On lookin' into eyes and stuff

If you're fond of framing and propa- ganda and stuff, you're probably a regular visitor to the commentators at the bottom of the Fox News Web page. Predictably, O'Reilly, Hannity and Hume are all weighing in on the weekend's top discovery by the news side: Those craven, hate-spewing media all reported that Gen. Ricardo Sanchez slagged the entirety of the Iraq effort after mid-2003, but nobody reported his comments on how dreadful the media are!

That's a discussion for another time (the address and subsequent Q&A are online at C-SPAN). Today's real fun is Hannity's divergence into the heretical suggestion that when the general says "The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas," maybe he's talking about -- oh, parent organizations that are clearly aligned with political agendas. (A reporter from the hatemongers of Times Square was among those Sanchez singled out for good work, and a reporter for the Scaife paper in Pittsburgh asked Sanchez the hardest question of the day, but that's digressing.)

Hannity: Brent Bozell, show me where that Rupert Murdoch, my boss here at FOX and the owner of the FOX News Channel, how did he influence Hillary Clinton to vote to authorize that war? Or John Kerry or any of the Democratic senators? I'd like to know where that influence and where is there evidence of that?

... Bozell (addressing another librul comment by the other guest): OK. Stop right there. Stop right there. Give me an example of Rupert Murdoch influencing this war. I'm sick and tired of hearing liberals make these kind of statements. Give me an example.

You guys want to know how it works? OK. I'll try to spell it out. Flip back to the top and "Putin: Lay off my buddy," representing Fox's coverage of Putin's visit to Iran. The only suggestion that he and Ahmadinejad are "buddies" is -- well, the earlier Fox headline that said "buddy, buddy." In other words, you sort of just made it up. Nobody's claiming to look into anybody's eyes and see anybody's soul or anything like that.

Check out the rest of the coverage. Putin and Ahmadinejad are warning against third countries' using the Caspian littoral to launch interstate wars against Caspian littoral states. (I'm Tasered! Tasered! to find gambling going on here.) And Robert Gates is telling his audience that Iran "seems increasingly willing to act contrary to its own interests." (The nice thing about realism, as Condi Rice could have told him before she took the devil's sixpence, is that realists don't give a poop what Secretary Gates thinks Iran's interests are. They're interested in what Iran thinks Iran's interests are.)

Thing is, Fox's coverage of Iran isn't accidental, and it isn't a one-off. It looks pretty much the same week to week. Why is that important? Here's a theoretical proposition. Let's say there are two general ways of reporting about "security" issues:

1) As the sorts of challenges that governmental and societal structures are designed to cope with. Even at the extremes, they represent events that fall into known mechanisms.

2) As "existential" threats to the very fabric of nationhood or culture, requiring extraordinary measures for an unspecified period of time.*

We can think of them as "war on terror" stories and War On Terror® stories to make things easier. If you're the political leader who can make the case for (2), you get a say in saying what kind of measures and how quickly (or slowly) things ought to return to normal. Make sense so far?

The way Fox talks about Iran is similar to the way it talked about Iraq, and it's similar to the way other Murdoch products talk about Iran and Iraq (and immigration, to name another security issue). Those similarities are measurable and can be compared with what other news outlets do: Fox is increasingly War On Terror®, and grownup news organizations are increasingly "war on terror." Next question, does that make a difference? Two propositions:

1) People who don't see themselves as aligned very closely with the government will be inclined to listen less closely to reports that suggest that Mexico's northern border is the next front in the War On Terror®, or even to reports that suggest the country is involved in a War On Terror® rather than a "war on terror."

2) People who do see themselves as aligned with government are already more inclined to hand over their civil liberties. War On Terror® framing of a news event makes them even more willing to do so.

Murdoch doesn't have to "influence the war." He can influence opinion about national security and civil liberties, and he can influence attention to coverage of the war (if you stop paying attention at the eighth graf and the latest about Blackwater is in the 12th, too bad for you). At least, that's the implication here. Coming soon to some sort of forum somewhere.

*Credit where it's due: The concept of "securitization" that this project is based on was developed by Barry Buzan and colleagues, aka the Copenhagen School. The tests and stuff, and the link to news framing, I hope, are original.

War on birds!

Not content with his War On Christmas and Stealth Assault On The Second Amendment, the feckless Kenyan Muslim socialist is going after the weakest and most defenseless among us -- our sparrows!

At least, that's how the War on Birds is reaching the public agenda over at The Fox Nation ("for those opposed to intolerance, excessive government control of our lives, and attempts to monopolize opinion"). Its source is the Washington Free Beacon ("dedicated to uncovering the stories that the professional left hopes will never see the light of day"):

Bird enthusiasts are calling on the Obama administration to cease its devastating war on birds and reverse an obscure mining rule killing possibly a million or more birds a year.

The soul of the inverted pyramid, right? Broad summary in the lede, followed by support below? Meaning the next things we should learn are which "bird enthusiasts" are involved, how their call is expressed, and how the "war on birds" belongs to the Obama administration. Keep your eye on the pivot foot as we move through the next few grafs:
Read more »

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:

* And, ahem, the photo
** As of this writing, fallen from No. 1 to No. 28.

