Foxocracy by Tobin Smith

Author:Tobin Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2019-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

But How Do You Keep an Audience Watching Fox News? “Just Mine the Rich Veins of White Identity Injustice and Grievance, Dude!”

This story is about one of the fifty-plus nights I was asked to anchor the live “America’s Nightly Scoreboard” on FBN. It starts about five hours before show time. On this prime-time opinion program, the process was that the host opened the show with an in-your-face demagogic editorial that was expected to secure the interest of the audience at home and glue them to their seats.

Of course, as you now know, in the Fox 2.0 post-2008 America, this meant the audience engagement strategy was another cathartic hour of Obama-bashing and liberal strafing.

Since I had not been preparing to host the show that night, I really had nothing in mind to write for my opening monologue. I was nervous that I would not convincingly fulfill my role as head blame-shifter for the “I-Hate-Obama” Fox News audience. I’d frankly run out of outrage-inducing or cathartic blame-shifting ideas. Even the Daily Memo, aka Roger Ailes’s topics of mass liberal destruction and outrage, that day was pretty weak. Nothing much on the memo hit me as particularly outrageous ammo. It was just a slow day of outrage and inflammatory injustice-inducing ideas for the Fox Hate Networks.

So as usual, I went to see one of my favorite Fox News prime-time producer friends looking for a few ideas—the clock was ticking. Gene (not his real name—he is still at Fox News to this day) came from a political science background and was what Roger would consider a Fox News philistine. Gene did eventually sell his soul to the devil to produce a number of the prime-time populist conservative televangelists, aka FNC opinion talk shows. After all, even a philistine has to pay the rent and eat.

What he told me that night, though, gave me about one hundred hours of Fox News-style outrage televangelism gold. He also reinforced the now-obvious truth that Fox News was doing Trump before Trump was doing Trump. Whatever America we are living in now, we and Roger Ailes got there first many years ago to set the unreality show stage.

“Toby,” Gene said, “what you don’t seem to understand is that the primary animating psychology of our core viewer is the psychology of grievance, which is a fancy way of saying they want to see the blood-sport of injustice payback. Grievance from a conservative political perspective is basically pathological; it’s any widely held perception and belief of a cultural or economic injustice inflicted upon them by the hated liberal ruling elite class.

“The key part of understanding and leveraging this right-wing pathology is this: In the court of tribal justice, a tribal injustice requires tribal redress—what I believe you would call ‘payback is a mofo.’”

The cocktails kept coming and he was rolling. “So listen,” he said. “What you don’t seem to understand is our basic core viewer carries an almost debilitating sub-conscious inferiority complex. They feel judged and so overwhelmingly disrespected every friggin’

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