Information technology has a way of disrupting and transforming society. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century posed a threat to the Church’s monopoly on knowledge and therefore power. An ignorant population is much easier to manipulate than an enlightened one.
During the American Civil War of the 1860s, the Union Army held a distinct advantage in terms of its armed forces’ ability to communicate using the newly invented telegraph.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt adeptly used radio to gain four straight presidential victories (1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944) and support for his New Deal. He also rallied the nation through World War II speaking directly to the people. Unfortunately, another leader skillfully used radio to take over Europe at the same time. Both of these men were able to shape their mass media message with propaganda to serve specific interests; although propaganda on behalf of a message with which you agree might be called something else.
The 1960 televised debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were widely seen as putting JFK in the White House in a closely contested race. The youthful and handsome Kennedy came off in a very positive light while the hot bright lights of the studio made Nixon visibly sweat.
In the 1980s, cable television broadly expanded the amount of content available meaning that Americans were no longer drawing from a limited and largely similar body of TV programming. What had once been a unifying cultural force had become a medium with the potential to divide. This became particularly acute with the advent of 24/7 cable television news outlets. The launching of Fox News in 1996 marked a clear effort to target a specific segment of the electorate; with the openly stated purpose of offering a conservative take on the news within a mass media environment seen by many as having a decidedly liberal bent.*
While Fox News offered a conservative slant to the news in the 1990s, nearly three decades later, the network has devolved into an institution primarily concerned with generating revenue rather than dealing in a conservative-leaning form of objective journalism. I see the oxymoronic nature of this last statement while adding that “fully objective” news reporting is something difficult to nail down. My point is that Fox News was originally one thing and now it is another.
Fox News today is the subject of Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy (2023) by media reporter and analyst Brian Stelter. While the specific focus of this exposé is Fox’s erroneous promotion of a stolen 2020 presidential election, the book’s largest revelation is that the network has intentionally stoked the passions of its audience in order to make money in the Age of Trump.
Stelter’s extensive primary source documentation— “private texts, unpublished emails, depositions” and more—became available due to the lawsuit filed against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox relentlessly blamed Dominion for its role in subverting the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden. On the eve of trial, Fox settled this lawsuit for $787,500. When it was raised that paying a settlement this large would be an admission that Fox News had knowingly spread lies, and that viewers would no longer trust the network, one lawyer captured the very spirit of our divided society. “[T]he people who watch Fox News,” he said, “are never going to hear about this.”
Stelter writes that “Because Fox was subject to the pretrial discovery process, it was forced to share years of emails, texts, chats, and memos with Dominion. Through court filings, Dominion ensured that thousands of documents were exposed to the public. For the first time in Fox history, outsiders were able to see how it worked on the inside.” As the Network of Lies book jacket reads, “FOX NEWS PAID ALMOST A BILLION DOLLARS IN LEGAL SETTLEMENTS TO BURY THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK.”
Stelter’s extensively documented telling reveals the power plays among the network’s stars of disinformation, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and others. He also reports on Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch who has determined it convenient to keep his distance from the mudslingers, fully aware that they are regularly fanning the flames of dissent with disinformation. Caught in the crossfire of the lies and deceptions are a handful of legitimate Fox reporters in the news division increasingly disgusted with the total absence of journalistic integrity in the network’s prime time shows.
Among the stars of this mendacious machine, Tucker Carlson stands out because it is his show that has attracted the most eyeballs. Selter calls Carlson “a modern-day Father Charles E. Coughlin, the demagogic radio priest who, in a 1930s version of far-right talk radio preached against ‘Jews owning banks’ and openly supported other fascist tropes pushed by Hitler and Mussolini. He also cites conservative columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote, “At least Coughlin was an honest-to-God fascist, a sincere bigot, whereas Carlson only plays one on TV for the sake of ratings.”
Indeed, one of Carlson’s oft-repeated harangues revolves around a deep state leftist conspiracy that Democrats are encouraging an “invasion” of non-white immigrants to “replace” white Americans.
While criticizing Fox from his previous position as host of CNN’s Sunday morning show, Reliable Sources, Stelter incurred the wrath of another far-right conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones. On his Infowars livestream program, Jones says, “[Stelter] is a cowardly degenerate sack of anti-human trash… he runs your kids, he runs the schools, he runs the banks. This guy, this spirit, this smiling, leering devil that thinks you can’t see what he is.” Jones adds in “in all caps shouting ‘HE IS YOUR ENEMY.’”
