lonely, disconnected, angry (and for most of the audience financially traumatized) people at home even more, you will get their emotional fight-or-flight brain chemicals involuntarily flowing. And that will give us a chance to addict you.
At its core, tribal identity TV is just a riff on Caveman Psychology 101, and evolution did not prepare your brain to ingest tens of thousands of hours of tribal fear, hate, and blame porn.
Episodic everyday tribal TV is different than seasonal episodic drama/comedy/sports TV. You may feel you are “addicted” to Game of Thrones, but you really just love the wondrous emotions and escape you feel watching adventure/romance/swordfights and those flying dragons. It may have felt like withdrawal when the show ended in 2019, but you have many other TV shows that float your mental escapism boat.
Prime-time politically tribalized opinion and commentary programs broadcasting every weeknight are different—they’re on at the same time every day of the year. Like I have stated from the beginning, daily tribal TV is an appointment to feel tribal superiority feelings—a social identity self-esteem booster shot, if you will.
Instead of escaping reality for an hour or two, the Fox News viewer is actively rescripting the reality of their life.
Properly produced, tribal identity porn is psychologically addictive because the feelings we deal in are the core psychological social identity needs we all have—to replace depleting self-esteem by validating the superiority of our in-group and seeing yet another high-def example of the inferiority of our hated enemy out-group.
Game of Thrones is make-believe that takes you to a fantastical faraway place. Fox News’s tribal fear, rage, blame, resentment, and hate programming helps you feel better about who you are right now and validates the righteousness and superiority of your right-wing social identity every day.
Eventually I learned from my producers at Fox News—via many late-night cocktails at the various Fox News New York City watering holes—that Roger’s real dream and the actual mission of Fox News was actually much darker than just rigged opinion debates.
What we created in my years at Fox News was a perpetual emotion machine powered by nuclear bombs of tribal fear, outrage, grievance, and blame. Those nukes filled the TV rooms of our viewers with the very real fallout of vitriol and resentment. For many of those viewers breathing that toxic air for six hours a day, Roger knew their dormant virus of political tribalism would activate and soon their worldview and the Fox News worldview became one.
All of which brings us to Fox News’s most powerful tribal instinct triggering technique of them all—the conservative’s visceral hatred and resentment of liberal identity politics more often referred to as “political correctness,” or simply PC.
YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS LIKE TO WORK IN WEST LA AND BE A CONSERVATIVE
I’m in the Fox News studio in West LA for a live hit for Sean Hannity on a Friday night. It’s a 5:35 hit, and traffic in LA for you non-LA people is horrific—you might as well go find an adult beverage with a friend and let the traffic clear out. An FNC producer from NYC is in the LA studios that day, and since LA is my original home and I know the hood, I take him out to Santa Monica for drive time cocktails.
It turns out Bruce the producer had moved to LA from NYC, and the moment our adult beverages arrive he starts wailing about how brutal it is to be a conservative New Yorker in LA. “Toby you can’t believe it. I go out to after work drinks with my wife’s friends who are all West LA professionals in the corporate insurance world. Jesus—the river of PC bullshit did not stop all night—and they could not believe that I (a) work for Fox News and (b) did not vote for Barack Obama. In fact, they looked at me, shook their heads, and said, ‘Bruce—you might as well go back to New York City—you will never make it out here. Everything you do and say is an insult to how we see the world in West LA.’ And oh boy—every friggin’ conversation was about how racist Republicans are and how bigoted they are versus the polyglots in LA who speak at least two languages and they don’t respect their culture and heritage blah blah blah. I told them I was Jewish, and they said ‘That might get you by in Beverly Hills—but not here. You Republicans are just so non-PC.’”
I have many longtime friends who self-identify as right wing or Republicans. In fact, virtually all my West Coast peeps are right-wingers minus the Bay Area.
What I have found is people use the term “PC” a lot but don’t really understand what it means. Like most cultural or political terms, PC is just mental shorthand for identity politics. And identity politics is just the commonly used term for a group of people that feel their rights (as a member of an undefended or marginalized minority or culture) have been abused and need to be protected by law or receive special treatment.
For instance, the Civil Rights movement and gay rights movement were never a “zero sum” business; affirming the rights these minority groups already had under the Constitution did not give them something new or confer preferential treatment.
But for the purpose of understanding one of the most important ways Fox News manipulates, triggers, and radicalizes its culturally and politically conservative audience, you have to understand the searing, bone-marrow-deep resentment and hatred generated by liberal identity politics and its brand of political correctness for people like Bruce.
