But can you use it in a sentence?

I don't know where your tipping point was, but I started to tire of election post-mortems about last Thursday. Like public opinion surveys, what's exciting about them isn't usually very valid, and what's valid about them isn't usually very exciting. Whether old media or new media, they tend toward the sort of see-you-shoulda-listened-to-me brand-building that ages poorly. (And -- actual southerner here -- I'd be happy if the broadcast oligarchs of 2026 tell James Carville to just go stick his head in a barrel and yell for a while.*)

So above is a morning-after lede from the AP for your consideration, offered less as a diagnosis than as a way of thinking about what news could look like over the ensuing months and years. What struck me, as an old paid-to-read-this-stuff hand from back in the Carter administration, was how unusual it seems to see "Trump" and "felony conviction" in the same paragraph -- compared with, say, the number of times you saw "Biden" close to "disastrous debate" in AP stories in the past five months.** That points us toward some conclusions about how the agenda-setting paradigm, and what we know about media effects in general, can help attack the conventional wisdom.

My starting point is some of the self-justifying blather I'm seeing on the right flank: People weren't fooled -- they knew exactly what they were voting for, and that's what they wanted. I agree that a large proportion of US voters knew exactly who they were voting for: the lying, gropey, vengeful old clown who thinks all the world's a sound stage and hates all the people they wish they could hate. What they were voting for is a different question, and that's where Fox News comes into the equation.

We've known for two decades that Fox users are more likely than users of grownup media to believe in things that aren't so. Kull et al (2003) looked at beliefs about justifications for the second US-Iraq war: presence of WMD, strong Qa'ida-Iraq links, and worldwide support for a US invasion. Fox users were the most likely to hold at least one misperception; public media users (and in those glorious days, newspaper readers) the least likely to hold any misperceptions.

Because it doesn't hit the usual metrics of polling drama during campaign season (see above, under sexy vs. valid), you might not have seen an October survey from Ipsos that looked at the relationship between news source and political understanding. Unsurprisingly, participants who get their news from Fox and other right-wing outlets saw immigration as the most important problem facing the country; for participants overall, it was the economy; in the category of national newspapers and (non-Fox) cable, the MIP was "political extremism or threats to democracy."

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Always get the dog's name

Before we move on to (ahem) today's events at Madison Square Garden, let's take a moment to see how much of American journalism can be packed into a single tabloid front page: here, the New York Daily News of Feb. 22, 1939:

● Always get the dog's name! That's Fritz, barking at the cops in an attempt to defend his injured master, Chester Brooks, 61, of W. 5th St., Manhattan.
● Style policy reveals style politics.* If there's a dog name rule, there's probably also a rule that tells Daily News staffers which other names are important; hence, "kisses wife" but "hugs son Gerald, 2."
● Don't just tell me what I'm seeing; tell me why I'm seeing it. Isidore Greenbaum was run in for jumping on the stage and trying to punch Fritz Kuhn -- not, regardless of the Hillary Clinton comment that got Fox News's panties in a wad last week, a "neo-Nazi," but the real thing.
● Sometimes it's OK to break the fourth wall. If a World Series victory allows the paper to declare heroes, surely attempted Nazi-punching could license the declaration of an "anti-fascist hero."

The parallels between the German-American Bund's 1939 rally and (ahem) today's events are entertaining if a bit inexact. The Trump rally, after all, is nine days before a national election in which he's the candidate of a major party. If Trump will be "actually reenacting" anything, the more likely template is "all his other rallies of the past few weeks"; batshittery about dog-eating aliens or sex-change surgeries during study hall is likely, with a nonzero chance of Arnold Palmer's penis and some somnolent dancing to Ave Maria. (Update: Should have anticipated the sort of gutter racism that seems to get the Trump cult especially excited, as it's on full display.) And the sort of large-scale revulsion that was shared even by the right-wing press seems unlikely at this writing.

