Stumbling around for someone to blame for the (so far) failed insurrection in Washington, Fox’s Tucker Carlson knew where to point the finger. “It’s not your fault,” he told his Trump-grieving viewers. “It’s their fault.”
The “they”? According to Carlson’s colleague Sean Hannity, that’s the media, the left, who were refusing to listen to the pain from the Trump heartland — or, as Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade put it, have never accepted the legitimacy of the Trump presidency.
Across the Pacific, on Sky after dark, Adelaide’s own Cory Bernardi was repeating the talking point with a murmured “shocking, shocking” followed by a forceful what-aboutery word salad of Black Lives Matters, Russia-gate, media elites and pious lefties.
As political party media, the Murdoch-owned outlets are in a hard place. They thought they were in charge of the outrage economy they created as a tool to link the hard and soft right in a populist unity — and then make money out of it.
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Trump has revealed it’s Frankenstein’s monster. They’ve lost control of the outrage and it’s out and about, scaring the villagers.
Seems outrage is addictive. It demands ever-increasing doses. If the hardened end of their spectrum doesn’t get what they want from Fox, they’ll get it somewhere else, turning to more extreme digital voices like Newsmax and One America News Network.
For the addicted Trump ultras, it’s a way of forcing Fox to make a choice. Judging by the rhetoric of Trump and his supporters in Washington this week, they reckon Fox is making the wrong one.
All that “it’s their fault!” from the Fox faces is an attempt to avoid that choice — to find a safe footing in the shifting sands post-Trump, where they can unite their audience against the real enemy: fact-based media and “the left”.
A snap poll by YouGov yesterday revealed the existential threat to Fox: 45% of Republicans strongly or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol. About 43% oppose. Among those who’ve been absorbing the steady diet of outrage about voter fraud, support rises to 56%.
In business theory, when your market fragments, you diversify your offering. Fox is trying that out, freeing their daytime news programs to be more truth-based, while leaving their prime time morning and night commentariat to pump the outrage (aka the Australian Sky model).
In further diversification, (as Cam Wilson has been reporting in Business Insider), the Sky after dark outrage — including on the US election result — is being repackaged on YouTube and Facebook into the US and international market, providing a new product offering: international validation for voter fraud claims.
Fox’s finger-pointing at other media is not all wrong. Standard media practice has been found inadequate for Trump. The scale of events overwhelmed journalists, with stories evolving from being shocking to noteworthy to be shrugged off over a week. While the serious national media (The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR) and digital media (like Vox) strived to keep focus, as events rolled into TV network news and the shrinking numbers of local mastheads, journalistic practice acted to normalise Trump and normalise the way Trump practises politics.
Being yet one more step further down the train, Australian news media sanded down the rough edges of the Trump story even further to straight reporting mixed up with a “those whacky Americans” trope. (Noteworthy exception: Matt Bevan’s ABC podcast America, If You’re Listening.)
It encouraged Morrison to lend a hand at normalisation (and cultural importation) such as the thumbs-ups besties pic (circulated again yesterday by the ALP) or accepting Trump’s award of the Legion of Merit.
But yesterday the journalistic shock built rather than declined, as the crowd evolved from demonstrators to protesters to rioters to insurrectionists, and Trump from bystander to figure-head to instigator.
Just as quick was the shift on Facebook and Twitter, where Trump went from cautiously labelled to banned within 24 hours.
After four years, it was the whiplash the media needed. As Paul Keating famously said, elections do change things.
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The enduring soft handling by the Gallery of Morrison over Kelly and other backbencher conspiracy theorising is really intriguing. It’s like Australian journalists haven’t kept pace with the vast shift in the US mainstream press methodology. Stateside, they are just calling out in real time all the ‘meta’ elements of how the hard right/Trump machine has worked – calling b/s on the platforming, the cynical ‘free speech’ tropes, the dog-whistling, the endlesly repeatedly gross untruths…I think now that the US media is so openly (dangerously) targeted by MAGA the pros finally ‘get it’: there is no ‘objective’ position to take in the matter of truth v. lies.
Australian journalists need to start imposing this same epistemological concreteness on Morrison, the supreme empty marketer. They have to make life uncomfortable for him in press conferences. Disrupt the glib facade. They have to refuse to play the ‘fudge’ information game anymore, just as the likes of Jake Tapper, John King and even a Chris Wallace on Fox have been for a while.