Is Fox News scared of girls?

What do you suppose is the second-most-important story on this last day of the year for the Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

Incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., pledged to voters she would be a far-left outsider who would push her party toward adopting “democratic socialist” policies, including universal health care and free college tuition. So far, she has kept her promise.

OK, fine, anybody could leave the "opinion" label off a rant from the Dearborn Institute. But you still might be wondering what propels some topics to the top of the agenda so often at (ahem) certain outlets. On the front page* yesterday, for example:

Or blaspheming the Gospel According to Fox as the lead story on Dec. 26:

Or Dec. 22, reprising her regular summertime role as "Dem darling":

Demonstrating that librul sense of entitlement (twice) on Dec. 20:

Committing that librul hypocrisy with big scary eyes on Dec. 19:

Coaxing her hapless followers to assault the Constitution on Dec. 13:

Striking the same pose to lead the War On Our Economy on Dec. 10:

Committing lese-majeste all over Trump Jr.  on Dec. 7:

Raising the spectre of first-year macroeconomics courses on Dec. 4:

Raising the spectre of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire on Dec. 3:

Offending Fox's sense of history on Dec. 1:

Offending Lindsey Graham's sense of history as the lead story on Nov. 26:

The "compares" stories are Fox at its most Foxlike: not lying about a specific set of facts, but bullshitting about the sort of story the facts are allowed to form. Here, for example, is the bit about the caravan** to which Graham "fires back":

“Asking to be considered a refugee & applying for status isn’t a crime. It wasn’t for Jewish families fleeing Germany. It wasn’t for targeted families fleeing Rwanda. It wasn’t for communities fleeing war-torn Syria. And it isn’t for those fleeing violence in Central America,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted late Sunday.

... "I recommend she take a tour of the Holocaust Museum in DC. Might help her better understand the differences between the Holocaust and the caravan in Tijuana," Graham tweeted.

Ocasio-Cortez seems to be talking about the policies surrounding refugee status, not the conditions any particular group might have been fleeing, so it's hard to see why she needs a tour of the Holocaust Museum any more than Lindsey Graham does.*** But angry old men do have a habit of bringing out the history stick when the young and the uppity need to be brought back into line. It's fine for Ronald Reagan to boast of setting out to change a country, but let the usurping Kenyan test-drive that idea and see what happens.

I think that's part of the reason for Fox's six-month-long panic over this particular 0.23% of the next House of Representatives. It's always possible that Ocasio-Cortez used to beat Fox up on the playground and steal its lunch money, but the real reason seems less fanciful: Fox is scared of girls. Actually, Fox is scared of lots of people who don't look like Tucker Carlson, especially when they articulate original ideas, demonstrate regular flashes of wit, and bump right back if you bump them while they're going to the basket. But mostly, Fox is scared of girls.

* Y'all didn't flop the picture just to get her looking in the right direction, did you?
** Even by Fox standards, the homepage hed is pretty stupid. On the story itself, the hed is "Ocasio-Cortez compares members of migrant caravan to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany."
*** If they'd like to have a nice talk about refugee policy in paranoid times, here's a photo of a refugee family being separated, next to a story about an autocratic leader who wants to purge some officers and says his country won't be pushed around anymore (Washington Post, 1A, June 5, 1939):

Whatever you do, don't mention the ...

Who had "oh, around 1 p.m. Eastern US on March 22" in the pool on how long it might take for President Brainspurs' unprovoked war of choice to fall out of the top 10 at the Fox homepage? Help yourself to another big orange while we review the media agenda that Fox is transferring to the public:

Our top story: "Far-left activist groups and personalities flocked to Havana, Cuba, this week in an effort to protest the economic sanctions imposed on the country by President Donald Trump's administration." That's one way of getting around the question of whether a blockade amounts to an act of war (hint: yeah). Hypocrisy, as you might imagine, is not a normally distributed phenomenon at Fox.

No. 2: Former DHS official goes on "Fox & Friends Weekend" to point out that the next big terror threat is posed by taking our eye off the ball: "It’s just human nature that you're going to be worried about where that next paycheck is cut."

No. 3: OK, technically, the "live updates" feature is a frequently updated check-in on the latest in war news, but here, it's just reminding us how smart and funny the boss is. The story is built around a Trump post on Truth Social, sharing a clip from the premiere of "Saturday Night Live UK." (USA Today says he clipped out the part of the skit in which Starmer says "I know how badly you want to start World War III, and that's great.") 

No. 4: What could scare Fox News into writing favorably about a tenants union? A picture of Barack Obama!* Here, the local Fox station covers a meeting "earlier this month." 

No. 5: Online randos post videos complaining about what other people do, and hospitality experts agree that it happens sometimes.