As I find myself slipping down this rabbit hole by typing this last paragraph, I do so to make a point: exposing the role that Fox News plays in ginning up anger and hate across social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and more. Fox News is the cheerleader for much of the disinformation that has infiltrated social media; and this has severely divided our society. Brian Stelter rails, “Fox News is the black widow at the center of the web of lies that perverts American politics. This is the most recent technology to disrupt our society and the rot is deep. Not only are tens of millions of Americans being fed a diet of disinformation, they are now able to easily contribute to its distribution.
This riveting and terrifying story of the devolution of social media is told in The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World—and What We Can Do About It (2024) by best-selling author and commentator Steven Brill.
Propaganda and disinformation campaigns have been an enduring feature of the human experience. The difference in 2024 is technology. Today, those who deliberately spread falsehoods for some political or economic gain (disinformation) now have an army of “keyboard warriors” who, as Brill writes, “create a plague of misinformation— falsehoods spread by those who may not know or care that what they are promoting is untrue.”
Brill counters many of these outrageous falsehoods that have gained traction with millions of us:
“The October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine was not a ‘false flag’ staged by pro-gun-control groups.”
“The measles vaccine… does not cause autism, ADHD, or any other illness.”
“5G cell technology doesn’t cause cancer, nor did it cause COVID-19…”
“The riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not a false flag operation engineered by the FBI.” Yet, a third of Republicans “believe that that is probably or definitely true.”
The 2020 election was not rigged even as, in 2023, “61 percent of Republicans” believe it was.
“President Donald Trump and his postmaster general did not concoct a plot to remove mailboxes from the streets in swing states just before the 2020 election in order to suppress mail-in ballots.”
“The baseball great Hank Aaron did not die from a COVID vaccine, nor did the actor Matthew Perry.”
“NATO troops were not secretly fighting in Ukraine…”
Another falsehood offers insight into Brill’s attempt to rein in social media. “Colloidal silver, a liquid containing silver particles, does not cure cancer, AIDS, or diabetes. Yet multiple websites, including one with sixty-two times more online engagement than the website of the famed Mayo clinic, say that it does.” Brill asks, how does a social media user determine the reliability of the source of the information they are exposed to?
His answer is NewsGuard (https://www.newsguardtech.com/) which uses “nine basic standards of journalistic practice” to rate different sources of information on a scale of 0 to 100. The journalists that rate each site would be readily identifiable. Publishers with unfavorable ratings would be able to challenge the score and “if we decided the complaint was valid, we would make the correction and describe what we got wrong and how we corrected it.”
A key component of this rating system would be that nothing would be censored. The rating “would simply give… users information about the publisher of the content.”
The presence of competing reliability assessors would encourage objectivity. While not perfect, this system is much better than letting the government decide these things through legislation, which it has been encouraged to do. And, despite obvious shortcomings, a journalistic rating system would be a dramatic improvement over the status quo; the algorithms of the social media companies driving content based upon generating ad revenue.
Naively, Brill writes, “We were… confident that what we were doing would be greeted as salvation by the people running the technology platforms.” In the process of pitching this service to these platforms, however, Brill and his partners discovered that not only did these tech leaders question the validity of the rating system; they had no interest in identifying false or misleading content. “What we did not understand,” Brill concedes, “was that misinformation and disinformation was their business and that they had no intention of using us or anyone else to curb it.” He adds, “We didn’t know that they didn’t want to solve the problem we told them we could solve. That problem was their business plan. Misinformation and disinformation were not bugs. They were features.”
With over 50 pages of detailed notes, Brill clearly concludes that social media companies are run by those who give lip service to efforts at monitoring disinformation for the simple reason that people engage more with outrageous falsehoods than with the truth. While technology rapidly distributes disinformation, it appears that the real problem is us.
*While there is clear evidence that the majority of journalists in the country personally lean left there is much less evidence that the reporting of the mainstream media is necessarily influenced by this. See this October 18, 2024 New Yorker article that addresses this very issue.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/how-biased-is-the-media-really
