Fox and the rules of news

 

A brief lesson on how the Rules of News® work, by way of explaining how the public agenda is set by the homepage of the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.

The Fox homepage has a clear agenda-setting hierarchy: 10 top stories, with a clearly identifiable lead and the rest in an easy top-to-bottom, left-to-right layout, before you get to the promotional content. Here's the No. 6 story as of 11 a.m. Eastern US time (it's moved up a notch since 8 a.m.). 

Time -- the "THIS JUST IN!!!" -- element -- has been a central component of news ever since we had to out-shout the balladeer on the next corner in Elizabethan London. In US headline dialect, the time rules are well established. The present tense ("removes") signals the "immediate past": the "since Thursday's edition" or "since we updated the homepage" that tells you why today is different from yesterday. That's part of a bundle of practices that, in turn, help the audience sort events into issues. In basic agenda-setting terms, that's how "the news" tells the audience whether a campaign stop is "about" crime, the economy, foreign policy or whether the candidate laughs at the wrong time.

Here, the time element helps us sort this into a "culture war" basket: An "airline" has added to a set of daily outrages against the icons of American life that indicate -- oh, what's the phrase? -- a "nation in decline." Except that Fox is cheating. Watch the pivot foot: 

Over the last few years, Delta Air Lines has embraced the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda under the purview of a chief officer who believes that the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" isn't inclusive. 

Delta's Chief Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Social Impact Officer Kyra Lynn Johnson has said publicly Delta is striving to "boldly pursue equity" which has impacted every level of the company, from its hiring practices to the language it uses in gate announcements. 

"So we're beginning to take a hard look at things like our gatehouse announcements. You know, we welcome ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ And we've asked ourselves, ‘Is that as gender inclusive as we want to be?’" Johnson said during a February 2021 panel with other DEI insiders. "You know, we're looking at some legacy language that exists in some of our employee manuals. And getting to the root of the way some things are described and saying, ‘Does that actually send a message of inclusivity?’"

Delta released an inclusive language guide in December 2020 which advised employees and leaders against using terms that reinforce the notion that there are only two genders.

See the move? We've gone from "THIS JUST IN!!!" to a panel discussion in 2021. Nothing in the text, even the comments Delta provided to the inquiring Fox reporter, indicates that a decree has gone out from Caesar Diversus to stop saying "ladies and gentlemen." If you're a reader, you have a right to be annoyed -- though if you're a Fox reader, you might more likely be filled with existential dread, because that's the proper slot on the agenda.

An important takeaway from the agenda-setting enterprise is that agenda-setting isn't a practice; it's an outcome of practice. The "media agenda" is what happens when practitioners commit journalism on Lippmann's "blooming, buzzing confusion" of daily events. Fox isn't really a different world; it's a different map with HERE BE GERBLINS drawn in different places.