For all that, the buildup in the Trumpist media has been steady. Fox had two side-by-side
stories about the Clinton outrage at the top of the homepage on Friday, and rally precedes led the page Saturday night and Sunday morning. But that's hardly out of step with Fox's campaign coverage in general. Indeed, several ongoing themes for both Fox and the Trump campaign suggest closer parallels with a different gathering at Madison Square Garden: the Oct. 30, 1941, America First rally, held as US involvement in the Atlantic war deepened (a U-boat sank the destroyer Reuben James the next day). See if the "enemy within" vibe from the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a bit of a ring to it:

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Paging the Dental Don Juan of Detroit

 

Well, this is hardly a surprise. The lead story on your Fox News homepage on Saturday night (9:30ish Eastern US) is the great man's rally at ... well, take it away, Fox:

Former President Trump echoed Ronald Reagan on Saturday during a spirited battleground outdoor rally at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, asking, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

Do you think he knows who was president in October 2020? Just asking. Because the real question -- since we're at a "spirited battleground outdoor rally" at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, after all -- might be: What did he say about Arnold Palmer?

... The crowd was both large and optimistic, with many children present at the rally dressed up as the former president and local steelworkers wearing hard hats.

Trump opened his nearly two-hour stump with a tribute to his late friend and PGA golf legend Arnold Palmer.

"But there was nobody that had his magic. He was a thriller. He was unbelievable. He, he knew how to win and he knew how to,, just do whatever it was that electrified a crowd," Trump said. "If I had him here right now with me, this crowd would be going absolutely crazy. They'd say, Trump, get off this stage. We want Arnold Palmer to speak."

Trump said he was good friends with and named one of the villas on his Doral, Florida, property after Palmer, who was a native of Pennsylvania, and died in 2016.

That seems somehow less than compelling. Did anything else catch the attention of the press -- the AP, for example?

Trump kicks off a Pennsylvania rally by talking about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia
LATROBE, Pa. (AP) — Donald Trump’s campaign suggested he would begin previewing his closing argument Saturday night with Election Day barely two weeks away. But the former president kicked off his rally with a detailed story about Arnold Palmer, at one point even praising the late, legendary golfer’s genitalia.

Oh. The Independent?

‘But don’t call them weird’: Trump raises eyebrows after crude 12-minute anecdote about Arnold Palmer’s manhood
Donald Trump shared a 12-minute anecdote about golfer Arnold Palmer at a Pennsylvania rally, prompting derision on social media after he made an off-color comment.

... “This is a guy that was all man,” Trump said. “He took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it.”

The (hem, kaff, Murdoch) New York Post?

Trump implies legendary golfer Arnold Palmer was well endowed at campaign rally in Latrobe, Pa.: ‘Oh my God’
He’s spilling the tea, and lemonade.

Former President Trump told a story about Arnold Palmer at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Saturday night that ended with the former Commander-in-Chief insinuating that the golf legend’s manhood was legendary.

USA Today?

Donald Trump targets steelworkers, riffs on golfer's anatomy in Pennsylvania rally
Orange and red hard hats dotted the crowd at a Donald Trump rally in western Pennsylvania on Saturnday night as he presented himself as the savior of the steel industry, a key part of the region’s identity, and made off-color remarks about the late pro golfer Arnold Palmer, a local hero.

... Trump spent his first 15 minutes at the microphone extolling Palmer's masculinity − and anatomy.

“Arnold Palmer was all man,” he told the crowd. “And I say that in all due respect to women. And I love women. But this guy. This guy. This is a guy that was all man. This man was all strong and tough. And I refused to say it but when − when he took showers with the other men, they came out of there, they said, 'Oh my god. That’s unbelievable.'”

NJ.com (and the shades of the newspapers it represents)?

Trump makes crude remark about golfing immortal: ‘I had to say it’
In many ways, Arnold Palmer’s resume is unparalleled. While many other golfing greats — like Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods — won more tournaments and majors and earned more money on the course, Palmer is acknowledged as the immortal who grew the sport’s popularity.

... But here’s what Donald Trump wants you to remember about Palmer, who passed away in September 2016: He had a big penis.

But at Fox, we've said all there is to say about Arnold Palmer.

Perhaps this is a pleasantly old-fashioned burst of propriety (after all, there were "many children present at the rally dressed up as the former president," and Fox also omitted his reference to the Democratic nominee as a "shit vice president"). And Fox might always change its mind and update the story later (this was posted at 8:29). But one can be forgiven for thinking that the orders from the ketchup-smeared bunker are conmvincingly clear on this point.

Here's the headline. Now go find some sources

What does it take to score a piece of news as a made-up story? Here's a Foxalicious example (No. 5 on the homepage in the day's first screen capture) to help tease things out.

