Why do you think they call it diplomacy?

 The Fair 'n' Balanced Network still haz a severe case of the sads about that -- oh, can we go ahead and call it "disastrous"? -- debate this month, so it dispatched a reporter "with a focus on national and global news" to the UN to make things better. Here's your Sunday morning top story:

UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. — Foreign ministers from European nations with close U.S. ties reacted to Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim world leaders are "laughing" at former President Trump, dismissing the claim.

During September’s presidential debate, Harris said, "World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you're a disgrace."

When asked about this quote, foreign ministers in attendance at the United Nations High-Level Week stressed they have no view one way or the other on the U.S. election and will work with whomever* wins.

Uh, Fox? If you're too young to remember the War on Drugs and its advertising campaign -- why do you think they call it dope diplomacy?

"We are friends of America," Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said, noting Italy and the U.S. are "two sides of the same coin." "If Trump will be the new president of America, we will work with him as we worked with him when he was president of America."

"We worked well with Biden, with Bush, with Reagan, with Clinton, with Obama," Tajani added. "For us, the transatlantic relations are the key strategy of our foreign policy, Europe and America."

If you've been waiting all your life to holler "STOP THE PRESS!!!" -- keep waiting.

Foreign ministers of Lithuania and the Czech Republic stressed that they will not interfere in the election by stating a preference, instead saying they "leave it to the American citizens to decide."

Gotta love that former Second World close harmony. Could we have some hitting back or dismissal, please?

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Welcome to 27th grade

You may well be wondering whether the scratch-made focus is attributed to the chef's success or the other way around, but belay that for a moment while we ponder one of those recurring myths: some notional grade-school level to which news is mythically written.

Short answer: I wish (and so does your IRB, if it's doing its job with those consent documents). The reading complexity of the stuff we present to perfectly innocent audiences tends to rely more on the perceived importance of the writer and the topic (sports team ownership, for example). Thus, let's look instead at the politics story next to the focus-ish success:

Among the most intriguing elections in Michigan this fall is a test of just how far a once reliably Democratic-leaning region around Flint, Bay City and Saginaw has shifted toward Republicans under the populism of former President Donald Trump.

Most political handicappers — the Cook Political Report in Washington and Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics among them — have the race between first-term state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Bay City, and Republican Paul Junge, who is making his third attempt at winning a seat in Congress in six years, as a toss-up.

Good so far? Take a deep breath:

That may undervalue somewhat the advantages McDonald Rivet and the Democrats could have, including the institutional support and popularity of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the region, a slight Democratic lean that remains in the boundaries of Michigan's 8th Congressional District and the expected enthusiasm in Flint and Saginaw, two cities with large Black populations, for the presidential candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and first woman of South Asian descent to become a major party's nominee.

Junge and the Republicans, on the other hand, are counting on some advantages of their own, namely that Harris remains something of an unknown quantity in a region where voters are still predominantly white and working class. Trump came within about 2 percentage points of winning within this district's boundaries four years ago (and within about a point in 2016) on a populist message that Democrats haven't delivered on promises to help voters in a district where county populations have dropped by 10% over the last decade or so.

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Watch the pivot foot

Here’s the No. 5 story from the Fair ‘n’ Balanced homepage Wednesday night to help explain why attitude change is often the wrong place to look for media effects — because who needs attitude change when you’re in charge of the tollbooth through which “objective” information itself is transmitted?

News agencies seem to agree that hostile foreign actors shouldn’t be clowning around in US elections, so the issue itself isn’t in question. Indeed, the event is more salient at CNN (which — imagine — is also covering the Federal Reserve, Near Eastern political violence and other stuff that doesn’t make the Fox top ten) than at Fox, and it gets thorough play at the AP. But see if there’s a bit of a difference in the information you get from the headlines:

Iranian hackers tried but failed to interest Biden’s campaign in stolen Trump info, FBI says (AP)

Iranian hackers sent stolen Trump campaign information to people associated with Biden campaign (CNN)

Somehow, these don’t seem to add up to “sharing.” You’re learning about the same event, but you’re learning different things about it. Here’s a bit from the texts:

The agencies noted that there is currently no information indicating if recipients replied to the messages. (Fox)

There is no indication that Biden’s staff ever replied, the statement says. (CNN)

You can see it happening in any busy newsroom: Hey, “if” and “that” mean the same thing (right?), and “if” is only half the length, and presto! Except — think of the if/whether distinction — they really aren’t built to transmit the same kind of information.

