Dem
47
GOP
53
Fox entertainer Jesse Watters is a medium-sized cog in a very large propaganda machine, and he's feeling proud as a peacock about that. So, he used the Monday night edition of his show to engage in a little braggadocio about how much better he and other right-wingers are at manipulating the message than the folks on the other side of the aisle:
We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left, and they are using tactics from the 1990s. They are holding tiny presser conferences, tiny little rallies. They are screaming into the ether on MSNBC. This is what you call top-down command and control. You've got the talking points from a newspaper, and you put it on the broadcast network, and then it disappears. What you are seeing on the right is asymmetrical—it's grassroots guerrilla warfare.
And Watters wasn't done. He was also happy to crow about how the process works:
Someone said something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it. It is free money, and we are actually talking about expressing information.
One is reminded of the old line attributed to Mark Twain: "A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots."
We really don't disagree with much of anything Watters said here—it's been clear for at least 20 years that Fox was nothing more than propaganda (note that the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism was released in 2004). And it's also evident that the right-wing mediasphere is very good at adapting to new developments. Rush Limbaugh dies, Joe Rogan steps forward. Print journalism is on the rocks, right-wingers turn to eX-Twitter for "reporting." And so forth.
Watters also opined that non-right-wing media outlets don't do enough to weaponize scandals (he used the example of "Sri Lankan transgenders are getting electric cars") and that there is "no way [the Democrats are] catching up." Putting aside the fact that Watters' specific example is both stupid and a slur, he's right that the non-right-wing media outlets of the world do not weaponize scandals 24/7, and he's almost certainly correct that there will never be a true left-leaning equivalent to Fox.
That said, the fundamental reason for these things is not the one that Watters—who, let's be honest, is an arrogant pri**—thinks it is. He would suggest that those on the left just don't get it, and are basically too stupid to figure it out. Anytime you hear an explanation along these lines, it's almost always useless. There are certainly individual nitwits on both sides of the aisle, but collectively, there are plenty of intelligent people, both right and left.
The real problem here is that the demographic groups that Fox and their ilk appeal to are, substantially, primed toward simple, emotion-driven storytelling. Some of them are religious fundamentalists, and so have learned to see the world in stark, black and white terms. Others are very angry about... whatever, and are pleased to gravitate to whatever will give them fuel for their resentments. Still others have not had a lot of exposure to the art of critical thinking (say, from a parent, or an advanced education, or a religious leader interested in rational inquiry, or the like).
By contrast, the current iteration of the Democratic Party skews heavily toward groups that see a world of complexity and shades of gray. That could be due to education, or to membership in a religious group that values critical analysis, or to being part of a disadvantaged group that learned that the dominant narrative is not always the unvarnished truth. Whatever it is, there have been attempts to recreate the Fox dynamic, but with a lefty spin, and they largely didn't work. Think of Air America, the left-wing talk radio network that went up in flames. Think of MSNBC, which certainly has its fans, but is never going to be the left-wing flamethrower mirror-image of Fox.
All of this said, the day will come when Fox is knocked off its perch. Two things are currently in the process of dying off: cable TV and Fox's audience. The next chapter, in terms of political media, is going to feature independent blogs and podcasts very heavily. And those are two areas where the playing field is a little more level, primarily because it's easier to develop an alignment between a content producer and the audience that works best for them. In other words, Fox is a mass-produced McDonald's hamberder, whereas, say, the "Life in the Left Lane Podcast" is something more like a grilled top sirloin patty on a bed of lettuce with Dijon mustard and sautéed shiitake mushrooms. (Z)