King to puppet

 

If you're not careful, you could spend the entire day writing about the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, but the salmon isn't going to roast itself, so here's a brief look at The Day In Biden on the Fox homepage. 

The left-hand tale (both are from the No. 3 position), around 10:30 a.m., suggests that your place on the monarchy-to-republic scale depends largely on who you are:

Biden’s orders have stopped construction of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border; reversed the ban on transgender individuals serving in the U.S. military; reversed Trump’s travel ban on mostly Muslim countries; rejoined the World Health Organization, after Trump withdrew last year amid the pandemic; rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, after Trump withdrew; restored the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in full, which Trump sought to get rid of; rolled back Trump environmental policies, like scrapping the contract for the Keystone XL Pipeline, and more.

By 5:30 p.m. or so, it's clear who's really in charge:

Advocates for the Green New Deal have praised the Biden administration for its early moves to address climate change, taking a victory lap after the president signed a slew of sweeping executive orders targeting the environment.

The array of directives that Biden signed include pausing new federal oil leases, rejoining the Paris climate agreement, eliminating lucrative subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, revoking permits for the Keystone XL Pipeline and converting the government's fleet of vehicles to electric power.

Again, if you're scoring along with your J2100 textbook and wondering about that news value of timeliness, the "have praised" is a little puzzling -- since most of the story is based on some two-day-old tweets from the usual suspects, it's hard to see why this couldn't have been ready in time to head off the coronation. But at least we've managed to get AOC on the front again.

The biggest difference between Fox's news side and Fox's commentary side since the Peaceful Transfer of Power, at least to date, seems to be that the news side thinks Biden was elected president. (I'm almost willing to predict that the website is also more likely to break the "fourth wall" -- to lean over and tell you what it really thinks -- over the past week, but that awaits more thorough testing.) Compared with the heavy lifting that both sides are doing for the party, any differences are really quite minor.

I'm not asking you who's on second

You might be wondering -- since Fox apparently made up its mind fairly early in November that Chavez and Soros and HILLARY!!111!1!1!!1!!1!!! didn't actually conspire to rig the election -- what things look like over on the Fair 'n' Balanced website these days. The short answer is more or less the way they always did. Enjoy, for example, the lead story from last Friday:

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., believes President Biden killing the Keystone XL pipeline shows he’s putting "Saudi Arabia first," not American workers.

"It looks like he cares more about workers in Saudi Arabia than the workers in America," Daines said on "America's Newsroom." 

Classic Fox, in that it's a single-source story of the tedious sort: not an assertion of fact built off one background comment and waiting for confirmation, but one person offering an opinion about policy effects. Even though it took two staffers to assemble, there's none of the comment-policy-countercomment-background from which news is usually built from talk-show appearances. (Though to Fox's credit, it's at least cribbing from its own work here, rather than that of the professional networks.)

 Note also that it's a bit behind the times (that pesky news value of "timeliness") -- the event happened Wednesday, but it's not a lead story until someone puts it into the "foreigners first" perspective for you. Compare that with the Monday lead story:

Americans still waiting on coronavirus relief, including stimulus checks, from the federal government may be surprised to learn that President Biden is reportedly offering $4 billion to Central American countries for development.

Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Saturday that Biden told him the U.S. would send $4 billion to help development in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — nations whose hardships have spawned tides of migration through Mexico toward the United States.

Fox needed four staffers and a boost from the AP to put together this eight-paragraph story (including the obligatory "Fox News' inquiry to the White House was not immediately returned"), and given the number of plates that need to be kept spinning, you can see why:

Biden wants a massive plan that includes $20 billion to accelerate vaccine distribution, a $15-an-hour minimum wage increase, an extension of supplemental unemployment benefits through the end of September, a one-time $1,400 stimulus check, a temporary expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit and $350 billion in new funding for state and local governments.

Biden promised that border wall building won't continue under his administration, and critics say his immigration stance encourages Central American migrants to cross the border illegally. Earlier in January, a caravan of thousands of migrants clashed with Guatemalan authorities while continuing to trek toward the U.S. border, according to reports.

Former President Donald Trump threatened to cut aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador for "doing nothing" about migrant caravans in 2019 after pledging to give them billions in 2018. Months later, Trump announced the aid the was restored after the countries reached immigration agreements with the U.S.

