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.