Here's the headline. Now go find some sources

What does it take to score a piece of news as a made-up story? Here's a Foxalicious example (No. 5 on the homepage in the day's first screen capture) to help tease things out.

First point: A made-up story is not the same thing as a made-up event, and made-up events are rare. When an expert tells you that a "previously missed detail" proves that a Nevada family saw space aliens in their backyard, or that the aliens were using a cloaking device, or that they've been trying to stave the pesky humans off for years, you have a set of real events -- A said B, A said C, and so dforth -- to document. The relationship of those events to the empirical world might be a little shaky, but roll the tape -- here's the guy who can tell you how an alien cloaking device works. 

The difference between camera-shy space beings in Nevada and Americans in liberal cities isn't the event, or the speaking of the event; it's the story that the events are drawn into. The promise of this Fox presentation, with its illustration and quote, is that we know something today that we didn't know yesterday. What's new today is something about public opinion, and we can index it by what Americans say about which candidate (do you even have to ask "which office?")  they favor to solve a border crisis. How might that be borne out in the text?

Voters in Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta were split on whether they believe immigration is a major issue in the United States, but overwhelmingly favored one candidate when it comes to grappling with challenges related to border security.

"This just can’t be open border. It’s not possible," a Chicago-area voter named Pablo told Fox News Digital.

Hmm. Go on -- perhaps to some overwhelming support.

Pablo, whose parents immigrated legally from South America in the 1960s, said the current immigration policies under the Biden administration are "not sustainable."

OK. And?

... Several voters suggested that the high concentration of illegal immigrants in communities across the United States would likely put a strain on American citizens.

"If there’s too many immigrants that come illegally, it will cause an issue for the working class in the country," Kevin, a student at Georgia Tech, told Fox News Digital.

However, some voters refuted the idea that immigration is a significant issue.

"I think immigration is necessary," Eric, a Southside Chicago native, said. "It gives people opportunity. It expands the economy—brings more money in. I think it’s necessary. I feel like that’s the foundation of America."

Still not seeing the overwhelming favorite. Wait! Here it is:

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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.

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How to lie without statistics

How close can the Fair 'n' Balanced Network come to telling an out-and-out lie without moving the pivot foot? Let's look over the claims in Friday morning's top headline and how they're (ahem) supported in the story.

For the homepage headline to be true, we'd need to have some voters and a liberal stronghold, and more than one voter has to be saying that the stronghold is leaning toward Trump. (OK, we'll spot you the "towards," but we issued the stylebooks for a reason). 

Fox News Digital spoke with Detroit, Michigan, residents about the political pulse in the city as Election Day nears in the crucial swing state.

(Well, you can see how FOX TALKS TO HUMANS might not make for a compelling headline. But go on.)

"It got to be Trump for the whole city," Keandre, an east-side Detroit resident, told Fox News Digital. "They are all voting Trump."

Guess that settles it. (Voter turnout in the 2021 Detroit mayoral election was around 18%, if you're wondering how likely it is that a "resident" is also a "voter.") But perhaps we can hear from a few more of the faithful?

One resident of St. Clair Shores in Macomb County said that he thinks the support for former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is split.

"People on both sides. It’s going to be a close one," Tom said.

Trump got a bit over 53% of the vote in Macomb County (the next one over from Wayne) in 2024, if you're scoring along at home.

Two other Detroit natives who spoke to Fox News Digital supported Harris.

"All my friends that are Trumpers only think about themselves and we have to think about the world," Ron said. 

"I really like Kamala Harris because she’s got a lot more compassion. It’s not about yourself. It’s about everybody," he explained further.

"I think it's time for history to be made," Mandela said.

"I just think that it’s going to be a woman president," he added.

Sounds like Harris 2, Trump 1 so far, with Tom left on base. (How Detroit natives fit into the mix isn't explained; the one in the next room is voting with fellow cat moms on the block, but we're 2.5 miles and a long outfield throw north of Detroit.) 

... Michigan residents also weighed in on which presidential candidate they think would be a stronger leader.

Mandela admitted he thought it was Trump despite his support for Harris.

"I think Trump is [stronger] because I think that Trump is not going to let anybody run over us," he said.

When asked who was the stronger leader, Keandre said it was Harris.

In case you were at your grandmothers' funerals on the day your methods class covered question design, that's not at all the same question as "who would you vote for?" So it's interesting that these two go in opposite directions, but not necessarily meaningful. Likewise the subsequent observations about leadership from Jeff (another Detroit native) and Adrian (do we have to remind you guys again that Macomb County is still not in Detroit?)

Summary: We can't say for sure that "voters" is a lie, because there's no indication of whether we talked to them. Detroit does qualify as a "liberal stronghold," though -- OK, let's just count "native" and "resident" as the same thing -- a third of our sample comes from a county that, if you've heard of it before, you've probably heard of as the original home of Reagan Democrats. One of the Detroiters says "they are all voting Trump"; two others make that sound more than a trace optimistic. Did the pivot foot move?