First point: A made-up story is not the same thing as a made-up event, and made-up events are rare. When an expert tells you that a "previously missed detail" proves that a Nevada family saw space aliens in their backyard, or that the aliens were using a cloaking device, or that they've been trying to stave the pesky humans off for years, you have a set of real events -- A said B, A said C, and so dforth -- to document. The relationship of those events to the empirical world might be a little shaky, but roll the tape -- here's the guy who can tell you how an alien cloaking device works. 

The difference between camera-shy space beings in Nevada and Americans in liberal cities isn't the event, or the speaking of the event; it's the story that the events are drawn into. The promise of this Fox presentation, with its illustration and quote, is that we know something today that we didn't know yesterday. What's new today is something about public opinion, and we can index it by what Americans say about which candidate (do you even have to ask "which office?")  they favor to solve a border crisis. How might that be borne out in the text?

Voters in Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta were split on whether they believe immigration is a major issue in the United States, but overwhelmingly favored one candidate when it comes to grappling with challenges related to border security.

"This just can’t be open border. It’s not possible," a Chicago-area voter named Pablo told Fox News Digital.

Hmm. Go on -- perhaps to some overwhelming support.

Pablo, whose parents immigrated legally from South America in the 1960s, said the current immigration policies under the Biden administration are "not sustainable."

OK. And?

... Several voters suggested that the high concentration of illegal immigrants in communities across the United States would likely put a strain on American citizens.

"If there’s too many immigrants that come illegally, it will cause an issue for the working class in the country," Kevin, a student at Georgia Tech, told Fox News Digital.

However, some voters refuted the idea that immigration is a significant issue.

"I think immigration is necessary," Eric, a Southside Chicago native, said. "It gives people opportunity. It expands the economy—brings more money in. I think it’s necessary. I feel like that’s the foundation of America."

Still not seeing the overwhelming favorite. Wait! Here it is:

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Well, go break it again

The persuasive power of Fox News doesn't necessarily spring from the things it makes up, though Fox does make things up with some regularity. The instructive part about Fox is the stories it tells: the facts that it isolates and prioritizes, the narrative structures through which those facts are channeled, and the nudge-nudge context that reminds you of which story you landed in. Hence a few observations about Monday morning's lead story at the Fox homepage. (Explanation of the data set below*.)

The function of the headline (this is not the time to tell me you skipped that day in your editing class) is -- in a limited space -- to show what happened and why it's relevant. Ideally, an active subject-verb-object clause will tell you why today is different from yesterday, and the palette from which those constituents are drawn -- whether the event is a collision, a shark bite, a shooting or a "horror" (a noun in 36 unique headlines in 2024, with three of those being "horror in paradise"), whether the object is a resident, a mom or a veteran, and so on -- tells you how to categorize the story and store it for future reference and comparison. Relative clauses and prepositional phrases support the event's importance: The core of the headline is "Journalist breaks silence," with the complements -- which journalist, silence about what -- signaling why it's in the lead position. Good to go?

So far this year, silence has been broken in 45 unique headlines at the top of the page. Silence-breaking is a less time-bound construct than speaking out, but the journalist in question nonetheless was unsilent about the laptop story in three foxnews.com stories in June alone. Lid-offblowing is rarer and newer, with six of seven unique headlines occurring since April 15. Unlike silence-breaking, it's distinctively valenced. The  first three cases are all about a Fox-made "scandal" over NPR's "left-wing bias"; the others deal with "when cops knew of potential threat at Trump rally," "who really knew about now-scrapped 9/11 sweetheart deal" and "vice president's claim of championing America's workers." The power to declare a scandal is, erm, also variable. At some shops, you'd need to wait for someone else to say it; at Fox, it appears to be vested in the headline writer.

The summary hed (more or less what we used to call a "hammer hed") and the photo mashup also work together to categorize the story. "Follow the scent" occurs in Hunter Biden headlines March 10 and March 20, with an "On the scent" Jan. 22 and the related "Gathering Hunter" (Jan. 12) and "Hunting and gathering" (June 3) for good measure. You hardly even need a story at this point (which is literally how tabloids work), but ...

Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop - falsely dismissed as Russian disinformation – became part of the American lexicon four years ago today, on October 14, 2020, kicking off a years-long scandal with big tech, corporate media and the intelligence community.

"I think that virtually every single mainstream outlet disgraced themselves," former New York Post deputy politics editor Emma-Jo Morris told Fox News Digital.