First understand this fact: PC is also just a synonym for cultural or political us vs. them tribalism. But I found that the particular brand of political correctness that makes self-identified conservatives’ heads spin is the smug, scorched earth absolutism kind: “If you don’t use this word or this phrase, or think the way I do, you are a (choose your favorite “ism,” “ist,” and “phobe”—it’s a long list) which proves to me you are morally and intellectually deficient” (with the implication always that if they don’t follow the PC rules of behavior, they are just a backward, gap-tooth hillbilly in a pickup truck).
The Dems/Liberals/Left apparently never read Dale Carnegie on how to win friends and influence people. “Criticism is dangerous because it wounds a person’s pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”
Attacking a person’s morality or intellect because they do not conform to your version of political or cultural correctness is like serving up criticism with a chlorine chaser. I’ll use the favorite term of tribal right-wingers, “Snowflakes,” to illustrate my point. Without a doubt in my mind, the most powerful driving force that drove Donald J. Trump to the American presidency was his skillful battle against cultural political correctness. He dispensed with the traditional racial and cultural code strategy and went right to his Trumpian anti-PC bullhorn.
Since he was born politically incorrect, he was a natural warrior against it.
Now to a self-identified liberal, the term political correctness refers to a commonly held belief that there is language, practices, and policies which could reasonably be expected to offend, marginalize, or disadvantage a group and thus should be eliminated or at least managed in a civilized and sophisticated society.
I am told the PC concept originally revolved around the core liberal drive for a color-blind America and a more fair and sen
sitive country that welcomes and respects the culture of all its citizens. PC was and is (in most cases) I think a noble pursuit—but with conservative talk radio first and then the vast growth of Fox News it’s been weaponized against its noble intent.
Today, to a politically and culturally incorrect conservative person (especially from small city or rural America—not living in a racially and ethnically diverse urban community) who proudly identifies as a member of Trump’s “Intolerables” tribe, political correctness means a way that we speak in America so we don’t offend overly sensitive “snowflakes.”
Don’t shoot the messenger here, folks—just telling you how at least 40 percent of Americans feel about absolutist scorched earth political correctness—they despise it with all their being. Brian Ott, a political scientist who has studied Fox News/Trump TV’s core audience, says that Fox News has an emotional and psychic “lock on 42 percent of the American public.” He has concluded from direct research that this lock is “absolute.”
Why is that? One common theme is the dogmatic approach of the left wing that preaches “inclusion” and how inclusive and color blind their big tent is, but excludes Americans that don’t say the right words or believe in the “right” issues.
More graphically, my favorite dictionary and arbiter of all things American, the Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com) tells us that political correctness means, “If you are so pathetically weak that you don’t have the balls to say what you feel and mean, you are a hopeless politically correct pussy.”
All righty then—our urban and nonurban cultural divide is indeed deep and vast.
Furthermore, to be considered an upstanding member of the Intolerable tribe is to believe that political correctness is nothing less than a plot and method of liberalism to control and dictate public speech and thought.
One of the most common examples of succumbing to political correctness is the word “y’all.” While I did not get this PC memo, I am told that using the term “y’all” is not politically correct anymore because some African Americans have decided that it is offensive.
Oy! My point here? There is no more powerful way to trigger right-wing heads to explode and induce all kinds of instinctive tribal behavior and emotions than to mount a discussion supporting political correctness. To even the non-tribal conservative, when they don’t agree with affirmative action they are called “racists.” When they don’t agree with transgender bathrooms, they are called homophobes.
When they want to build a physical wall to keep undocumented immigrants and their young children out of America, they are racists and baby killers. When they want to ban Muslims or asylum seekers from entering the country, they are Islamophobia bigots, racist, and un-American—that’s a near PC grand slam.
So gosh—what culturally and politically PC visceral heresy act does Fox News perform on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis? They gin-up as many political correctness segments per day as humanly possible. From the “War Against Christmas” to using the term “snowflake” and “elite” as often as possible in referring to Millennial and Gen-Z aged liberals, ripping into PC behavior exacts a purely Pavlovian trigger response in conservatives from basically everywhere.
My point: To a conservative (and most right-leaning Independents) engaging in political correctness is tribal activation and validation mongering on steroids. It’s a “gimme” as we say in golf. When the Fox News producers are out of ideas for today’s show, they just search “politically correct” and they have at least one segment.
As GOP Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was quoted recently on today’s toxic environment of political tribalism and identity politics, “Donald Trump did not give us all this. Donald Trump is showing us what it looks like.”
American politics, it has become painfully clear, is now driven less by ideological commitments than by our tribal partisan social identities—less by what we think than by what we are defined as by our chosen tribal membership. For cultural and political conservatives and binge-watching Fox News addicts in general, their bone-marrow-deep resentment of being labeled “racist, homophobic, Islamophobic” for their long-held beliefs and cultural differences from urban liberal America is the most powerful Pavlovian tribal trigger possible.
