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.