No. 6: Republican candidate has the answer to California's redistricting plan: Seize the ballots and count them until we like the result. Sheriff Chad is generally running just behind a Fox contributor and former host in California's open primary, but Fox seems fairly fond of him; he was among the top 10 stories every few months in 2024-25 and was the lead story in June 2024 when he released a video endorsing Trump

No. 7: No need to may attention to Trump's Mueller comments when you can run a picture of Rachel Maddow, right? Active blasting at Fox is directional -- Maddow is allowed to blast in the active voice, but only to her left. Here's a bit of the blast in context: "That is because once his investigation and his report were concluded, he was just wildly outmaneuvered by a really serpentine attorney general named Bill Barr, who played really dirty pool when it came to the handling and release of the information from Mueller’s investigation."

No. 8: The only thing better than a celebrity story is a "California Leavin'" celebrity story: Hollywood celebrities pull up stakes and find life better on the farm, in the South, in the mountains, wherever. The actual hed "California Leaving" (or "Leavin'") shows up 10 times across the dataset, along with three cases of "California Fleeing" and assorted variants like California Scheming, Stealing and Screaming. 

No. 9: It's in Detroit, so you can probably write the comments yourself. (This is pegged to a Tuesday announcement, if you've been wondering about the value of time in the Fox equation.)

No. 10: Tom Brady is toward the virtuous end of the villains-victims-virtuous spectrum that many athletes and celebrities fall on. He's among the top stories 42 times in 2022 and 2023. Here, if only he was flaunting bikini snaps in an Instagram post, he'd be proving that age is just a number.

Without the distraction of a kinetic war, the top of the homepage is still a reliable guide to the dangers and delights of Planet Fox. Leftists are a menace everywhere, Trump sees the problems before we do, freeloaders, Obama, and (hem) Detroiters (kaff) are always ready to take advantage of hardworking Americans, and liberals eat their own. Fortunately, there are always a few celebrities and athletes who model the values that made America great. Quite a place, that Planet Fox.

* If only he'd een wearing a tan suit.

 

Planet Fox declares war!

Do you get the idea that a particular topic is drifting toward the top of what we call the "news agenda" over at a certain network known worldwide for its fairness and balancehood?

Right, that's now three days out of the past seven (the image at top right is from this afternoon, with Tuesday and Monday images below it) that Fox's victimization at the hands of the power-hungry Muslim-Marxist cabal at the White House has been at the top of the front page. What seems to be happening is that assorted administration functionaries are pointing out in public that Fox-flavored news is ... well, let's let them explain it themselves:

"A lot of their news programming, it's really not news. It's pushing a point of view," senior adviser David Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week. (Well, yeah.)

"The way we -- the president looks at it and we look at it, is, it is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel added on CNN's "State of the Union." (A little off target, but ... yeah.)

The open assault on Fox News began last weekend when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn accused the network of being a "wing of the Republican Party."

"What I think is fair to say about Fox -- and certainly it's the way we view it -- is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party," Dunn said on CNN. "They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is." (A bit overkind to CNN, but ... she has a point.)

Here's how Fox defended itself last week:

Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente, who likens the channel to a newspaper with separate sections on straight news and commentary, suggested White House officials were intentionally conflating opinion show hosts like Glenn Beck with news reporters like Major Garrett.

"It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming," Clemente said.

Today it managed to find an outside source -- the repellent toad Karl Rove -- to say the same thing:

Former Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove said Fox News' commentators have been tough on Obama but the White House appears to be confusing the news and opinion that appears on the network.

"They're conflating the news side and the opinion side in order to -- in order to attack a media outlet. Again, it's undignified for the president of the United States to be doing" Rove said on "Fox News Sunday." He added that it is the administration's practice to attack its critics full-throttle.

"I think this White House is dominated by Chicago- style politics, so if you don't like the questions that are being asked by Major Garrett or Wendell Goler or Chris Wallace, then you try and demonize Fox News," he said.

Nice bank shot: note how he managed to get the Chicago thing in as well? But the important thing is that Rove and the Fox official are both playing sleight-of-hand in the same direction. The problem with Fox News isn't the opinion side; the news side itself is the party organ. Fox isn't just a CNN or Times with a different tone on the editorial page. It's a whole different creature. It does stuff you just don't see real news doing anymore.

Fox doesn't necessarily make stuff up (at least, not often). Fox is more like a crooked cop. It knows the rules; it just has a very well-developed sense of when to look the other way. If the Mail or the Torygraph happens to invent a story that makes the villain of the day look bad, who's going to blame Fox if it doesn't ask the sort of questions that might occur to an inquisitive three-year-old before running the thing as "reports say"?

Nor is Fox uniquely inept with polling data. The Times often does a sloppy job with survey results, partly because the Times doesn't have a very clear grasp of how confidence levels work and partly because it has trouble telling debate from reporting. Both shortcomings are widespread in journalism, and -- as at the Times -- they tend to result in evenly distributed ineptitude. Some days one party benefits from the clueless hed; other days, it's the other guys. At Fox, the errors all seem to run in one direction. After a while, one starts to wonder why.