Another bit of data is somewhat less subtle. CNN and the AP include comments from both the Trump and Harris campaigns. Fox includes a comment from Trump himself — like the poor influencers who took Russia’s money without knowing it, he’s certainly an aggrieved party here — but waives the routine of balancing. As it might with a cop story, that doesn’t mean there’s no rule, but it does suggest that there are rules about applying the rule.

And that’s the beauty of the framing/agenda-setting process. Given different maps through what looks like an identical thicket, you can end up in some strikingly different places.

 

From your lipskis to God's ear

 Unless you get all your news from the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage, you might have run across an amusing tale of Russian intrigue on Wednesday. Here's the AP's follow-up from Thursday: 

They have millions of followers online. They have been major players in right-wing political discourse since Donald Trump was president. And they worked unknowingly for a company that was a front for a Russian influence operation, U.S. prosecutors say.

An indictment filed Wednesday alleges a media company linked to six conservative influencers — including well-known personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson — was secretly funded by Russian state media employees to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine. 

And a nod to CNN for first putting 2 and 2 and 2 together to get six. But back to the AP: 

... The U.S. Justice Department doesn’t allege any wrongdoing by the influencers, some of whom it says were given false information about the source of the company’s funding. Instead, it accuses two employees of RT, a Russian state media company, of funneling nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based content creation company for Russia-friendly content. 

After the indictments were announced, both Pool and Johnson issued statements on social media, which Rubin retweeted, saying they were victims of the alleged crimes and had done nothing wrong.

No doubt it's a relief to know that even in the eyes of the Justice Department, you're suspected of nothing more than being -- oh, if only there was a Soviet-era phrase that has regained currency with the foamy-mouthed American right! -- a useful idiot.

The conservative press was historically hawkish on Kremlin (or, if you read Col. McCormick's Tribune, Whitehall) disinformation operations. A favorite during my brief sentence in the right-wing media was the purported rumor that the AIDS virus had been invented in a lab at Fort Detrick, with the story exported to a willing outlet somewhere in the back of beyond, only to resurface in the West as "NEW REPORT CLAIMS!" But Fox News, perhaps with a Trumpian RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA from Truth Social echoing in its ears, was understandably not eager to rush into things. Here is its first report, appearing Thursday afternoon:

President Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced new efforts to crack down on Russian election interference on Wednesday, but Republicans say they are "skeptical" of the new moves so close to the November election. 

"We’ve seen this before. In 2016, the same people pushed the Russia hoax and we now know it was totally bogus.* Now, it may be true this time, but I am extremely skeptical," House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital. 

The other main source is the equally prudent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Oddly missing from this text, though, is the Voice of the People: the bluff little guys whose social media streams are always handy when the internet needs to Explode or Catch Fire, or some executive branch policy or hapless school administrator needs to be Roasted or Mocked or Blasted.

Methodological time out here. I'm drawing on a data set of four captures a day of the top 10 stories on the Fox homepage. That provides a clear agenda-setting hierarchy: an identifiable top story and nine more arranged beneath it** before you get to the sponsored content. Stories are coded for date, time, image, headline and subhead, source, stickiness (how long they stay in place and a few other variables. Social media (it's 2024, after all) is a frequent source. This can be a single tweet by an Elon Musk or a Bill Ackman, an announcement of a sports retirement or a celebrity breakup, or -- my favorite -- the "Biden blasted" (or "Outrage as..." in the UK-styled example at top) story. That's where the bullpen of usual suspects comes in.

And who should be providing the outrage for Biden's insult to Easter? 

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson shared a screenshot of the White House statement, writing alongside it, "What a slap in the face to all Christians in America…"

This was in the No. 3 spot on the homepage March 30. A Google search shows nine other Fox stories mentioning Comrade Johnson in the past year. (One, you'll note, is another late-breaking -- as in, posted at 7 p.m. Thursday -- "we're the real victims here" story.)

Google shows nine Dave Rubin videos at Fox since the beginning of the year, and he's mentioned in a number of stories as well. You might remember this one, which reached the No. 10 spot on the homepage on May 15:  

"How is this real life?" commentator Dave Rubin asked.

Tim Pool often appears as an interviewer or host (of RFK Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy), but he's also a source. Here's the top story from early afternoon March 19:

"This is not funny This lady is dangerous," podcaster Tim Pool wrote.

None of these say "vote for Trump." They don't have to. Two decades into the agenda-setting enterprise, McCombs and Shaw noted that attitude change is often the wrong place to look for media effects; the bigger deal is political learning. If the goal is to lower the president's approval among US voters (as it appears to have been), learning that the president hates your religion and appoints people you can't trust is a pretty good outcome. If you want people to learn that Ukrainian resistance is useless, help them learn that Ukraine's US supporters live on a different planet.