Well, we're all entitled to speak our minds. That's what we have a First Amendment for. (Likewise the right to make things up about "the American lexicon.") But the right to freedom of the press isn't a right of access to everyone else's press, or to dictate how those presses handle your "exclusives." Here's CNN, for example, applying some context a mere two days after the momentous revelations:

The New York Post says it obtained the emails through two Trump confidants: His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Giuliani has openly coordinated with a known Russian agent to promote disinformation about the Bidens. The Washington Post reported Thursday the White House, and Trump personally, were warned in 2019 that Giuliani “was being used to feed Russian misinformation” to the President. Separately, Bannon was recently charged by the Justice Department with orchestrating a million-dollar fraud scheme and accused of deceiving thousands of donors to his nonprofit.

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How to lie without statistics

How close can the Fair 'n' Balanced Network come to telling an out-and-out lie without moving the pivot foot? Let's look over the claims in Friday morning's top headline and how they're (ahem) supported in the story.

For the homepage headline to be true, we'd need to have some voters and a liberal stronghold, and more than one voter has to be saying that the stronghold is leaning toward Trump. (OK, we'll spot you the "towards," but we issued the stylebooks for a reason). 

Fox News Digital spoke with Detroit, Michigan, residents about the political pulse in the city as Election Day nears in the crucial swing state.

(Well, you can see how FOX TALKS TO HUMANS might not make for a compelling headline. But go on.)

"It got to be Trump for the whole city," Keandre, an east-side Detroit resident, told Fox News Digital. "They are all voting Trump."

Guess that settles it. (Voter turnout in the 2021 Detroit mayoral election was around 18%, if you're wondering how likely it is that a "resident" is also a "voter.") But perhaps we can hear from a few more of the faithful?

One resident of St. Clair Shores in Macomb County said that he thinks the support for former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is split.

"People on both sides. It’s going to be a close one," Tom said.

Trump got a bit over 53% of the vote in Macomb County (the next one over from Wayne) in 2024, if you're scoring along at home.

Two other Detroit natives who spoke to Fox News Digital supported Harris.

"All my friends that are Trumpers only think about themselves and we have to think about the world," Ron said. 

"I really like Kamala Harris because she’s got a lot more compassion. It’s not about yourself. It’s about everybody," he explained further.

"I think it's time for history to be made," Mandela said.

"I just think that it’s going to be a woman president," he added.

Sounds like Harris 2, Trump 1 so far, with Tom left on base. (How Detroit natives fit into the mix isn't explained; the one in the next room is voting with fellow cat moms on the block, but we're 2.5 miles and a long outfield throw north of Detroit.) 

... Michigan residents also weighed in on which presidential candidate they think would be a stronger leader.

Mandela admitted he thought it was Trump despite his support for Harris.

"I think Trump is [stronger] because I think that Trump is not going to let anybody run over us," he said.

When asked who was the stronger leader, Keandre said it was Harris.

In case you were at your grandmothers' funerals on the day your methods class covered question design, that's not at all the same question as "who would you vote for?" So it's interesting that these two go in opposite directions, but not necessarily meaningful. Likewise the subsequent observations about leadership from Jeff (another Detroit native) and Adrian (do we have to remind you guys again that Macomb County is still not in Detroit?)

Summary: We can't say for sure that "voters" is a lie, because there's no indication of whether we talked to them. Detroit does qualify as a "liberal stronghold," though -- OK, let's just count "native" and "resident" as the same thing -- a third of our sample comes from a county that, if you've heard of it before, you've probably heard of as the original home of Reagan Democrats. One of the Detroiters says "they are all voting Trump"; two others make that sound more than a trace optimistic. Did the pivot foot move?

The month is young, and -- it's only Friday -- this probably won't even end up the biggest lie Fox tells this week. It's a reminder, though, that Fox isn't really  interested in telling you about public opinion on its own. It's interested in showing you that the good guys are winning (or the bad guys or losing). If you're waiting for the day's employment reports to crack the top 10 stories -- same principle -- keep waiting.

Unclutch the fucking pearls

Make room on the fainting couch for the Wall Street Journal, covering -- what's that headline again? -- "The Profane 78-Year-Old Leading the Dockworkers Strike":

“We’re going to show these greedy bastards you can’t survive without us!” Daggett shouted to cheers from the crowd in a speech filled with profanities and warnings about the threats automation poses to workers.

