headsup: the blog: Another day on Planet Fox

When you ask people what they think about a policy practice -- say, blowing away random speedboats in the Caribbean on grounds that they're delivering something called "narcoterrorism" to America's doorsteps -- you're also asking them what they know about the practice. And that's cause for another look at the agenda-setting effect of the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage.

Two things must ye always remember about media agenda-setting. First, agenda-setting is not a practice itself but an outcome of practice: that is, of doing "news" at speed on a pile of information with limited space and time. Second, if you're only looking for attitude change as an outcome variable, you're probably looking in the wrong place. Agenda-setting is about political learning: the transfer of salience from what "the media" think is news to what the public thinks is news. (As our friends in PoliSci have noted in their flavor of agenda-building, this is complicated by the fact that our political structure assumes an active and informed public, whereas the public almost always has something better to do.)

With that in mind, what is the Fox audience learning from Saturday morning's top story about recent developments in the War On Speedboats?

As scrutiny mounts on the Trump administration's use of force in its targeting of suspected cartel members in the Caribbean, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were asked whether they believe U.S. citizen victims or drug traffickers are more important.

Republicans, such as Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., said the answer is easy.

"I can't speak for anybody else, but my top concern is American citizens, their lives, their health. So, for me, it's an easy choice. Kill drug dealers, save Americans," said Sheehy.

But that's not why we're writing the story, is it?

Democrats, however, had less black and white opinions on the strikes.

"Look, I fully support doing whatever we can within the legal means to make sure that we're stopping drug trafficking," said Rep. Johnny Olszewski, D-Md., adding, "We should absolutely be concerned about the victims of drug trafficking and people who have lost their lives to drug violence."

... Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., pushed back on the question, asking, "Is this going to do anything to truly help them?"

"Cocaine's still flowing, the demand is still there," Smith said, adding, "You see a drug dealer on the street, that's a bad person. That person is selling drugs. Let's say they're selling actual fentanyl, not the cocaine that we're hitting here. Would you support allowing anyone to execute that person who wants to on the spot?"

... Meanwhile, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., answered, "We have to do our best to disrupt drug distribution. Also, we have to invest in drug health care and drug education, et cetera. We have to do all the things. The real question is, how do you do it right?"

Pressed on whether the government should be prioritizing drug victims above the traffickers, Reed responded, "I've commented and thank you for asking," before walking away.

It sounds like the Fox reporter is getting off lightly here. No one tells him "quiet, piggy" or asks if he's a stupid person. But while there's clearly a transfer of political knowledge going on, it's not the same sort that a Fox reader might pick up at, say, the Drudge Report (linking to CNN's report from Friday, which put things in rather a different light).

In the same way that Fox users were more likely than, say, NPR or Times users to know stuff about the second US-Iraq war that wasn't true, Fox users also tend to not know stuff -- about an improving economy, for example -- that is true. That doesn't mean the issues aren't covered; it means they're covered for different reasons and take the form of different stories.

The arrest of the man accused of planting pipe bombs at Democratic and Republican sites before the Trumpist attack on the Capitol in 2021 was the lead story from Thursday noon-ish through Friday morning. He stayed among the top 10 stories through Friday: the FBI accused the Biden administration of sitting on the evidence, CNN's Jake Tapper mistakenly called him a white guy, his family was noisy at his first court appearance, and -- critically -- Fox could run a the mug shot (as one commenter put it: "he's not white. He's black").

By Saturday, with both CNN and the AP having reported that the suspect was a Trumpling who thought the 2020 election had been stolen, the story* was gone from the top of the page -- but not from Fox altogether, as evidenced by the Greg Gutfeld clip that Trump posted on his social media platform Saturday.

Agenda-setting and framing are both reciprocating engines: political actors learn about issues (and voter attitudes) from the media, and media learn from their audiences (which include political actors). As surely as Trump hears from Fox, Fox hears from Trump in return. After a suspect was arrested in the killing of Charlie Kirk, the FBI's original over-hasty claim of an arrest was "Patel's blunder" at the top of the page on Sept. 13 -- but "Caught in 33 hours" (with a subhead praising "FBI chief's bold evidence strategy") after Fox interviewed Trump that afternoon. And the great man himself is hardly shy about sharing his opinions of Fox programming, particularly when it's true

It'd be wrong, not to mention churlish, to suggest that the Fox audience isn't taking in any actionable information with its daily diet. It is. Indeed, that audience can find its way around Planet Fox quite well. The rest of us can only hope to pick up a stray clue here and there -- say, to the permission structure for reporting on those potentially taboo developments, as in the Saturday evening** top story about Secretary Hegseth's escapades: