Emotional Truth, Political Lies #01
Emotional Truths, Political Lies — An Introduction to Key Themes
Fox News: emotional manipulation for fun and profit
How can people be so stupid?
I hear that question all the time. Well, how did we get so stupid? It wasn’t easy.
PRRI: Crazy Like a Fox
I try to maintain a varied information diet. This study from Baptist News Global raised my antennae: “From religion to immigration to COVID, Fox News creates divisions even among Republicans”
Baptist News was reporting on a study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a Pew-like research institute founded in 2009 and dedicated to illuminating “important cultural and religious dynamics shaping American society and politics.”
What was remarkable in their findings was not the distance between Fox viewers’ picture of reality and that of average American’s but the wide distance between “Fox News Republicans” and other Republicans!
In a study polling 2,538 Americans, they discovered striking differences between Americans in general, Republicans, and (most telling) Republicans that get most of their news from Fox News.
As an example, 43% or all Americans view climate change as an important issue.
This is not hugely different from the overall number in 1990. But there’s a big difference in 2021.
In 1990 Republicans and Democrats polled very closely.
Now, there’s a wide point spread between the two: only 19% of Republicans think climate change is an issue…37 points off the overall number (which implies a 70+ point gap relative to Democrats and Independents — a big move there as well but in the opposite direction.)
More interesting for our purposes here is the 13 point gap between Republicans who get most of their news from Fox and those who don’t.
This gap is even more severe on other issues. Here’s a summary of some of PRRI’s results. Check out the bottom two rows for the biggest impact of the Fox reality distortion field.
Tallying it up
And that brings me to my thesis.
Determining how much Fox News spent to create ignorance will start to let us add some numbers to a Cost of Stupid tally sheet. So far we have Fox’s entire budget (paid by advertisers and cable subscribers).
Before we try and attach actual numbers, let’s take a deeper look at Fox News and then the reach of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
What was remarkable in the findings was not the distance between Fox viewers’ picture of reality and that of average Americans but the wide distance between “Fox News Republicans” and other Republicans!
Fox News — distorting reality since 1996
The impact of Fox News came to the attention of academic researchers when they looked at the media’s role in how support for the Iraq war was ‘ginned up’.
For example, in 2003 the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, with polling firm Knowledge Networks, conducted a large-scale study of U.S. public perceptions and misperceptions related to the Iraq War.
The study found that Fox News viewers believed inaccuracies about Iraq at a rate of 80% vs, say, 23% for NPR/PBS.
The most robust effects were found among those who primarily got their news from Fox. Among those who did not follow the news at all, 42 percent had the misperception that evidence of close links to al Qaeda has been found, rising progressively at higher levels of attention to 80 percent among those who followed the news very closely.
This bears repeating: excepting PBS and marginally a few others, the more you watched the ‘news’ the less accurate was your picture of reality. In general, you actually had a better grasp of the facts if you didn’t follow the news at all!
This polling was done before MSNBC existed. I don’t want folks on the left to get too smug. Here’s a nationwide poll from 2012. MSNBC viewers do slightly better than the No News crowd on domestic questions and slightly worse on international ones. Fox News viewers, of course, do worst on both.
In 1990 Republicans and Democrats polled very closely. Now there’s a wide point spread between the two: only 19% of Republicans think climate change is an issue…37 points off the overall number (which implies a 70+ point gap relative to Democrats and Independents.)
Climate Change — It’s in the Air
This is the first in a series that will examine the manipulation of our view of the world. The intent is to work back from the ‘product’ (our opinions) to the sell (evoking an emotional response and manipulating how we respond to our emotions.)
I’m going to use opinions about climate change as my benchmark for manipulation.
Why? Three reasons:
- First, unlike say guns or abortion, it isn’t inherently a hot-button issue.
- Second, it gives us a baseline in simple observation and scientific consensus against which to measure reality distortion.
- Last and related, 30 or so years ago there was general agreement across the political spectrum as to its importance. Then the sell began and it evolved into a defining issue of our political divide. That required work.
We’re going to take it as a given that Climate Change is real. If you’re doubtful, dig into the science. The deeper you dig into the modeling, the more convincing it is.
Quick start: for an entirely convincing, 100% easy-to-understand 4 minutes on the science, watch the video below. For a meta look at the issue, here my 2 cents.
Beyond the US: the Rupert Murdoch Blast Zone
To get another view of the who and how of this component of reality distortion, we don’t need a lot of text. It’s an Anglophone thing. The US is not an ‘n of 1.’ Look at bottom of the graph. The worst 3 countries on one measure of climate denial are Murdoch’s main media markets.
Cost of Stupid Tally — okay, so what did all that cost?
This gets a bit gnarly.
(If there’s a stock analyst out there that’s deep into Fox’s revenue and is willing to help, give a yell.)
The challenge is splitting out the relevant parts of Fox…clearly, Fox’s sports-specific channels should be excluded. I’m tempted to include the whole of Fox’s Cable biz even though it reports on sports and business, too. Clearly, their biz commentators frequently engage in political commentary, e.g. Lou Dobbs, and it’s the whole package that’s the sell. But how about the 28 TV stations? And are we talking about revenue…it should probably be limited to expenses, right, because (for now) we want to know how much is spent making us stupid…not how (hugely) profitable it’s been.
