Theory time: Walking around with no legs

Should we be talking about media theory while watching a great power shoot itself repeatedly in the foot (pausing once or twice to reload) while stumbling toward something that might resemble the geopolitical status quo ante bellum, only worser? Well, yeah. So here's a theoretical proposition to toss around while enjoying the morning roundup from Fox News:

Media effects are downstream from media sociology

This is not, of course, meant to start a round of theoretical "mine's bigger" or suggest that one bag of theories has to precede another in all cases. It is to say that when we see a change in public attitude or understanding about mediated events, the odds are that it follows some interesting (and probably measurable) change in media practice. To flip things around and be more specific, a change in whether, where and how often people hear "walking around with no legs" might affect perceptions of the person who says it.

Now, that doesn't mean a lack of attitude change means a lack of media change. Pretty much every news site I look at has adopted a form of the "live updates" Fox is doing in the top position Saturday morning -- basically, liveblogging while wearing a trench coat and a press badge -- and there's no reason to think such a change in presentation form is going to change your attitude about coups, earthquakes, Missing Moms or anything else it's applied to.

Nor do attitudes have to change for a media effect to be present. Should the "live news" feed contain a story every few days whose subject-verb-object motive power comes from "CentCom releases 
photo," it's doing its job if the median Fox viewer's attitude remains  stable at "exterminate the brutes." A counterframe could also try to preempt attitude change; if CentCom (through Fox) is reassuring you that Navy food is perfectly awesome no matter what your cousin saw in USA Today, there's a photo for that too.

But setting aside all the caution against false positives, the media-practice-to-media-effect chain does suggest that when Fox starts quoting Donald Trump verbatim, at length, we should start to keep a careful eye on the parts of the Trump coalition where all the much-touted fractures might be expected.

"At length" doesn't mean "'War and Peace' but with an intermission." If your question has been "what will it take for these people to notice that their cult worships a barking loony?", the answer might be just a couple of sentences -- if the gatekeeping practices at Fox allow those sentences through on the regular. Even if you're rolling your eyes by now at Trumpian chestnuts "they have no leaders, but their leaders are really friendly now" or "walking around with no legs," imagine what the Fox user seeing them, in quotes, for the first time might think:

President Donald Trump said Iran "can't blackmail us" after the country announced they were reimposing restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday morning.

"We have very good conversations going on. It's working out very well," Trump said. "They got a little cute, as they have been doing for 47 years, and nobody ever took them on. We took them on. They have no Navy. They have no Air force. They have no leaders. They have no nothing. Actually, their leaders are ... it is regime change."

Despite Iran wanting to close the strait again, Trump said in the Oval Office that negotiations are "going actually along very well" and promised more information "by the end of the day." Trump also cited how oil tankers are now coming to U.S. ports to fuel up, including in Texas and Louisiana.

"We're taking a tough stand. They've killed a lot of people. A lot of our people have been killed. A lot of your fellow soldiers have been killed over the years by Iran," Trump said, citing how he ordered the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's elite Quds Force, in January 2020.

Trump described Soleimani as the "father of the roadside bomb."

"And when you see soldiers or others, but soldiers generally walking around with no legs, with no arms or face that's been smashed, that was Soleimani, it was Iran that did that," Trump said. "So we have a much different view on it than other presidents. They've gotten away with murder for 47 years. They're not getting away with it anymore."

And then imagine what it all might look like the next day, and every few days after that.

Important first-week-of-the-term caution here. If there's thing about media effects to have tattooed on your forehead, it's that one message does not change the world, whether it's Napalm Girl or an invasion from Mars. With that firmly in mind, I'm going to suggest that a testable hypothesis is within reach: regular exposure to verbatim Trump will lead to a decrease in support among Trump partisans. (I was taught that it's rude to hypothesize the null, but yes, this implies it would not lead to significant change among anti-Trump partisans.)

Opposing interpretations are welcome.