... Daggett, who has the broad shoulders of a former dockworker and a raspy voice that comes from years of shouting at labor rallies, is now throwing himself behind an effort to win a historic increase in pay and an effort to get dockworkers around the world behind his goal of halting automation in its tracks and establishing longshore labor as a formidable partner in global trade.

“People are going to sit up and realize how important longshoremen jobs are,” Daggett said in an interview at the rally. “They won’t be able to sell cars. They won’t be able to stock malls. They won’t be able to do anything in this country without my f—ing people. And it’s about time they start realizing it.”

Personal prescriptive peeve* here. Neither "bastards" nor "fucking" is "profane." Different poles on a scale of naughty-to-FCC v Pacifica, maybe, but neither stands in opposition to, or rudely invokes, the sacred.** But the cooler point is the subset of framing that we can think of as policing: whom the press needs to keep an eye on because, well, we're just never sure they can be trusted.

Mind you, this is the Wall Street Journal, the site in which A.J. Liebling first observed that "the employer, in strike stories, always 'offers' and the union always 'demands.'" True to form, both cases of offering belong to "port employers and ocean shipping companies," and all the demanding is done by the profane old man delivering his "battle cry." The Journal overall maintains a strong firewall between the church of the editorial page and the state of the news pages, but that's the fun of framing analysis: it illuminates how the routines of news can make the wall transparent, no matter how vigilant the guards.

The agenda-setting cousins will remind you that a single article isn't going to change your attitude about labor in general or Harold Daggett in particular. That's not what news does. What it does is affect the balance of what you learn: not just the ones and zeroes of the day's events (Tigers 5, Astros 2) but whether you're in the sort of zip code where that's good news or bad news.
 

Daniel Hallin explains this as a set of spheres in which news operates. Objectivity does its work in the "sphere of legitimate controversy," where "neutrality and balance are the prime journalistic virtues": whether it's about firing the football coach or adding an ad valorem tax for library expansion, both sides are aired out for the public to see. In the "sphere of consensus," journalists act as "ceremonial protectors of consensus values"; both sides don't need an airing, because there is no legitimate other side to TIGERS WIN!!!!*** In the third sphere, we're patrolling the bounds of the legitimate. That doesn't mean you're ruled out of the news if you'r eoutside the norm, but it does mean you and your views are going to go through the special security line, and it's going to show -- in whether and how you're marked for saying "fuck," for example.

Up at the top is a lead story from the Fox nomepage in Jan. 17; it's one of three unique stories from the top of the page between July 2023 and February 2024 with the "Potty Mouth POTUS" hed. Here's the lede:

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that President Biden does not insult voters, but he has made insulting remarks to them on several occasions.

Now, to be fair, in this example, Biden had merely called a voter a "horse's ass" back in 2020. But barely two weeks later (same headline), it emerged -- meaning Fox read an article at Politico -- that Biden, in speaking with "close allies and aides," had apparently referred to that Trump fellow as a "sick f---" and a "f---ing a--hole." 

Fox's orthography is standard for the US press. The British are different, and the Guardian's let-the-fucks-fall-where-they-may attitude is a real outlier (here's a summary, and if you haven't seen it before, enjoy the stylebook cartoon). But the boundary work is clear when Fox (again thanks to Politico) quotes the Trump campaign:

"It’s a shame that Crooked Joe Biden disrespects the presidency both publicly and privately," senior Trump campaign adviser Chris Lacivita told Politico.

No such opprobrium attaches to Trump's own campaign language, whether he's saying "bullshit" or merely slinging loads of it at lawful immigrants in Ohio. Trump is in a category that, at least at Fox, doesn't need policing. Like a Tom Brady or a Bill Belichick or a Kevin Costner, he can go about his business. Your Taylor Swifts and your Travis Kelces (not to mention your Kamala Harrises and your Tim Walzes), on the other hand, need constant watching. It's certainly not Fox's fault when some of that social media monitoring is done by the influencers who were surprised to find that their newly enlarged paychecks were partly funded by the Kremlin, but there we are.

None of this is to suggest that the Wall Street Journal is enjoying Moscow's largesse. It does suggest that, no matter how high the barbed wire on the church-state wall, there's a clue to the secret passages in who is marked as profane and who isn't.

* Everybody has some
** Unlike, say, Blake's "God damn the king"
*** Though it's dicey when the Houston starter graduated from Wayne State, which is two miles up Woodward from Comerica Park.