Foxocracy

Inside the Network's Playbook of Tribal Warfare

Tobin Smith

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781635766615
• eBook ISBN:
  9781635766622
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From a 14-year Fox News contributor, guest anchor, and two-time New York Times bestselling author comes an unprecedented insider's account of the Fox News playbook––the production secrets and manipulation strategies Fox News uses to influence viewers, divide families, weaponize the daily discourse of news and public opinion, and addict a core audience on right-wing rage and fear.
Fox News did not start America's culture war––but they did have the manipulative and destructive genius to exploit it for billions of dollars. For the first time, a Fox News veteran exposes and diagrams the toxic strategies and tactics within the Fox News playbook that liberal and progressive candidates will be fighting against in 2020 and beyond. It is the very same playbook that Fox News used to move twelve percent of Independents to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 to produce Republican wins in the previous Democrat strongholds of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Author Tobin Smith takes readers behind the scenes of the actual production of the "fair and balanced" opinion panel segments that feed a ravenous audience. How are these productions rigged so that right-wing pundits always win? What techniques does Fox News use in manipulating its viewers' tribal instincts: to addict them; to activate a hatred toward partisan enemies; and to hook them on ego-gratifying feelings of intellectual and cultural superiority?
Foxocracy is filled with never-revealed conversations with Fox News executives––including the late Roger Ailes––and opinion programming producers. It breaks down the real and often heartbreaking collateral damage among friends and family caused by the waging of an endless culture war. And it brings incendiary proof from an insider and on-air talent of Fox News's predatory audience manipulation psychology and production tactics. And perhaps even more frightening, this book reveals how that playbook is now being insidiously upgraded for maximum effect––white tribal-identity activation––on all forms of social media and means of content delivery.

Chapter 1

How Did the Fox News Tribal Identity Porn Playbook Become So Powerful?

The Fox Hate Channel’s white tribal partisan identity playbook for the Foxhole spiral is not new. But its power to manipulate American right-wingers got supercharged by very powerful regulatory and information technology disruption combined with a hundred years of practice and the presidential election of 2008.

Understand this—the white tribal identity media panic and fear spiral grift has been around for 125 years—it just took a set of massively transformational and disruptive inventions and regulatory shifts to turn it into emotional plutonium.

But before I tell that story, let’s keep score here on all the benefits that have come to millions of Foxhole addicts watching nuclear powered Fox News white tribal identity porn every day of their rapidly ending lives:

1. An uncountable number of divorces.
2. Tens of millions of important and emotionally nurturing friendships and family relationships poisoned.
3. An epidemic of tribalized white political and cultural intensity disorder.
4. A growing number of senior-aged Americans suffering from chronic and deadly isolation following the loss of nurturing family relationships and friendships poisoned by their constant hyper-partisan zealotry.

Public health data states that the top reason for elder estrangement is “pushing away family and friends.” For many, isolation leads to a chronic loneliness that (according to the latest research) brings them up to a 60 percent higher risk of premature death.

America is in the middle of a “silver tsunami.” FNC’s target audience in America (white people over sixty-five) adds sixteen thousand new targets every day until 2030. Fox News and Planet Fox anticipate more than sixty million new emotionally vulnerable and isolated targets in America for their predatory and seductive brand of white tribal identity porn—what I call the “Foxhole spiral.” If you add in the UK and Australia, Planet Fox is perfectly positioned to ride the silver tsunami of aging Baby Boomers around the English-speaking world.

Planet Fox must be so proud that their little right-wing propaganda channel turned into the most emotionally destructive white tribal identity media factory since—well, you know—1930s Germany.

To communicate a big complex story well, it really helps to find the right analogies. I used the Nigerian Prince scam to illustrate how the damage from digital and viral scams stays hidden because of the shame and embarrassment of falling for that ridiculous scam.

So now to introduce how and why the Fox News tribal identity activation and amplification playbook works so powerfully well, why it is so insanely profitable, and why I came to refer to it as a weapon of mass emotional destruction, I present . . . the nuclear powered Hot Pot pressure cooker.

Don’t laugh—stay with me. The Foxhole panic spiral phenomenon I am detailing has been around for ages—but when it got digitized on the front end and combined with social media’s emotional targeting on the back end, it became an emotionally and psychologically radioactive cloud like Chernobyl that never ends. First off, if you don’t know what a Hot Pot is, it’s a cool digitally controlled pressure cooker. My favorite stew that takes me hours to cook in the oven takes about twenty-five minutes in my Hot Pot. It’s magic—I have two of them.