So if you can't tell who's on second, billionswise, it's because who is on first.

Fox, to at least its partial credit, didn't go for what seems to have become known as the Big Lie. Given the state of the numbers, that wasn't a really difficult call -- partly because Fox's stock in trade was always the myriad Little Lies it could spread in favor of its friends and against its enemies. Given the state of demand in the marketplace of ideas, it's hard to see how or why that would change.

How Fox tells the story

You could spend a week with the Boy Scout Handbook trying to unravel the knots that the Fair 'n' Balanced Network has tied itself in just over the past 32 hours, so let's content ourselves with looking at a couple of handy Fox storytelling techniques in this presentation from around 6:15 p.m. Thursday. 

 In the lead story, we have an illustration of the first-day-of-editing-class rule that the best place to look for a headline is the first independent clause of the lede. The Mouth of Sauron gave a briefing to condemn the "appalling, reprehensible" violence, and there we are. Contrast that with the story in the No. 2 position. The hed's entirely true: Biden does indicate that BLM protesters would have been treated differently, but that shows up in the ninth graf, more than halfway into a 710-word story.

If you're a Fox reader, of course, "What about unity?" makes perfect sense, because a different theme -- Democrat hypocrisy -- is why the story is on the front page. Unity, or the more general idea of a campaign pledge to be a unifier, doesn't appear anywhere in the story, which spends a lot of time on the 25th Amendment, but unity doesn't have to be mentioned. You don't need to say "Goldstein" to run the Two Minute Hate. And for you doubters, of course it's objective; aren't the first two words "President-elect"? (If you're interested in how news organizations invest a zero-sum resource like time, this story has four contributors: one named in the byline and three in the shirttail.)

The overall "well, he started it" theme continues with the No. 4 story, because it's never too early to point out that the liberal media hate you and everything you stand for. This one's by a Fox "senior editor," not one of the regular media critics, but it has the formula down. Cite the offending statement:

"Look at them, they’re high-fiving each other for this deplorable display of completely unpatriotic, completely against law and order, completely unconstitutional behavior, it’s stunning," he said. "And they’re going to go back, you know, to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they’re staying at, and the Garden Marriott, and they’re going to have some drinks and they're going to talk about the great day they had in Washington ... They stood up for nothing other than mayhem."

... quote a few offended randos on Twitter, and always conclude with a no-comment:

A spokesperson for Olive Garden did not respond to requests for comment.

But the No. 5 story is the real classic. The top story was a straight-ahead who-what-where off a news conference, but this one lets Fox show some initiative on behalf of the Dear Leader (six Fox staffers contribute, with an added credit for The AP, to the 465-word text):

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen vowed that pro-Trump rioters who entered the U.S. Capitol would "face the full consequences of their actions under the law," and those consequences could include being charged under President Trump's executive order authorizing up to 10 years in prison for "injury of federal property."

"Our criminal prosecutors have been working throughout the night with special agents and investigators from the U.S. Capitol Police, FBI, ATF, Metropolitan Police Department and the public to gather the evidence, identify perpetrators and charge federal crimes where warranted," Rosen said in a statement on Thursday.

Isn't that exactly what Dear Leader told his cult it would do the day before? 

They’ll knock out Lincoln too, by the way. They’ve been taking his statue down, but then we signed a little law. You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for 10 years and everything stopped. Did you notice that? It stopped. It all stopped.

There is a slight problem if you hang on for the sixth graf:

... Rosen did not reference the executive order, which Trump signed in June after protesters targeted historic monuments and statues in the wake of George Floyd's death.

 Oh.

Now, the lede doesn't technically credit Rosen with the line about the executive order; that's in a separate independent clause. But news writing has a bad habit of dropping a comma in where it wants to mark another complementized clause (blame the craftwide belief that "that" is invariably a Needless Word), so it's genuinely hard to pin down on the first go. 

One could go on, but Fox is busy doing more stuff.

 

 

 

Today in ledes

Ledes were different in the old days:

Globular little Howard C. Hopson, once the high-pressure head of the billion-dollar Associated Gas & Electric System and now, at 58, a neurotic hypochondriac, was convicted yesterday of grubbing $20,000,000 from the pockets of his company's 7000,000 shareholders.

New York Daily News, Jan. 1, 1941