By sabrina haake
Community
Sunday, November 03, 2024
at 8:01:47a MST
REPUBLISHED BY:
The
stress of this make-or-break Democracy test feels cruel and unusual.
Cruel because of what’s at stake, unusual because it is unrelenting.
For people who inform themselves through fact-based media outlets, the most commonly heard question is, how is this race even close?
Of all the craziness we’ve seen and heard, the Nazi-adjacent rhetoric,
the venomous threats, the crazed narcissist making the nation’s
struggles all about himself, how can half the country still support him?
How can half our fellow citizens vote for him, knowing what they know
about him? Are they crazy? Are they hateful?
The short answer, IMHO, is no. Most Trump voters are not Nazis, voting for Trump because of
who Trump is. There are enough haters among them, of course, but MAGA
mostly just wants to be entertained. They go to his rallies because they
enjoy the carnival, the camaraderie. They don’t know who Trump really is, what his policies really are, because Fox News, again, is selling them false information.
People who watch Fox News support Trump
Forty-three percent of the country watches Fox News, which correlates directly with the percentage of voters who support Trump over Harris.
More telling, most Fox
viewers don’t diversify the information they consume: Viewers with
consistently conservative political views get them from a single
outlet—Fox News—to a much greater degree than independents and liberals,
who inform themselves from a variety of sources. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half (47%) of consistently conservative Americans get their government and political news just from Fox News.
Fox News topped primetime viewership in August 2024. According to a recent Deadline Report, Fox News’ The Five was “the top regularly scheduled program in cable news, averaging 3.29 million viewers, followed by Jesse Watters Primetime with 2.97 million, Hannity with 2.61 million, Gutfeld! with 2.55 million and The Ingraham Angle with 2.44 million.”
Voters can’t act on what they don’t know
The high percentage of
Americans hooked on Fox entertainment-sold-as-news escalates the risks
inherent in Fox’s pro-Trump propaganda from fraudulent, to dangerous, to
a national security threat. It elevates the stakes from “political
speech,” protected by the 1st A, to weaponized
disinformation. The difference is substantive, and both legislature and
courts need to deal with it in a meaningful way.
For now, whenever there’s a
news cycle unfavorable to Trump, Fox hosts either spin it in the
opposite direction to help him, or, more frequently, they redirect their
viewers to election topics deemed favorable to Trump, like the border.
Over the past several months, Fox has focused obsessively
on our broken immigration system, featuring dog whistles meant to
frighten white people, but Fox hosts almost never mention how Trump intentionally killed the border bill just so he could campaign on it.
When Fox tires of showing black and brown people committing crimes, and lying about violent crime rates that have actually fallen,
Fox programmers switch to pablum like popular hairstyles, dog breeds,
and who eats ketchup on their omelets. Meanwhile, ominous and
unprecedented national security warnings about the dangers of a second
Trump administration, coming in from Trump’s own advisors, are hidden
from Fox viewers.
Fox buried warnings from Trump’s own brass
Last week when news broke that John Kelly, Trump’s own Chief of Staff, wanted to warn Americans about Trump,
including that Trump wanted generals more like Hitler’s and exhibited
fascistic urges, Fox News re-directed viewers to Trump’s publicity stunt
where he cosplayed at McDonalds. Fox ran dozens of insipid articles
about Trump at McDonalds (Trump standing at the fry counter, Trump
claiming Harris never worked there, Trump charming the customers at the
drive-through window, etc.) Meanwhile, they reported almost nothing
about John Kelly’s warning.
In one of two articles I saw about Kelly’s statements, Fox packaged it as a Harris ploy, reporting last week that, “The Harris
campaign on Friday put out a letter penned by 13 ex-Trump
administration officials seeking to bolster claims made by former
President Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly…” The article then
identified 13 fairly low-level Republicans who signed a letter warning about Trump, instead of the hundreds of high ranking Republican advisors
issuing the same warnings. Fox focused on Trump smiling in an apron to
bury dire statements from heavy hitters including Mark Milley, the highest ranking military officer
and Trump’s own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fox News
articles about other Republicans against Trump, including former Vice
President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney
of Wyoming, are mostly led with misleading headlines against Democrats
and Harris because the vast majority of people- 70 to 80%- read only the headlines. Even after Trump said Liz Cheney should have 9 rifles pointed at her (execution squad style). Fox headlines spun the story against both Cheney and Harris.
Over 300 high ranking
Republicans, including military and political leaders, have issued
warnings against another Trump administration. As the NYT reports, the list includes “former defense secretaries Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, former World Bank
president; ex-CIA directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster;
former director of national intelligence John D. Negroponte; and former
Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld,” and former Trump administration
officials Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye.
Or, as Fox described the letter from 13 Republicans, “Mike Pence who has signed multiple letters from Republicans attacking Trump, signed this letter, as well.”
No matter what happens Tuesday, we need fairness in the news
One thing we know for sure
about domestic politics is that when the pendulum swings, it always
swings back, the question is when, and after what.
When the day finally comes
that our Supreme Court isn’t ethically compromised—and that day will
come— voters will challenge Fox News (and likely Elon Musk) for aiding and abetting election fraud, as Dominion did. The next time around, the outcome for Fox won’t just be the cost of doing business.
We’ve legislated truth in the news before, and our nation was better for it. In 1969, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed
the Fairness Doctrine, which required all news broadcasters to give
fair coverage and opposing views on matters of public importance.
Balancing publishers’ first amendment rights against the right of the
public to be well informed, the Red Lion Court ruled that the public’s right to access full information takes priority over the First Amendment concerns of broadcasters. “It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited market-place of ideas in
which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance
monopolization of that market.” This is the same legal analysis that
should be applied to today’s “political speech
defense.” Bottom line, there’s a difference between free speech and
weaponized speech, and the law needs to catch up with rapidly changing
social media, AI, and monopolized town squares.
Legal change will
eventually come, it’s not if but when. We aren’t meant to hate our
neighbors, as much as Putin, Xi and Trump want us to. As Harris said,
there’s a better way. In the meantime, take a walk in the woods. Leave
your phone at home. Vote, speak up, write a column, drive your neighbors
to the polls, then let it go.
Kamala Harris for president. Obviously.