Well, go break it again

The persuasive power of Fox News doesn't necessarily spring from the things it makes up, though Fox does make things up with some regularity. The instructive part about Fox is the stories it tells: the facts that it isolates and prioritizes, the narrative structures through which those facts are channeled, and the nudge-nudge context that reminds you of which story you landed in. Hence a few observations about Monday morning's lead story at the Fox homepage. (Explanation of the data set below*.)

The function of the headline (this is not the time to tell me you skipped that day in your editing class) is -- in a limited space -- to show what happened and why it's relevant. Ideally, an active subject-verb-object clause will tell you why today is different from yesterday, and the palette from which those constituents are drawn -- whether the event is a collision, a shark bite, a shooting or a "horror" (a noun in 36 unique headlines in 2024, with three of those being "horror in paradise"), whether the object is a resident, a mom or a veteran, and so on -- tells you how to categorize the story and store it for future reference and comparison. Relative clauses and prepositional phrases support the event's importance: The core of the headline is "Journalist breaks silence," with the complements -- which journalist, silence about what -- signaling why it's in the lead position. Good to go?

So far this year, silence has been broken in 45 unique headlines at the top of the page. Silence-breaking is a less time-bound construct than speaking out, but the journalist in question nonetheless was unsilent about the laptop story in three foxnews.com stories in June alone. Lid-offblowing is rarer and newer, with six of seven unique headlines occurring since April 15. Unlike silence-breaking, it's distinctively valenced. The  first three cases are all about a Fox-made "scandal" over NPR's "left-wing bias"; the others deal with "when cops knew of potential threat at Trump rally," "who really knew about now-scrapped 9/11 sweetheart deal" and "vice president's claim of championing America's workers." The power to declare a scandal is, erm, also variable. At some shops, you'd need to wait for someone else to say it; at Fox, it appears to be vested in the headline writer.

The summary hed (more or less what we used to call a "hammer hed") and the photo mashup also work together to categorize the story. "Follow the scent" occurs in Hunter Biden headlines March 10 and March 20, with an "On the scent" Jan. 22 and the related "Gathering Hunter" (Jan. 12) and "Hunting and gathering" (June 3) for good measure. You hardly even need a story at this point (which is literally how tabloids work), but ...

Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop - falsely dismissed as Russian disinformation – became part of the American lexicon four years ago today, on October 14, 2020, kicking off a years-long scandal with big tech, corporate media and the intelligence community.

"I think that virtually every single mainstream outlet disgraced themselves," former New York Post deputy politics editor Emma-Jo Morris told Fox News Digital.

Well, we're all entitled to speak our minds. That's what we have a First Amendment for. (Likewise the right to make things up about "the American lexicon.") But the right to freedom of the press isn't a right of access to everyone else's press, or to dictate how those presses handle your "exclusives." Here's CNN, for example, applying some context a mere two days after the momentous revelations:

The New York Post says it obtained the emails through two Trump confidants: His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Giuliani has openly coordinated with a known Russian agent to promote disinformation about the Bidens. The Washington Post reported Thursday the White House, and Trump personally, were warned in 2019 that Giuliani “was being used to feed Russian misinformation” to the President. Separately, Bannon was recently charged by the Justice Department with orchestrating a million-dollar fraud scheme and accused of deceiving thousands of donors to his nonprofit.

One can see how a tad bit of caution might be appropriate. (As a reminder, the laptop was not "falsely dismissed as Russian disinformation"; it was accurately characterized as having hallmarks of Russian disinformation.) Nonetheless, the AP reported the same day that Twitter said it had been wrong to block links to the Post story: "It served as demonstration of how quickly things can change when it comes to social media, misinformation and the coming U.S. election as companies try to navigate unprecedented times." And would it be rude to point out that you could barely find a traffic-and-weather report on AM radio that month without being buried in LAPTOP!!!!11!1!!! coverage?** But back to Fox:

While at the New York Post, Morris first reported on Hunter Biden’s personal computer, which eventually was dubbed the "laptop from hell" by the paper’s staffers. The infamous laptop was filled with shocking videos and photos of drug use, lewd sex acts, and sensitive business communications. It was exposed by the Post only a few weeks before then-candidate Joe Biden was set to square off against then-President Trump.

In an unprecedented act of uniformed censorship, the bombshell Post report was essentially buried by Big Tech and the mainstream press, silencing an "October surprise" that many feel could have swung the election.

Minor points here: it's not "uniformed" unless it's in uniform, and it ain't "censorship" if Twitter -- or CBS, or the New York Times, or Fox News itself -- does it. (As a journalistic mentor of mine used to say: The obligation to cover is not an obligation to print.) As for what "many feel," Fox is also the network that brought you "Expert reportedly spots missed detail in video that says proves aliens were in Las Vegas" (May 9), and no, those are not the aliens who ate your dog.***

Morris, who had the lead byline on the initial bombshell report, feels the "multiple scandals" that erupted following her story forever changed the trajectory of tech and media in America.

This could well be true.

"It definitely did change… the trajectory of the tech history because first of all, obviously, the most glaring example is that… the trust on Twitter was completely collapsed… it led Elon Musk to buy the platform," Morris said.

"Now that he has acquired Twitter, it's completely changed the ability for censors to operate because he is just not playing ball with them," she continued.

This, on the other hand, is simply delusional. (Which, again, is an absolute First Amendment right.) Musk, like many authoritarians, has shown himself delighted to play ball with the "censors," as long as he gets to call the game.

But back to the original point. Is this story (already replaced at the top of the page) going to change any minds, for or against? Highly unlikely, but that's not the sole point of media effects. If it reinforces an opinion, or even if it just changes the ratio of ones to zeroes in the information stream, it's done its work.

Now go check your voter registration.

* For reference, the 2024 data set (4 captures a day of the top 10 stories on the Fox homepage) is complete through Sept. 6.
** The things I put up withfor you people.
*** Of the 45 unique headlines contining "bombshell," four are about Hunter Biden and only two about beings from space. Councidence, or what?