The month is young, and -- it's only Friday -- this probably won't even end up the biggest lie Fox tells this week. It's a reminder, though, that Fox isn't really  interested in telling you about public opinion on its own. It's interested in showing you that the good guys are winning (or the bad guys or losing). If you're waiting for the day's employment reports to crack the top 10 stories -- same principle -- keep waiting.

Unclutch the fucking pearls

Make room on the fainting couch for the Wall Street Journal, covering -- what's that headline again? -- "The Profane 78-Year-Old Leading the Dockworkers Strike":

“We’re going to show these greedy bastards you can’t survive without us!” Daggett shouted to cheers from the crowd in a speech filled with profanities and warnings about the threats automation poses to workers.

... Daggett, who has the broad shoulders of a former dockworker and a raspy voice that comes from years of shouting at labor rallies, is now throwing himself behind an effort to win a historic increase in pay and an effort to get dockworkers around the world behind his goal of halting automation in its tracks and establishing longshore labor as a formidable partner in global trade.

“People are going to sit up and realize how important longshoremen jobs are,” Daggett said in an interview at the rally. “They won’t be able to sell cars. They won’t be able to stock malls. They won’t be able to do anything in this country without my f—ing people. And it’s about time they start realizing it.”

Personal prescriptive peeve* here. Neither "bastards" nor "fucking" is "profane." Different poles on a scale of naughty-to-FCC v Pacifica, maybe, but neither stands in opposition to, or rudely invokes, the sacred.** But the cooler point is the subset of framing that we can think of as policing: whom the press needs to keep an eye on because, well, we're just never sure they can be trusted.

Mind you, this is the Wall Street Journal, the site in which A.J. Liebling first observed that "the employer, in strike stories, always 'offers' and the union always 'demands.'" True to form, both cases of offering belong to "port employers and ocean shipping companies," and all the demanding is done by the profane old man delivering his "battle cry." The Journal overall maintains a strong firewall between the church of the editorial page and the state of the news pages, but that's the fun of framing analysis: it illuminates how the routines of news can make the wall transparent, no matter how vigilant the guards.

The agenda-setting cousins will remind you that a single article isn't going to change your attitude about labor in general or Harold Daggett in particular. That's not what news does. What it does is affect the balance of what you learn: not just the ones and zeroes of the day's events (Tigers 5, Astros 2) but whether you're in the sort of zip code where that's good news or bad news.
 

Daniel Hallin explains this as a set of spheres in which news operates. Objectivity does its work in the "sphere of legitimate controversy," where "neutrality and balance are the prime journalistic virtues": whether it's about firing the football coach or adding an ad valorem tax for library expansion, both sides are aired out for the public to see. In the "sphere of consensus," journalists act as "ceremonial protectors of consensus values"; both sides don't need an airing, because there is no legitimate other side to TIGERS WIN!!!!*** In the third sphere, we're patrolling the bounds of the legitimate. That doesn't mean you're ruled out of the news if you'r eoutside the norm, but it does mean you and your views are going to go through the special security line, and it's going to show -- in whether and how you're marked for saying "fuck," for example.

Up at the top is a lead story from the Fox nomepage in Jan. 17; it's one of three unique stories from the top of the page between July 2023 and February 2024 with the "Potty Mouth POTUS" hed. Here's the lede:

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that President Biden does not insult voters, but he has made insulting remarks to them on several occasions.

Now, to be fair, in this example, Biden had merely called a voter a "horse's ass" back in 2020. But barely two weeks later (same headline), it emerged -- meaning Fox read an article at Politico -- that Biden, in speaking with "close allies and aides," had apparently referred to that Trump fellow as a "sick f---" and a "f---ing a--hole." 

Fox's orthography is standard for the US press. The British are different, and the Guardian's let-the-fucks-fall-where-they-may attitude is a real outlier (here's a summary, and if you haven't seen it before, enjoy the stylebook cartoon). But the boundary work is clear when Fox (again thanks to Politico) quotes the Trump campaign:

"It’s a shame that Crooked Joe Biden disrespects the presidency both publicly and privately," senior Trump campaign adviser Chris Lacivita told Politico.

No such opprobrium attaches to Trump's own campaign language, whether he's saying "bullshit" or merely slinging loads of it at lawful immigrants in Ohio. Trump is in a category that, at least at Fox, doesn't need policing. Like a Tom Brady or a Bill Belichick or a Kevin Costner, he can go about his business. Your Taylor Swifts and your Travis Kelces (not to mention your Kamala Harrises and your Tim Walzes), on the other hand, need constant watching. It's certainly not Fox's fault when some of that social media monitoring is done by the influencers who were surprised to find that their newly enlarged paychecks were partly funded by the Kremlin, but there we are.

None of this is to suggest that the Wall Street Journal is enjoying Moscow's largesse. It does suggest that, no matter how high the barbed wire on the church-state wall, there's a clue to the secret passages in who is marked as profane and who isn't.

* Everybody has some
** Unlike, say, Blake's "God damn the king"
*** Though it's dicey when the Houston starter graduated from Wayne State, which is two miles up Woodward from Comerica Park.