It's worth remembering, in the course of all this, that powerful, frenetic, shameless, hard-right media outfits aren't exactly new in the U.S. media-politics spectrum. If you keep up with stuff like how your news organizations perform in conflicts and crises (and who doesn't?),* you might be reminded of, oh, a time when fascism actually was on the march and one political party was actually trying to do something about it. Let's close with a sermon from Cissy Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald (and, needless to say, cousin of Chicago's Bertie McCormick), as reported by David Brinkley in his very enjoyable "Washington Goes to War." She's talking about Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell

and other Quislings [who] manage to get paid big money for their treachery. ... This filthy work of plotting, planning, sneaking, lying, spying, cheating, stealing, smearing in the mere HOPE of one day overthrowing our American form of government.

... Yes, they're nutty, all right, these 'liberals' -- for they can't see further ahead than the first frenzied days of plunder, murder, fire, rape and prancing about with pale, fresh-cut human heads on bloody pikes.

Almost makes Glenn Beck sound like a freaking grownup, doesn't it?

* Some major research universities offer special-topics courses in this very subject! Be sure to ask for it by name.

Today in history: War on Fox, 1942-style

What did the War on Fox look like on this day in 1942? Pretty much like this.

Back in those days, kiddies, the War on Fox pitted the World's Greatest Newspaper (and its cousins in New York and Washington) against the reckless, decadent Europe-loving commie in the White House. The artist is Carey Orr (he's been featured here before), and the occasion is the convening of a grand jury to determine whether the Chicago Tribune should be indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Two months earlier, on the Sunday after the epic U.S. victory at Midway, the Tribune had committed a slight (ahem) indiscretion: a front-page story strongly suggesting that the good guys won because they knew in advance what the bad guys were up to. That being largely true, the story was a stunningly dumb idea.

The Trib thought it had been cooperative and appropriately penitent in the wake of the story. The Navy wanted the spotlight to go away, but frequent Tribune targets like Walter Winchell kept plugging it back in. Under heavy pressure from the White House, the grand jury investigation went ahead. And the Trib fired back at the "Knox-Biddle Smear."

If you're scoring along at home, the guy on the left, pointing at the target, is Frank Knox, FDR's Navy secretary (not coincidentally, publisher of Chicago's largest evening paper, the Daily News; the hed to the left of the cartoon, not shown in this view, proclaims that he's using his position to boost his newspaper). Francis Biddle, the attorney general, is hauling ammunition. At right on the cartoon front page is Stanley Johnston, the reporter whose work set the story in motion. Next to him is Pat Maloney,* the Trib's managing editor, who wrote the hed and compounded the damage by adding bogus attribution -- "reliable sources in the naval intelligence" -- to the story. The heds are from the Trib's first-day coverage (the news broke on Friday, and "Knox uses Navy post to favor own paper" was Monday's take on the story.

Beats Photoshop, doesn't it?

* Yeah, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" guy.

Today at Fox: War is over (if you want it)

If you're the agenda-setting type, you can get a good idea of the "media agenda" from the foxnews.com homepage, captured at 12:06 p.m. Eastern today, 16th inst, in this year of our Lord the two thousand nineteenth: Bullying obstructionist Democrats; Hannity, scourge of false prophets; Democrats hate the Constitution; scary video is scary;* and celebrities deny stuff from social media. No surprises if you keep up with the Fox agenda in general, right?

Unless you look at what the big papers were leading with around 11:45 a.m.:

You'd almost think they had been looking at broadcast organizations' websites an hour before that (that's the BBC on the right):

So, to recap: As of 1 p.m.,** there was no sign on the Fox homepage of an ISIS attack in Syria that killed American troops (plural), which from the BBC's timestamp appears to have been news since sometime before 10:30 a.m. It's not among the top 5 stories, and it's not among the shark sightings, lizard sightings, Royal Family outrages, episodic deaths and other items that make up the next 14 stories. 

Should we conclude that Fox has declared victory in the Global War on Terror and gone home? Probably not. It does seem fair to hypothesize that Fox no longer thinks a terrorist attack that kills American service personnel is a reflection on the president. It's not out of line to speculate that Fox is waiting for the White House to tell it whether it's OK to talk about terrorists who aren't lurking at the Mexican border. And it appears especially clear that Fox's agenda of existential threats is too crowded by immigration and lese-majeste to include transnational substate political violence.

* In that the video is from around 5 p.m. "last week," one may fairly wonder what this sentence is doing on the following Wednesday: "It wasn’t immediately clear whether the pedestrians were hurt or what caused the crash." If you'd like to conclude that Fox would rather you be scared than informed, that seems a fair conclusion.
** Update: At 2:15 p.m., still nothing among the top several dozen stories, though if you scroll down past "world" and "family" and "entertainment" until you reach "what to watch," there's this: "Rep. Lee Zeldin says deadly attack on US troops will intensify arguments to both stay and leave Syria." We are not impressed.
    Update II: As of 3:02, a Fox story posted "20 mins ago" begins thus:
    The horrifying moment in which a deadly suicide bomb exploded on a street in Syria on Wednesday was captured in a video that ISIS-sympathetic accounts then shared on Facebook.
   Two different accounts posted what appears to be the same video showing the bombing in Majib, which reportedly killed 16 people — including a number of U.S. service members. 
    This is the ninth of the also-ran stories that follow the top 5. It follows standard Fox fare like "McPhee wears wedding dress during fitting with stepdaughter"; "Broke teen who sold kidney for iPhone now bedridden for life";
"New footage shows Dems at swanky 'cocktail reception' in Puerto Rico amid government shutdown"; "‘SMILF’ creator opens up on misconduct allegations"; and "Military couple's surprise reunion in Texas caught on camera"

Ministry of Truth

A quick scissors-and-paste job from Fox News, and the Big Soviet Encyclopedia is more or less in order. That means the contest mentioned below is now closed, though readers are still welcome to check in with comments and observations.

Brief summary: A quick check of news sites this morning (Central Standard Time, if you're wondering) found that Fox had a global warming story in the No. 3 position on its opening page. Not just any global warming story, but one that (without attribution) blamed the phenomenon for sinking an inhabited island. Half an hour later, the offending tale was gone -- not just from the front, but apparently excised altogether (a search for the island's name on Fox finds no hits, and a search for "inhabited island" nets one tale about Vieques).

Is Fox going through the overnights and cleaning up everything it can't affirm on its own? Hmm. The global warming story was a straight link to a piece from the Independent, but the lede is still a rewrite from this morning's Observer about a purported terrorist plot to attack the Channel Tunnel (it has a Fox credit at the top and a staff shirttail, but if the Fox staffer added anything that isn't in the original, I can't find it). The No. 2 tale is now an AP piece about Iran. At No. 3 is Donald Trump's flag lawsuit, also from the AP. So what's up?

One, it's a holiday weekend. Fox's web operation always feels a bit short-staffed anyway, and the copyediting is careless even by Internet standards (Fox can't even be consistent with its signature tweaks, like capitalizing "War on Terror" and changing "suicide bomber" to "homicide bomber"). Two, Fox is more than just the armed propaganda wing of the Bush administration. It's also a geek channel -- "geek" as in "bites the heads off live chickens," not as in "computer programmer." Fox doesn't love car chases because they fit the party line; it loves car chases because it's an old-fashioned populist tabloid at heart.

Three, "news" consists of two channels. One is a stream of data (usually quite accurate, sometimes utterly fictional). The second carries a series of calibrating signals about The Way The World Ought To Work. That's as true of any news organization as it is of Fox; it's why CNN's front page has a video story up today called "Christmas In America: We All Join In." Somebody at Fox (pulling a holiday weekend lobster trick; guess the seniority level) must have mistaken the Lost Island for a straight-up geek tale and overlooked the flashing red light on the Party Line. Fox World doesn't have global warming. Oops.

"No, Comrade Editor, there is no heat on the train to the gulag. Perhaps your precious global warming will come in handy now! HAHAHAHA!"

[UPDATE: As of 11:25a, the story's back as a six-graf rewrite (with attribution and Fox credit), downpage. Let's see how long this one lasts.]

Best of the weekend, you say?

Well, that's what the N&O says, and the N&O wouldn't lie, would it?

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's decision to hire nine Ebonics translators for the Southeast region briefly reignited a 40-year debate over whether African-American speech constitutes a separate language.

Oh.

Look. Here's a suggestion for the N&O and the rest of the purportedly liberal media who ran this drivel.* Don't try to score points by stoking the outrage-meter Fox style. Fox isn't going to return the favor by acting like a grownup medium. Just don't bother. (The lede's patently false, by the way -- the "decision" did no such thing as what's attributed to it -- but we'll get back to that in a moment.)

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Today in constructivism

Common cold cured! Fractious Near East at peace! And our second-most-important story of the day at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network is ... can we zoom in on the lower left there? That's better:

A panel at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism comparing the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements was stacked with liberal journalists who offered one-sided conclusions, according to one alumnus who attended the event.

Panelists at the event, which was held on Oct. 1 in the prestigious school’s Pulitzer Hall, made “little attempt to hide their sympathies” to the Occupy movement, author Harry Stein wrote in City Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Or, to take another whack at the hed: Guy in Audience Still Whining About Something Panel Discussion 10 Days Ago Wasn't About. (The announced topic of the event, after all, was coverage of social movements, not "comparing" two movements.) Given the throngs that normally pitch tents ahead of time for panel discussions on Monday nights at journalism schools, you can be forgiven for marveling at this one's rise to the top of the national news agenda.

To its credit, Fox does produce a candidate for no-comment of the year, from the panel's moderator, Todd Gitlin:*

“You have nothing to do with news,” Gitlin said. “And you’re wasting my time.”

He's half right. His time was being wasted, but other than that, the story's a pretty sharp illustration of how much Fox really does have to do with news. Columbia may be "no longer Joseph Pulitzer's school," to borrow the whiner's title, but Fox went to the Charles F. Kane school of journalism, and that's alive and well.

