In this media rant I wish to make three points:
- Fox News, guided by the values of founder Roger Ailes, did not originate but did magnify the worst tendencies of post-World War II news media in the United States.
- The real significance of Ailes and Fox is his/its revival of the ancient “eristic,” an intoxicating mode of argument rooted not in the civil exchange of ideas for the purpose of arriving at sound public policy, but rooted instead in the desire to defeat and humiliate opponents.
- The end and tragic result of Fox’s magnification of the news media’s worst tendencies and revival of the eristic has been the death of political conservatism as a force for generating new ideas or reformulating old ones.
Fox and the Three Worst Features of American News Media
Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, died recently.
The response by his critics was, paradoxically but predictably, Fox News-like in
its vitriol. Media Studies Professor Marc Lamont Hill tweeted, “Roger Ailes has died. Wow. Sending deep and heartfelt
condolences to everyone who was abused, harassed, exploited, and unjustly fired
by him.” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi chimed in with “The extent to which
we hate and fear each other now – that's not any one person's fault. But no one
person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he
sold ours. It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators
rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster.” Media critic
Neal Gabler posits that Ailes created a monstrous news channel:
You could say that Fox News gave voice to those who felt
voiceless, though it might be more accurate to say that he gave voice to those
who were so filled with enmity that they seemed on the borderline of sanity.
With his hosts and guests howling at elites without surcease, he created not
just an alternative media or even an alternative set of facts, but an
alternative universe that has overtaken the real one — a bizarre universe
bubbling with resentments and conspiracies and fabrications in which liberals
aren’t a political opposition; they are the source of all evil. Basically, he
poisoned America.
Think Gabler is exaggerating?
Consider the recent case of Princeton University assistant professor of
African-American Studies Keeanga-YamahttaTaylor. Professor Taylor delivered the commencement address at Hampshire
College in Amherst, Mass. In the speech she called President Trump a “racist,
sexist megalomaniac.” After Fox News covered her speech, she was subjected to
bitter, angry, threatening, racist trolling that forced her to cancel public lectures in Seattle and San Diego. She put out a statement which said in part:
My speech at Hampshire was applauded but Fox
News did not like it. Last week, the network ran a story on my speech,
describing it as an “anti-POTUS tirade.” Fox ran an online story about my
speech and created a separate video of excerpts of my speech, which included my
warning to graduates about the world they were graduating into. I argued that
Donald Trump, the most powerful politician in the world, is “a racist and
sexist megalomaniac,” who poses a threat to their future. Shortly after the Fox
story and video were published, my work email was inundated with vile and
violent statements. I have been repeatedly called “nigger,” “bitch,” “cunt,”
“dyke,” “she-male,” and “coon” — a clear reminder that racial violence is
closely aligned with gender and sexual violence. I have been threatened with
lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in my head. I am not a
newsworthy person. Fox did not run this story because it was “news,” but to
incite and unleash the mob-like mentality of its fringe audience, anticipating
that they would respond with a deluge of hate-filled emails — or worse. The
threat of violence, whether it is implied or acted on, is intended to
intimidate and to silence . . . The cancelation of my speaking events is a
concession to the violent intimidation that was, in my opinion, provoked by Fox
News. But I am releasing this statement to say that I will not be silent. Their
side uses the threat of violence and intimidation because they cannot compete
in the field of politics, ideas, and organizing.
The most credible accounts of Roger
Ailes’ tenure at Fox suggest that he created a toxic, ratings driven corporate
culture, while his predatory behavior toward women is now well documented. (Appropriately,
Ailes’ biggest defender is Bill O’Reilly, himself finally forced out at Fox in
April of this year after his show’s corporate sponsors could no longer stand by
the sexual harassment behaviors that Ailes enabled for many years). Maybe what’s
most shocking is that the TV liberal Rachel Maddow openly admits to considering
Ailes a “friend.”