An analyst from the Hollywood Reporter says that 90% of Fox’s business is Fox News. Digging into Fox’s quarterly 10-Qs and the 2019 & 2020 10-Ks (their quarterly and annual reporting) that number makes sense only if it’s talking about profit and not gross revenue. If so it seems right on the nut. The cable side is hugely profitable; the TV stations not so much. I’m going to guess that a lot of the cost of content for national news on both is booked against the cable side and that shows (e.g. Masked Singer) and local news are booked against that TV station side. There’s no Masked Singer on the cable stage.
Taking 5 years, the cost to produce that content is around $2+B per year or roughly $10B summed up.
So that’s a start. We are, of course, talking about spending over a much longer time period. Fox provides an apples-to-apples comparison going back 5 years. Before that, it’s even more challenging since we’d need to factor out the stuff they sold to Disney, e.g. 20th Century Fox.
For now, we’ll book the billions and refine this as more pieces drop into place.
(Seriously, if there’s an analyst out there that’s deep into this, help me, help me! Highlight this paragraph, click the little padlock icon that shows up, and leave a private comment with your contact info.)
Onward
Fox is, of course, just one piece of the puzzle. There’s the oil companies’ lobbying and astroturfing. There are Koch Brothers ‘think’ tanks, the Mercers, and much much more. Robert Brulle of Drexel University calculated in 2013 that the ‘climate change counter-movement’ was operating on an annual budget of $900m.
And there are other important components of the Make Us Stupid industry that are even harder to quantify. Defunding education, for example. That’s certainly relevant. Also, I want to look at the capture of the Southern Baptist’s central institutions specifically to push a political agenda.
A key component of getting smarter is not more facts but a greater awareness of the broad emotional currents moving us forward into the various possible futures that lie through the rapids ahead.
I’m betting we get somewhere close to $500B over the last 30+ years. We’ll see.
But there’s another huge piece of the process that we need to scrutinize. We’ve been talking about the spend. More important I think, we need to deeply examine the sell!
No Emotion, No Sale
It is a market truism that you need emotion to sell. No emotion=no consumer action. No consumer action=no ‘sales’.
Much of the information about Fox, the Kochs, the oil companies, et al is old news. (Ross Gelbspan convincingly detailed the attack on climate science in 1998, for example). I hope to bring something new to the table. I want to work through what it might take to get smarter.
A key component of getting smarter is not more facts but a greater awareness of the broad emotional currents moving us forward into the various possible futures that lie through the rapids ahead and how that opens up or closes down different responses for various subgroups in the US.
I intend to alternate progress between the ‘Cost of Stupid’ tally and a key second component: the emotional underpinning of our current stupidity. Beneath each and every line on the graphs above is an emotional dynamic — or, more accurately, a collection of dynamics. We need to examine what’s fueled the slide to where we find ourselves.
Let’s Start with Emotional Pain
A conceptual touchstone for me is the ‘demographic collapse‘ among working-class non-college-educated whites unexpectedly detected and then explored by Anne Case and Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton.
Half a million people are dead who should not be dead.
That’s 100k more than American deaths in WW2 or COVID by spring 2021.
The reasons: suicide, drug overdose, liver failure…a variety of causes that Case and Deaton term Deaths of Despair. I dug into this in perhaps too much detail for a Medium article back in 2016. The unfathomable failure of the Democrat Party to hold support among working-class people, particularly upper Midwestern working-class whites, was a shock I felt compelled to explore. Those are my people.
Somewhere in the early to mid-2010s we hit an emotional tipping point as disquiet and mostly unnamed fear became despair, suicidal depression, and self-medication through alcohol and opiates. I don’t think the rage and ‘acting out’ we see are unrelated. And rage is marginally a healthier reaction in that it doesn’t immediately kill you. Someone else maybe but likely not you.
So we have a cauldron of rage, despair, fear, ‘caste’ unease, and shame ripe for exploitation. It is reality based, firmly grounded in the material circumstances of working people and their experience over the last 50 years.
This won’t go away; it is not stupid.
This emotional ‘fuel’ is being shaped for political advantage. (It goes without saying that the high cost sell exists because someone benefits and might even lose ground if our reaction was smarter. It been hugely expensive because it hasn’t been an easy sell.)
To repeat: the sell, by and large, mitigates against effective solutions. The sell is stupidity promoting. That the point. It is blocking action on climate change, sure, but also blocking an effective balm to the emotional distress.
What is needed is collective ‘solidarity’: effective community-based accurately targeted action.
What is being sold are individualist mythic solutions.
Fox is not merely bad information. It’s news theater that surfaces, legitimizes, and amps up selected emotions from the mix. Ultimately, I think, we’ll need to examine identity formation (the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as individuals and as a people and how they are built and maintained) and why our identities are currently fragile.
The identity component was made very clear in the recent storming of the Capital by what my friend Sean, calls Vanilla Isis.
My favorite description: cosplay revolution with real bullets.
We’ll start to explore all this and start putting together an operational definition of smart and stupid in Part 2.
Thanks for reading!
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Ispos MORI survey
- NYT https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/climate/2015-paris-climate-talks/where-in-the-world-is-climate-denial-most-prevalent
- Mother Jones (includes a more complete discussion with interviews) https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/07/climate-denial-us-uk-australia-canada-english/