Journalism tends to have a pragmatic and fairly scornful reaction to ideas like constructivism. We deal with the real world, after all, and we deal with it quickly, accurately, and without fear or favor, and that's all ye need to know. The idea that news is a constructed commodity that presents socially appropriate conclusions about constructed realities -- often quite well, and often at some physical and social risk to the people doing the work -- doesn't draw a lot of water. But it's the way Fox manages to sneak onto the track and look, at a casual glance, a lot like real journalism.


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Making stuff up at Fox

Ready for another lesson in how voters learned about the 2024 presidential campaign? We'll start with the No. 5 story on the Fox News homepage, around 8:30 a.m. Oct. 26.

First, a little gaffe context. This is Fox's 19th unique headline of 2024* using "gaffe." Of those, 12 gaffes belong to Biden, two to Tim Walz, and one each to Chuck Schumer (bad grilling technique in a social media post), Bill Clinton (something something border something crime), the Pentagon (too DEI for comfort), "Pittsburgh sandwich shop" (being mean to JD Vance) and Donald Trump (mentioned by Nikki Haley in a Republican debate after he had "seemed to confuse" her with Nancy Pelosi). Gaffing, you may fairly infer, is distinctly directional at Fox.

Now, was this actually a gaffe, and if so, what kind? We can (literally) go to the videotape on that, but first, let's enjoy the Fox text:

President Biden sparked confusion during a mumbling saga, remarking that there was ‘nothing wrong’ with him as he discussed Sen. Mark Kelly's wife in the past tense.

"I'm Joe Biden, I'm Jill Biden's husband. And God, thank you for the introduction to the Gila Indian River community here… the Gila… nothing wrong with me. The Gila River Indian community for welcoming me today," he said while visiting the Indian Reserve on Friday.

One lie is evident from the text: the "nothing wrong with me" bit has nothing to do with Gabby Giffords. You can find another lie from the video (at the one posted by the White House, it's around the 19:00 mark). The person he's addressing isn't "God," but "Gov" -- as in Stephen Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community, who had just introduced him (and praised Jill Biden in the process, if you're wondering how she got into the quote). You'll also note a beat for reaction after the "Jill Biden's husband" line.

The big thing you'll probably notice is what "nothing wrong with me" is doing, which is speech repair. When you get a words couple out order of, as Biden did, you might or might not notice. If you do notice, you can either sail blithely on or fix it. Following Levell and Cutler (1983), you can cut down on the audience's confusion a bit by drawing attention to the repair. Note the beat after "nothing wrong with me"; the laughs suggest that the audience picked up on the repair correctly. But back to our story:

"You know, I say this with all sincerity, this, to me, is the most consequential thing I've ever had the opportunity to do in my whole career as President of the United States," he said. "It's an honor, a genuine honor, to be in this special place on this special day."

Another lie. Biden -- news flash -- mumbles a lot, but even if you're dickish enough to transcribe it as "wunnada" instead of "one of the," there's unquestionably more going on between "is" and "most consequential" than Fox indicates. And if you need another cue, "things" is clearly plural.

Those are also in the subtitles. If Fox wants to assert its journalistic independence by not trusting the White House transcription, that's fine, but -- OK, let's just say, leaving-your-business-card-at-the-crime-scene-wise, that Fox is not the sort of people you want on your side in a sophisticated fraud spree. But on to the substance of the gaffe:

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Actually, no. Not really.

Orcs are a mockery of elves, trolls are a mockery of Ents, and Fox ... oh, let's just have a brief look at the top news story from this afternoon:

The president's top counterterrorism adviser on Wednesday called jihad a "legitimate tenet of Islam," arguing that the term "jihadists" should not be used to describe America's enemies.

Part foot fake, part red herring. Here's the official version of what was actually said:

Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenant* of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.

If you got to the undergraduate-level class where you learned stuff like the assorted meanings of "jihad," you probably also passed through the stage in eighth grade or whenever at which you can puzzle out the implications of "I won't call you an X, because X is good and you're no good." He isn't saying that blowing civilians up is legitimate; he's saying the new policy isn't going to call it "jihad," precisely because it isn't legitimate.

During a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of "political, economic and social forces," but said that those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in "religious terms."

That's close enough to random journalistic word salad -- and the "but" gives it a particularly disoriented air of non sequitur -- that you can't conclusively call it a lie, but it's tempting. Here's the relevant quote:

The president’s national security strategy also outlines how we will strengthen other tools of American power which will help us meet many challenges. This includes addressing the political, economic and social forces that can make some people fall victim to the cancer of violent extremism.

In other words (oh, stop the press), people might be more likely to fall victim to the arguments of political violence when those arguments are enabled by political, economic or social conditions. That's almost as profound as noting that water goes downhill -- though understanding that water goes downhill is a pretty good first step if you want to figure out what it's going to do next.