As regards his journalistic legacy,
most of Ailes’ critics seem convinced that he represented something uniquely
awful in the history of American and/or global news media. My own view, for
what it’s worth, is that historians of the future will find Ailes and Fox News noteworthy
for how they magnified the three worst features of post-World War II American
news media:
Worst
Feature #1: The news media as an arm of the State. Some
Vietnam War reporting and Watergate-era journalism created an inaccurate
perception of American news media as adversarial towards the interests of the
State. In fact the establishment media have always had a cozy relationship with
the powers that be, exemplified most distressingly by the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. And probably the best example of the reigning in of what
little media/State tension did exist during the Vietnam era was CNN’s 1998 termination
of April Oliver and Jack Smith, producers of a feature report showing that the
US military used sarin gas during the Vietnam’s “Operation Tailwind.” Oliver
and Smith were fired after significant pushback to the story from the Pentagon.
(Oliver and Smith ended up writing a 77-page rebuttal to the CNN internal
report that was used a justification to
fire them. It is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the real world
challenges to journalists who dare to be more than stenographers for the
powerful.).
Worst
Feature #2: The News as Entertainment. Fox has taken this
feature to lamentable heights, but it did not begin with them. Reuven Frank,
who served as President of NBC news from 1968-1974 and again from 1982-1984
reportedly said that every news story should "display the attributes of
fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and
denouement, rising action and falling action, a beginning, a middle and an
end." Attorney Floyd Abrams claims that Frank told him “sunshine is a
weather report. A flood is news.”
Worst Feature #3: The News as Alternative Reality. In 2012 Thomas
Mann and Norm Ornstein published It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. The authors published
an op-ed that same year in the Washington Post that summarized one of the key
points of the book: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in
American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social
and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy
of its political opposition.” That is,
the modern day GOP inhabits an alternative reality.
No doubt Fox News aided and abetted the Republicans
march toward an alternative universe. But as with the news as entertainment,
this is not unique to Fox. Put on your local television news or read your local
corporate newspaper. What you will see and read bears only marginal relation to
the real lives of the majority of people inhabiting the geographical region.
Most mainstream media subscribe to what Roger Ailes called the Orchestra Pit
Theory: “If you have two guys on a stage and one
guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy
falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening
news?” News media, from Fox on up, give
us a view of reality as nonstop orchestra pit malfunctions, consequently making
“reality” (especially for heavy TV news viewers) seem more chaotic, evil, and
beyond repair than it actually is.
Roger Ailes, Fox News, and the Revival of the
Ancient Greek Eristic
More than 2000 years ago, ancient Greek philosophers
developed a fascination with what we today call “mass communication.” They
called it Rhetoric, and they had spirited debates about the ethics of such communication.
Most people today receive little education about that time period or those
debates, which is unfortunate because if they did maybe it would be easier to
understand the rise of Roger Ailes and Fox News.
In the 5th century BCE,
as Greece dabbled in experiments with democracy, attention was given to the
importance and power of communication in civic life. Today when people hear the
word “rhetoric” they think of “spin” or “bullshit,” but to the ancient Greeks
the study of rhetoric was equal to the study of citizenship; rhetoric was vital
as an aid in making policy decisions, resolving disputes, and mediating the
discussion of public issues to citizens.
Early teachers of rhetoric were
known as “Sophists.” Many of them were brilliant philosophers and educators
teaching the skills necessary to be successful as a public advocate, but others
were kind of like early versions of Dale Carnegie; “winning friends and
influencing people” took priority over sound argument and the search for truth.
Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle developed a sense of
rhetoric as “philosophy in action.” Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the most well developed exploration of the “art of
rhetoric” from that time period, conceives of a rhetorician as someone who
presents a well-argued case, develops an emotional connection with an audience,
and is perceived by them to be a person of goodwill.
Plato was quite hostile to the
sophists. In his writings, most of which feature his teacher Socrates, Plato
has Socrates accuse the Sophists of engaging in “eristic” argument. Eristic
argument was a kind of verbal duel; the purpose was not to enlighten or arrive
at truth but only to win an argument. Plato’s Socrates differentiates eristic
from dialectic. According to professor James Benjamin, “A defining
characteristic of proper dialectic is that the participants must seriously
pursue the subject under discussion. Disputes become eristical when one of the
participants violates the serious purpose of the dispute. Just as a card game
deteriorates into chaos when one player intends to play bridge while another
player intends to play hearts, so too does dialectic deteriorate into eristic
if one participant holds a serious intention while another participant holds a
less serious intention . . . Eristic is fallacious dialectic that corresponds
to fallacious argumentation in rhetoric and is motivated by a disregard for the
rules of serious argumentative pursuits.” (quote appears in Benjamin, J. "Eristic, Dialectic, and Rhetoric." Communication Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 21-26). Eristic argument, given that it is
like a sport, has high entertainment value and literally draws crowds.