Remember—to many Americans in 2019, their political identity is their ideology.
In my opinion, it’s now crystal clear that the Democratic Party and Progressives have done themselves no favors by creating so many identity politics issues and cultural PC checkboxes that that many mainstream Americans will never culturally fit within. They drive away a lot of good people who simply hate being demonized or stigmatized by how they see the world.
Can you blame them?
Because above all else—the power of anti-PC programming is to emotionally troll the hyper-aggrieved viewer to get a visceral tribal reaction. Luckily for Fox News, self-identified white right-wingers, after watching thousands of hours of Fox News, develop such a bone-deep and finely tuned feeling of communal victimhood that for many those feelings are never more than just slightly below their emotional reactor.
Feelings of bitterness toward smug condescending liberal absolutism, name calling/labels, and utter disrespect for how other tribes see the world is Fox News’s bread and butter emotional trigger and hot button manipulation.
CHAPTER 12
The Untold Truth about Tribal Social Identity Porn
As social scientists Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have written in Scientific American, “Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the struggle for survival is how easily organisms can be harmed by that which they desire. The trout is caught by the fisherman’s lure, the mouse by cheese. But at least those creatures have the excuse that bait and cheese look like sustenance. Humans seldom have that consolation. The temptations that can disrupt their lives are often pure indulgences. No one has to drink alcohol, for example. Realizing when a diversion has gotten out of control is one of the great challenges of life.”
They add this insight as well:
The term “TV addiction” is imprecise and laden with value judgments, but it captures the essence of this genuine phenomenon. Psychologists and psychiatrists formally define substance dependence as a disorder characterized by criteria that include spending a great deal of time using the substance; using it more often than one intends; thinking about reducing use or making repeated unsuccessful efforts to reduce use; and reporting withdrawal symptoms when one stops using it.
Key Point: What distinguishes addiction to Fox News tribal hate porn from regular TV addiction is simple: TV addicts watch a bunch of channels. They make friends with their favorite actors, hosts, and news anchors all over the dial. Watching TV gives them something to do. Their imaginary friends are always there at the same time and place. Perhaps the most significant difference is that ordinary entertainment TV addicts (like me!) discuss their favorite shows and stars with their actual friends and family in friendly banter and debate. Far from estranging them, the mutually shared experience of a favorite TV show is a social bonding event like discussing the movie you just saw with family or friends.
In contrast, the average Fox News addict watches more than three hours per day of just Fox News tribal identity porn. Moreover, most hard-core Fox News addicts I have met and heard about from family members never turn the TV off of Fox News. (Cue the old couple with a Texas accent saying, “Oh, Tobin, we love you on Fox. We never turn it off at our house!”)
Key Point: Just like addiction to sexual porn, video games, food, or sex, addiction to right-wing tribal porn is classified as a process or behavioral addiction.
Fox News addiction is very real.
The incidence rate of addiction to Fox News is much larger than anyone ever imagined or that has been reported. Frank Luntz’s poll disclosing nearly one-third of American households have political estrangement issues occurring is the closest third-party research that corroborates our Fox News social derangement disorder incidence data.
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nbsp; You now know what “hooks” partisan tribal viewers—it’s the feel-good brain “drugs” they get from watching yet another fixed outcome and rigged gladiatorial victory by their self-identified tribe.
In short, Fox News addicts get high.
TRIBAL BLAME PORN
In 2008–2009, I found that for many viewers, their new and growing Fox News addiction was more about Fox News as a powerful coping mechanism than the normal cultural or political warfare themes Fox News specialized in programming. Our new audience engagement theme? Lost faith and hope in their prosperity, their children’s future, and white America.
Here is what I learned about tribal blame porn. Fox News ratings started to really take off in 2008 when a certain person won the American presidency. Apparently for many white Americans who suffered the brunt of the financial pain of the 2007–2009 Great Recession and then the heresy of a black Barack Hussein Obama as their president, the one-two punch put them over their tribal ledge.
After thousands of hours of reading about, researching, and interviewing Fox News addicts, the light bulb finally went off: My tribal “fear and hate porn” definition had missed an important other emotional target and trigger: economic blame and self-absolution.
After the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the Great Recession of 2007–2009, Fox News moved from primarily creating and televising the pornography of tribal fear and hate into the much more engaging and insidious business of providing the more powerful and addictive tribal identity pornography of communal victimhood, blame, and personal absolution for a new, broader, angrier, and emotionally vulnerable audience. Fox’s tribal fear-and-hate-porn strategy morphed into the business of packaging and selling a very potent production of communal tribal blame and victimization porn to the twenty-first-century post-Industrial Age victims of various villainous out-groups (globalists, Beltway insiders, pointy-headed elites) who sold them down the river.