He repeated the administration argument that the enemy is not "terrorism," because terrorism is a "tactic," and not terror, because terror is a "state of mind" -- though Brennan's title, deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, includes the word "terrorism" in it. But then Brennan said that the word "jihad" should not be applied either.

Which makes sense if you're looking for more examples of the Administration That's Scared To Say the T-Word. Except for this: The United States of America is at war. We are at war against al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates.

So instead of a War on Terror, we have a War on Terrorists? Which creates a problem for the Fox audience exactly how?

There's not a lot surprising about Brennan's remarks. Compared with his comments in the same setting last year, you can make a case that there's not much new on the "I know jihad, senator, and you're no jihad" front:

Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against "jihadists." Describing terrorists in this way—using a legitimate term, "jihad," meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal—risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.

Indeed, you can start to wonder if the chorus of people who think this administration is incapable of saying the word "terrorist" are deeply dishonest or just deeply illiterate. Brennan certainly isn't shy about pushing the sorts of buttons that Fox likes to push:

That is because "terrorism" is but a tactic—a means to an end, which in al Qaeda’s case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate.

Long story short, there's nothing of substance for Fox to complain about. But if you look at the last two grafs of the story, you get an idea of the context in which you're supposed to understand it.

The comment comes after Brennan, in a February speech in which he described his respect for the tolerance and devotion of Middle Eastern nations, referred to Jerusalem on first reference by its Arabic name, Al-Quds.

"In all my travels the city I have come to love most is al-Quds, Jerusalem, where three great faiths come together," Brennan said at an event co-sponsored by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Islamic Center at New York University and the Islamic Law Students Association at NYU.

Yeah, "after" by three months. But Arabic --oh, hell, how often do we have to say this? -- is a language, not a religion or a political affiliation. "Al-Quds" is what servis drivers say when they're calling out their destination. It's about as scary as "Paree." Sometimes, people speaking in public will toss in a few Berliners words in a language that might strike a different chord with the audience. If it bothers you that much, stay home.**

Fox looks a lot like journalism sometimes, but don't be misled. As a wiser journalist once said, if I had a yaller dog didn't have any more sense than Fox does, I'd give it pizen.

* Ahem. Give Fox points for correcting this one.
** More kefta for the rest of us.

Four legs good, two legs better

Stop press! We're leading with Hannity's exclusive:

Damning emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman did not come from Russian hackers and the claim is being made to "delegitimize" Donald Trump, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Fox News' Sean Hannity in an exclusive interview.

Hannity sat down with Assange in London's Ecuadorian embassy, where the Australian native has been holed up for five years battling extradition to Sweden on unrelated charges. Part I of the interview is set to air Tuesday night at 10 p.m. on Fox News Channel's "Hannity." 

That'll show the hysterical liberal media, huh?

In excerpts released prior to airing, Assange is adamant that the hacked emails his organization released of Clinton official John Podesta did not come from Russia, as the Obama administration has claimed.

“We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” Assange said. 

Which, you have to admit, takes some of the exclusive out of "exclusive." Here's Fox from Nov. 3:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange insisted that the thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton, her State Department staff, close allies and the Democratic Party that the website has published didn’t come from the Russian government.

... “The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,” Assange said. “Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”

He does seem to be pretty consistent about it -- the Russian government wasn't the source. Whether they came from Russia or not seems to be a different question, but regardless, it's enough for Hannity:

Hannity told Fox News' Bill Hemmer "I believe everything (Assange) said," and praised the Internet activist for his commitment to government transparency. 

That has to be a relief, considering ... what's that, Fox News national security analyst (and Trump appointee) K.T. McFarland?

On Monday, Attorney General Holder proudly announced the U.S. government had shut down websites that sold pirated luxury goods or shared videos and songs. But shutting down a website that offers pirated secret government documents and damages United States' security? Not a chance.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange isn’t some well-meaning, anti-war protestor leaking documents in hopes of ending an unpopular war. He’s waging cyberwar on the United States and the global world order.

Mr. Assange and his fellow hackers are terrorists and should be prosecuted as such.

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Lying: Lessons from the masters

Here's a superlative example of the propa- gandist's art. At a casual read, you'll get -- well, exactly the impression you're supposed to get: The callow naif who is poised to represent the Party of Chardonnay and Surrender Democrats is surrounded by people even flakier than he is, so sign the kids up for those Farsi lessons now.

The story itself, of course, is almost a complete fabrication. The fun part is the "almost" -- seeing, in this case, what an impressive superstructure of lies the good folks at Fox can build out of a few kernels of empirical reality. That's the essential skill of the propagandist, so let's have a bit of a look at who said what.

Here's Fox, starting at midmorning with the reefer you see at lower right, effectively the No. 3 story on the Fox home page. The story was promoted in the afternoon to the dominant visual element on the page (upper right), suggesting that it's been vetted a bit up the food chain and endorsed for stronger play. And the story it refers to?

Obama adviser: Pooh Bear, Luke Skywalker hold lessons for foreign policy
Foreign policy architects could benefit from studying Winnie the Pooh and Star Wars, according to a Barack Obama adviser who is set to attend a meeting of the Democratic candidate’s national security work group Wednesday.