Seen
from this perspective, Roger Ailes and Fox News since 1996 have provided us
with a powerful model of modern eristic. The bluster and bloviation of
blowhards like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—maddening to their opponents—is
rooted in a communication model that ancient philosophers and rhetoricians
warned us about many years ago. In a corporate media world that lives and dies
by the advertising dollar, it is not surprising that the success of Ailes’
eristic has spawned a wide range of imitators all over the political spectrum,
from the alt.right to the so-called left over at MSNBC. The mainstream media's obsession with Vladimir Putin, cleverly coined "Putinology" by Keith Gessen, comes straight from the Fox playbook in use of the most vulgar guilt-by-association tactics.
Ailes, Fox, and the Death of Political Conservatism
Perhaps the most disastrous
consequence of Ailes’ eristic has been Fox’s impact on political conservativism.
Conservativism used to be about, and should be about, figuring out how to adapt
precedent and traditional principles to modern problems. Conceived of that way,
conservativism at its best is a rigorous and spirited testing of ideas. Ailes
and Fox, because of their addiction to the eristic mode of argument, literally
destroyed any of that sense of conservatism. They replaced it with a sham
conservativism that seeks not to advance new ideas or provide fresh takes on
old ones, but rather is content to demolish “liberal elites.”
Charlie Sykes, the conservative
talk-radio host who appears to have finally “had it” with the excesses of the
movement that he himself had a prominent role in creating, penned an important op-ed recently for the New York Times that gets at the heart of what the eristic
style has done to conservatism. He writes:
Not
surprisingly, the vast majority of airtime on conservative media is not taken
up by issues or explanations of conservative approaches to markets or need to
balance liberty with order. Why bother with such stuff, when there were
personalities to be mocked and left-wing moonbats to be ridiculed?
What
may have begun as a policy or a tactic in opposition has long since become a
reflex. But there is an obvious price to be paid for essentially becoming a
party devoted to trolling. In the long run, it’s hard to see how a party
dedicated to liberal tears can remain a movement based on ideas or centered on
principles.
Conservatives
will care less about governing and more about scoring “wins” — and inflicting
losses on the left — no matter how hollow the victories or flawed the policies.
Ultimately, though, this will end badly because it is a moral and intellectual
dead end, and very likely a political one as well.
If you want to test Sykes’ argument,
just go to Facebook and monitor the posts of your self-identified “conservative”
friends. You won’t see much original argument or insight, but you will see a
boat load of memes mocking liberals. (There are of course exceptions, but the exceptions
always seem to prove the rule.). Is this entirely because of Roger Ailes and
Fox? No, but Fox has for over 20 years produced an almost intoxicating brand of
eristic that has normalized mockery, name-calling, and knocking down straw
(wo)men as legitimate forms of conservative argument. If liberalism died
because its advocates lack guts, maybe conservatism died because, as Stephen
Colbert famously noted in his roast of George W. Bush, it argues “from the
gut.”
So addictive is the eristic that if
you point out the strategy to the addicts, a typical response is “whataboutism;”
“Whatabout when liberals attack conservatives? Whatabout that professor’s
commencement speech? Didn’t she call Trump names?” Etc. etc. A great sign of a philosophy going
bankrupt is when its adherents are reduced to answering all major criticisms by
pointing out the hypocrisy of the critics.
Eristic argument will always be with
us. The answer is not to censor it or whine about it, but to teach citizens how
to recognize it. Once citizens recognizes the eristic at work, they can seek
out more ethical discourse interested in the pursuit of truth as opposed to the
pursuit of power and ratings points. Even better, they can become a more active
contributor to the media; we need more blogs, newspaper columns, social media
posts, podcasts, and other forms of media that reject trolling (i.e. the
eristic) and seek understanding and insight. Drown out the eristic with a
healthy dose of ethical citizenship.
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