In the performance art that is Fox News opinion programming, we performed our emotionally destructive alchemy like any grifter would:

• We first hook your attention with visual images we knew would automatically trigger the emotionally corrosive but powerful feelings of political or cultural fear, hatred, outrage, personal resentment, and deep-seated feelings of social or economic grievance.
• And then, we choreograph the grand finale of the segment so your political/cultural team wins yet another righteous victory and sweet tribal revenge so that you get that cathartic rush of positive emotions and ego stimulation (plus a big dose of feel-good neurochemicals) when your tribal fears are relieved and replaced with the self-esteem/ego building that comes from your team being proven righteously superior again.

Identity Porn

Fox News tribal identity addiction falls into the category that addiction professionals call a “process addiction.” Neuroscience has proven that when anyone with a process addiction partakes in his/her binge behavior of choice—whether that behavior is eating, using the internet, gambling, consuming sexual pornography, or watching Fox News’s partisan opinion programming—the reaction in the brain is the same.

Research psychologists such as Dr. Peggy Drexler tell us that resentment is “really the feeling of indignation in reaction to a real or perceived slight, a sense of insult or inadequacy caused by the actions, comments, or simple existence of someone or something else.” Said more simply, you experience resentment when you feel that you’re not getting your fair share while someone else is getting more than their fair share. And boy oh boy, does cultural and political tribal resentment trigger feelings of hate, anger, and outrage—the addictive trifecta of tribal partisan pornography.

Dr. Drexler also points out that resentments actually have a benefit for tribal-outrage addicts. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, with more than 2,300 subjects from around the world, found that short-term resentment actually helps to boost self-esteem by allowing us to blame others for our problems.

Does that sound familiar?

But in the aggregate, resentment is highly toxic. A 2011 clinical review of the emotional and physiological effects of anger and resentment on the body showed that chronic bitterness can slow metabolism, immune-system function, and organ function.

Some psychologists even believe that if left unchecked, resentment can turn into a condition known as posttraumatic embitterment disorder, which manifests as anxiety, depression, and fits of rage.

Key Point: Watching a lot of TV to pass your free time may become addicting, but watching hard news is just habit; there is no “addicting process” to become addicted to. Breaking news may be thrilling, but it’s way too intermittent and unscheduled to be addictive.

The Fox News addictive-programming process uses addictive anger and resentment to:

• Understand the elderly white conservative viewer’s pre-tribal mindset, which is a compilation of their resentments, indignations, cultural values, religious values, political values, racial perspectives, regional outlooks, and worldviews.
• Scare or outrage the crap out of viewers by boring down on a recently exposed tribal nerve like a psychic dentist with a drill, presenting a heresy or an innately scary image of non-white/non-Christian foreigners, immigrants, or terrorists doing horrible things.
• Produce each seven-minute rigged outcome opinion-debate segment around the carefully selected partisan heresy such that the “fair and balanced” debate is massively rigged for the conservative pundit(s) on the program to . . .
• Deliver the climactic and righteous rhetorical victory for the partisan right-wing viewer to trigger the jolt of dopamine and serotonin that the addict anticipated and knew was coming.

It costs Fox News about $2 billion a year to create their digital crop of toxic white tribal identity porn. It is planted, fertilized, and then amplified in the old white audience’s brains. To monetize this emotional toxic stew, all the partisan media company has to do is:

• activate one or more primal emotions, and more importantly,
• amplify one or more soul crushing negative visceral narratives for a few minutes and then end the segment with a soul feeding and neurochemical rush that comes from yet another tribal victory or glimmer of hope in order to sell ads to advertisers and content usage licenses to pay TV distributors.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s a great business—especially if you create the emotional plutonium (the white tribal identity activation and amplification content) and you own part of the nuclear-powered tribal radicalization machine (in FNC’s case the Fox News cable and online digital distribution platform).

But understand: white tribal identity mongering became an unbelievable business when the world’s digital surveillance platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube began in 2008 to redistribute and retarget Fox News’s white tribal identity content—for free. The power and intensity of the white tribal identity intensity spiral on these emotional manipulation social media platforms is now astonishing.

Why? It’s the digital Hot Pot. When social media’s hyper-targeting is combined with Fox News’s emotionally powerful white tribal identity porn content, these social media platforms create a killer digital Hot Pot tribal identity amplifying monster.

Here is why I use the Hot Pot metaphor. In the old pre-internet days, it used to take decades to create a wild-eyed foam-at-the-mouth hyperpartisan—you know—that crazy uncle who sees a conspiracy behind everything and won’t shut up about it. Today that radicalization process takes only a few years—or even months. The reason is the emotional manipulation power of social media’s emotion vulnerability assessment and content targeting algorithms.