Again, the useful idiots say that they're crime victims too, and that they never surrendered editorial control over any of the propaganda they produced. It would be churlish not to take them at their word. At the same time, there's no reason to think that the Russians aren't careful shoppers who know a bargain when they see one -- regardless of who writes the scripts.

* No it wasn't.
** You might have learned a "reading Z" in your editing class, or you might not. I don't judge.

What makes a top story at Fox

Frontpage news decisions -- for those of you who remember front pages -- aren't Telexed down from Sinai each night at 9:30 (for those of you who remember morning newspapers with "news"). They're made by small groups of people applying roughly equal amounts of arithmetic and witchery to a stack of reconstructions of the day's events, aiming to catch the audience's attention by explaining (a) what's new about what you don't know in the context of (b) why everything you already know is still true. The Fox News homepage -- above is the lead story from early Saturday evening -- doesn't necessarily show a different planet, but it does follow a very different map around the planet you woke up on, depending on what's plugged into the equation and how the "calculate" button is pressed.

That's more or less what drove the front pages in Max McCombs' and Donald Shaw's 1972 "The agenda-setting function of mass media." (This one's from Raleigh on the first day of the study.) Broadly following the textbook's list of news factors -- conflict, timeliness, impact, proximity, oddity and so on -- editors across town in neighboring cities could disagree radically about whether Nixon or Humphrey should save the country while agreeing that (a) the election is the top story and (b) Nixon is a bigger deal today because he's right down the road. Faraway places are most important when Americans are there, but an airline crash is still frontpage news if it's on a distant continent (ideally one with high proportions of white people, but you get the idea). This is issue salience, which combined with attribute salience -- whose fault the economy is, if "the economy" is the top story -- makes up the media agenda that the audience learns from

The Fox decision-makers are working in a different millennium and on a palette beyond the ken of the 1968 audience, but they're using a familiar set of tools. So what makes a top story in the sunny uplands of August 2024? It's still the elction, but ...

MSNBC host Chris Hayes fumed over new poll results showing former President Trump as the favorite to win the Electoral College and therefore the presidency in November.

Spoilers: The writer is a Fox associate editor whose beat seems to consist mainly of monitoring Twitter to see (a) what the good guys are saying about the bad guys (the "Twitter blows up" story) and (b) what the bad guys have been up to while you weren't watching. As in 1968, "the election" is still the top issue; on Saturday, it's driven by an actor from the bad side who's -- well, acting out on Twitter about news that's supposedly favorable to the good side.

On his X account Friday, the "All in With Chris Hayes" anchor blasted recent poll results from famed pollster Nate Silver showing that Harris would most likely beat Trump in the national popular vote if the election were held today, though Trump would win the Electoral College.

So clearly not a "this just in" story, but let's flash back to the headline for a moment. The who-did-what-to-whom clause is about an anchor who's enraged, but the "why" is in the prepositional phrase: "polls showing Trump would win." This, kids, is simply fictional. That’s not what “recent poll results” show, that's not what Nate Silver released, and Silver is a guy who messes with data to model election results, not a "pollster." (Our writer admits as much later: "The poll Hayes expressed frustration over was Silver’s latest election model.") This model, as Fox reported (ahem) Thursday, shows Harris more likely to win the popular vote but Trump with a 52.4% likelihood of winning the Electoral College. Make what you will of a model by someone who thinks a “polling day” is a thing, but back to our real point, which is the MSNBC anchor quote-tweeting a post about the Silver model:

"It’s clear as day the Electoral College is, to quote the great Justice Jackson a national suicide pact," Hayes posted.

The media pundit’s statement referenced a quote from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote in 1949 that the Supreme Court "will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact" if it doesn’t balance its "doctrine logic with a little practical wisdom."

The snippets are from Jackson’s dissent in Terminiello v Chicago, though Fox omits a lot of the contextually fun stuff that — oddly — seems to presage the peaceful and patriotic protests of Jan. 6: “This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means … that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrine logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

So how does a lone day-old tweet from an anchor at a rival network, presented in a breathless text that bollixes up dubious data from an even older tweet, become OUR TOP STORY? Because the bad guys hate the Constitution, and POLLING GURU SAYS the Constitution is about to return our hero to his rightful position (at least, once the story has been worked over by a more senior writer), and the liberals’ delusions are dissolving in tears of rage, and there you have it. Almost makes one wish for some nice uncomplicated coups and earthquakes, to steal a better title.