Why do you think they call it diplomacy?

 The Fair 'n' Balanced Network still haz a severe case of the sads about that -- oh, can we go ahead and call it "disastrous"? -- debate this month, so it dispatched a reporter "with a focus on national and global news" to the UN to make things better. Here's your Sunday morning top story:

UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. — Foreign ministers from European nations with close U.S. ties reacted to Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim world leaders are "laughing" at former President Trump, dismissing the claim.

During September’s presidential debate, Harris said, "World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you're a disgrace."

When asked about this quote, foreign ministers in attendance at the United Nations High-Level Week stressed they have no view one way or the other on the U.S. election and will work with whomever* wins.

Uh, Fox? If you're too young to remember the War on Drugs and its advertising campaign -- why do you think they call it dope diplomacy?

"We are friends of America," Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said, noting Italy and the U.S. are "two sides of the same coin." "If Trump will be the new president of America, we will work with him as we worked with him when he was president of America."

"We worked well with Biden, with Bush, with Reagan, with Clinton, with Obama," Tajani added. "For us, the transatlantic relations are the key strategy of our foreign policy, Europe and America."

If you've been waiting all your life to holler "STOP THE PRESS!!!" -- keep waiting.

Foreign ministers of Lithuania and the Czech Republic stressed that they will not interfere in the election by stating a preference, instead saying they "leave it to the American citizens to decide."

Gotta love that former Second World close harmony. Could we have some hitting back or dismissal, please?

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Welcome to 27th grade

You may well be wondering whether the scratch-made focus is attributed to the chef's success or the other way around, but belay that for a moment while we ponder one of those recurring myths: some notional grade-school level to which news is mythically written.

Short answer: I wish (and so does your IRB, if it's doing its job with those consent documents). The reading complexity of the stuff we present to perfectly innocent audiences tends to rely more on the perceived importance of the writer and the topic (sports team ownership, for example). Thus, let's look instead at the politics story next to the focus-ish success:

Among the most intriguing elections in Michigan this fall is a test of just how far a once reliably Democratic-leaning region around Flint, Bay City and Saginaw has shifted toward Republicans under the populism of former President Donald Trump.

Most political handicappers — the Cook Political Report in Washington and Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics among them — have the race between first-term state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Bay City, and Republican Paul Junge, who is making his third attempt at winning a seat in Congress in six years, as a toss-up.

Good so far? Take a deep breath:

That may undervalue somewhat the advantages McDonald Rivet and the Democrats could have, including the institutional support and popularity of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the region, a slight Democratic lean that remains in the boundaries of Michigan's 8th Congressional District and the expected enthusiasm in Flint and Saginaw, two cities with large Black populations, for the presidential candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and first woman of South Asian descent to become a major party's nominee.

Junge and the Republicans, on the other hand, are counting on some advantages of their own, namely that Harris remains something of an unknown quantity in a region where voters are still predominantly white and working class. Trump came within about 2 percentage points of winning within this district's boundaries four years ago (and within about a point in 2016) on a populist message that Democrats haven't delivered on promises to help voters in a district where county populations have dropped by 10% over the last decade or so.

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Watch the pivot foot

Here’s the No. 5 story from the Fair ‘n’ Balanced homepage Wednesday night to help explain why attitude change is often the wrong place to look for media effects — because who needs attitude change when you’re in charge of the tollbooth through which “objective” information itself is transmitted?

News agencies seem to agree that hostile foreign actors shouldn’t be clowning around in US elections, so the issue itself isn’t in question. Indeed, the event is more salient at CNN (which — imagine — is also covering the Federal Reserve, Near Eastern political violence and other stuff that doesn’t make the Fox top ten) than at Fox, and it gets thorough play at the AP. But see if there’s a bit of a difference in the information you get from the headlines:

Iranian hackers tried but failed to interest Biden’s campaign in stolen Trump info, FBI says (AP)

Iranian hackers sent stolen Trump campaign information to people associated with Biden campaign (CNN)

Somehow, these don’t seem to add up to “sharing.” You’re learning about the same event, but you’re learning different things about it. Here’s a bit from the texts:

The agencies noted that there is currently no information indicating if recipients replied to the messages. (Fox)

There is no indication that Biden’s staff ever replied, the statement says. (CNN)

You can see it happening in any busy newsroom: Hey, “if” and “that” mean the same thing (right?), and “if” is only half the length, and presto! Except — think of the if/whether distinction — they really aren’t built to transmit the same kind of information.

Another bit of data is somewhat less subtle. CNN and the AP include comments from both the Trump and Harris campaigns. Fox includes a comment from Trump himself — like the poor influencers who took Russia’s money without knowing it, he’s certainly an aggrieved party here — but waives the routine of balancing. As it might with a cop story, that doesn’t mean there’s no rule, but it does suggest that there are rules about applying the rule.

And that’s the beauty of the framing/agenda-setting process. Given different maps through what looks like an identical thicket, you can end up in some strikingly different places.