Their algorithms redistribute and remonetize Fox News tribal identity porn by identifying the most powerful Fox News white tribal identity content and then placing it in the newsfeed of the most emotionally vulnerable users they have identified via likes/clicks/shares on the Facebook or YouTube or Twitter app.

In Facebook and Google/YouTube’s case, they know exactly which segment of Fox News white tribal identity porn is engaging best in real time across two hundred forty million Americans. This hyper-targeting is one of the intended consequences of this so-called surveillance capitalism industry. But this emotional predation on social media platforms produced consequences that their twenty-something-aged founders never thought about while they were coding their algorithms (can you say “Russian trolls” or “social media addiction?”). And they perform this emotional predation with zero cost for the content and zero liability for any of the unintended consequences—even when a white supremacist radicalized by online hate groups commits mass murder livestreamed on his Facebook page for the entire world to see.

Just like digital Planet Fox, the intent of social media is to activate your engagement time with images or videos that they know you are most vulnerable to engage with. They know this because you showed them exactly what kind of visual content you are most emotionally engaged and vulnerable to: Every click and like and share is just another data point hoovered up into their engagement assessment and targeting machine.

How do they all get away with this?

New Technology and Regulations Drive News Media Grifts

Yes, dear friend, in addition to the very intended consequences of the Reagan White House’s decision to end TV’s thirty-five-year political content regulatory framework in 1986 (the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine, which we will get to)—the small Section 230 of the ironically named 1996 “Communications Decency Act” (CDA) created the most emotionally powerful and destructive white tribal identity spiral since 1930s Germany. Yes, I dare say it—it’s an indisputable fact. Thank God digital social media platforms were not available to Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels (pronounced Gerbels, soft G).

Fox News’s founders had no idea what social media was or would become. Murdoch bought MySpace, but it had no emotional engagement surveillance engine. But when the CDA stipulated that web platforms cannot be held liable for the content they host and algorithmically retarget and weaponize—one of the unintended consequences was the creation of the 100 percent digital Fox moral panic spiral. There would be no Foxhole spiral without the audience multiplier effect of emotionally weaponized social media. Even if the content social media redistributes is patently deceptive and dupes one hundred million people every month with carefully orchestrated white tribal partisan propaganda—zero liability!

A book publisher and author can be sued for libel if they knowingly make a false claim about someone or some company—they can be sued for “irreparable harm and emotional damages.” But if that irreparable harm and very real emotional damage came from social media distribution, no dice—Facebook is allowed to monetize as much fear and hate porn as they possibly can—so they do.

The white tribal panic spiral is an amazing business model—and understanding amazing business models is how I have made my primary living for decades. First off, like I said, there’s no content...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• FOXOCRACY
• Also by Tobin Smith
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Note to Readers
• My Important Message for Self-identified Conservative or “Deplorable” Readers
• Introduction: FNC’s Rigged Opinion-Segment-Scam: Confessions of a Fox News Hit Man
• 1 How Did the Fox News Tribal Identity Porn Playbook Become So Powerful?
• 2 How I Broke the Code on the Rest of FNC’s Tribal Identity Porn Conspiracy
• 3 In America, Politics Are Tribal . . . Period
• 4 My Road to Fox News Enlightenment 2000–2018
• 5 Why the Emotional Impact of Fox News Is Ten Times More Powerful than Conservative Radio
• 6 How the Fox News “Fair and Balanced” Tribal Warfare Playbook Works
• 7 A Few Key Stories to Illustrate the Playbook
• 8 Your Eyes Do Not Lie: Fox News Is Good Old Soft-core Sex Porn Too
• 9 More Fox News Production Lessons Learned
• 10 Why Fox News’s White Tribal Superiority Shtick Is So Incredibly Powerful
• 11 The Incredible Power of Weaponized Visceral Threat and Fear
• 12 The Untold Truth about Tribal Social Identity Porn
• 13 The Two Superpowers of Fox News
• 14 How Fox News Became a Significant Branch of the 94-Million-Strong Evangelical Church
• 15 The Facts About Fox News TV Addiction
• 16 What Then Is the Only Logical Conclusion About the Power, Intent, and Pathologies of Fox News’s Tribal Warfare Playbook in 2019?
• Afterword: America Is Better than This: It’s Time for the Fox News Reckoning to Fight Back Against Commercial Tribalized Partisanship
• About the Author