And they have to start calling out specific Murdoch colleagues. How someone like Simon Benson – Scott Morrison’s personal p**s boy – hasn’t been drummed out of the Gallery ranks by now escapes me.
You mean for the Australian gallery to behave like real journalists? Good luck with that!
Hey, you look like the p-boy.
And you look like a bucket of sh&*.
History of the world, Mel Brooks.
Nice words Jack.
And also they could call out or question their own counterparts, those mischievous political activists masquerading as ‘journalists’ monopolising press conferences, for LNP agitprop and infotainment….
Fox news should be disbanded in Australia!!
I would target his organisation/s with climate change class action/s.
The Frankenstein monster analogy is an excellent one. But please let’s always properly name “Fox” and “Sky” as “Murdoch’s Fox” and “Murdoch’s Sky”. This is because it is the failing Murdoch media empire which has led the media way adopting, quite deliberately, as a morally bankrupt global business model, the peddling of mis and disinformation aimed at shoring up far right wing governments, organisations and individuals whose contempt for social democracy, civil society and its institutions and public and democratic accountability, accords with the greedy, neoliberal-verging-on-the-anarchic Murdoch agenda. Humankind is only just starting to reap the whirlwind the Murdoch media’s profoundly wicked feeding and succoring of ignorance and division has sowed.
Media has been gamed while being coopted into a form of clubbiness and far reaching eco-system as we see in Australia, to act as a PR and sound bite delivery system, where it’s difficult to parse through who is media, MP or adviser/consultant let alone what is a policy; the Chinese walls have been removed.
Fairfax has a very good article by a RMIT researcher Emma Shortis pointing the finger back directly to Australia and LNP MPs, claiming to be more ethical than the US, titled ‘There’s a lot of blame to go around for the chaos in the Capitol, but some belongs to Australia’.
The LNP has become totally immersed in US style political eco-system of Koch linked libertarian think tanks, Fox News style noise, underlaid by much white nationalism, plus nowdays conspiracy theories, and grovelling up to US and UK interests.
Yes that Shortis piece is electrifyingly good.
Thanks Drew. Good article from Emma Shortis. Short term thinking is not appropriate at diplomatic levels, and relationships need to addressed in a national long term, non-partisan manner.
Scot from Marketing knows no other way than the quick advantage, the partisan jab, and worry about the consequences later. The Foreign Minister and the Dept, and ScoMo’s colleagues should tell him to stay the hell out.
And Joe Hockey’s consultancy business should get no contracts from our embassy.
Also, the Dark Money sell out to US corporate interests began with John Howard. Reading Dark Money takes you through John Howard’s talking points through the 90s and 2000s, demonising refugees and immigrants, not condemning open racism, attacking workers, contemptuous deregulation of multi-nationals. Howard is the cancer that we can’t cut out of our political organs, and his sidekick Costello is a waste of oxygen.
All follows from that, dupes played by the Koch brothers.
Exactly, no doubt talking points provided locally by groups linked back to the states, the clear emergence of US based nativist and libertarian policies presented as ‘conservative’ and voted for by a coalition of the same.
In addition to the emergence and influence of Kochs in the US and their now global ‘dark money’ networks of donors and influence e.g. IPA/CIS are linked via AtlasNetwork, as is IEA in UK, were the ideologues in the shadows.
In the ’70s and ’80s the key ideologues, now deceased, each known as the ‘most influential unknown men in America’; playing a ‘long game’*. This applied to white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton a colleague of Paul Ehrlich via ZPG, FAIR etc., admirer of the white Oz policy, plus muse of Steve Bannon et al. and radical right socioeconomic libertarian James Buchanan of the Austrian/Chicago School and the Chilean experiment, who made collaborators like Friedman et al. appear moderate.
Both could be linked together via the Koch’s now infamous corporate ‘bill mill’ ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council of which VP Pence represents, along with too many GOP colleagues, with accusations of being ‘owned’ to block e.g. environmental bills.
*Along with Mayer’s Dark Money I’d suggest that Nancy MacLeans ‘Democracy in Chains (Long Game)’ re. radical right economic libertarians (joined at hip with eugenics and pro segregation) is complementary; also helps one understand how Australia from Howard (and the UK with Thatcher then Brexit) has been dragged down a rabbit hole….
Even as Murdoch’s James Campbell publishes an “I was wrong about Trump” article today, the only side of politics he criticises is “the Left”.
It’s instinctive with them.