Not the same assertion as the frontpage hed. For "Obama's Pooh Bear policy" to hold up, two things have to be true: There has to be a Pooh policy, and it has to be Obama's. But why quibble about informal logical fallacies when Our Way of Life is at stake?
Richard Danzig, former Navy secretary under President Clinton, drew several creative and unusual analogies to explain the challenges America faces overseas during a foreign policy conference in Washington, D.C., last week, according to an article in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

Fox gains a bit of standoff distance with that. From here, it's going to be about what somebody else's report says, not what Fox is claiming on its own. Let's stop in at the Torygraph and see if we can track down the pertinent grain of truth:

Barack Obama aide: Why Winnie the Pooh should shape US foreign policy
Winnie the Pooh, Luke Skywalker and British football hooligans could shape the foreign policy of Barack Obama if he becomes US President, according to a key adviser.

The attribution is key. Under the rules, it means that this is what the "key adviser"* said, not what the reporter infers from what he thinks the adviser might have meant. Quite simply, it's a lie -- you can find a podcast here, but you aren't going to find the adviser making those assertions, because the reporter made them up.

Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.

The relative clause is ambiguous. From the text, you can't tell if the person shortening the Pooh lesson to "if it is causing you too much pain, try something else" is the reporter or the speaker. In the recording, the speaker offers no such summary. But by the time the story gets to Fox, any kernel of fact has fallen away, leaving only the context that the Torygraph invented:

In arguing that the country should back off a policy that causes too much pain, Danzig said, “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”

Wrong on two counts. First, the comment doesn't come in context of any such argument (because, again, the speaker presents no such argument). And second -- oh, hell, I suppose we have to bring it up sometime. Danzig is making sort of what we call a "joke," which "adults" or other people with what we call a "sense of humor" understand as a form of figurative speech.

Specifically, he's acknowledging the speaker who introduced him by referring to two of the latter's great interests: sports (hence the Berra quote that precedes the Pooh one) and his (the introducer's) children. Thus the idea that Winnie the Pooh is a foundational security text is -- you hate to even bring this up, given that the British press used to have a great reputation for wit, but he didn't really mean it!! And anyone who would claim (with what appears to be a straight face) that he did is either a liar of breathtaking scope or someone so bleeding stupid he shouldn't be allowed to tie his own shoes without close adult supervision.**

There is a serious point behind the Pooh quote, which the Torygraph at least provides, rather than paraphrasing:

Mr Danzig spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children’s classic, which says: “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.”

So, like, I mean, the wisdom of the bear isn't "stop doing painful stuff," it's, like ... "consider alternate courses of action"? Heavy!

Mr Obama’s approach will be popular in Europe, where President George W. Bush has spent the week on a farewell tour, arriving in Britain yesterday for meetings with the Queen and Gordon Brown.

Which implies that what we're talking about is "Mr Obama's approach," rather than the observations of a policy analyst -- much as Fox does with the "Obama's Pooh Bear policy" hed. Alas, as the introduction makes clear, Danzig wasn't speaking in his role as Obama adviser. The Torygraph keeps its pivot foot down; Fox is the one that's cheating here.

Fox is also the lone fabricator on the centerpiece, "Adviser also cites 'Star Wars' at foreign policy conference." Danzig -- is it going to get too dull in here if we repeat this? -- does nothing of the sort. He's quoting an actual terrorist talking about the actual use of nerve gas in an actual terrorist attack, and he's doing so in the context of suggesting some general knowledge about small-group terrorism that could be useful for the future. The result isn't earth-shattering psychological insight (unless, like Fox, you think terrorism was invented sometime late in the afternoon of Sept. 10, 2001), but it is the sort of pragmatic wisdom you gain from actually doing the fieldwork. If David Petraeus made the same observations about terrorist psychology, Fox would be licking between his toes in sheer delight.

No doubt you'll have more fun with the Fox and Torygraph tales on your own than we have time or space for here. And if you do, it's worth bearing in mind that almost all news organizations, at some point, play fast and loose with contextualizing; that's the core of the many legitimate complaints about the popular reporting of science. Fox is unusual because it lies so deliberately, so casually, and so consistently in the service of its political masters.

That's particularly dismaying today, in that actual journalists are losing jobs (if you are reading this at or near a McClatchy paper, the house has just bought you a virtual beer) while lying hackery of the Fox brand is starting to seem like its own reward. It may be that we can't do much about that particular injustice except point it out. If that's the case, let's at least point it out loudly and regularly.

* Unlike Fox, the Torygraph appears to have some subs who can actually read their own stylebook. It doesn't make up for fundamental dishonesty on the part of the reporting staff, but it's better than nothing.
** By which I mean to leave open the possibility that "Tim Shipman in Washington" didn't write the myriad lies that the Torygraph is running under his byline, which is by no means impossible. Tim, if your desk is making things up and putting your name on them, now is your chance to let us know.