Schrödinger's apple

 

The lead story at the Fox News homepage, around 1 p.m. and 2:30 pm.. Monday.

I'm not at all sure Fox appreciates the gravity of the situation. Thanks, I'll be here all week. 

Just another day at the office

It might be an overstatement to say that Fox News lies about everything, but it's fair to suggest that Fox News will lie about anything, because nothing is too small for Fox News to lie about in service of the cause. So this story -- starting its career at the No. 2 spot on the Fox homepage Saturday, then taking a few cycles off, then returning to the same position Sunday afternoon -- isn't an example of the extraordinary; it's literally just another day at the office.

As usual, the homepage headlines are a tad bit livelier than the ones on the story itself, so let's start with Saturday's: Not "Bitter pill," which is just there to remind you of the deserts of sinners, but the subhed: "Fauci roasted for new paper pushing debunked Trump claim, COVID origin theory." Let's say three things have to be true for the hed to be true: Fauci has to have been roasted; his new paper has to have pushed a claim and a theory, and at least the claim has to have been "debunked." (Under a distributed reading, "debunked" could apply to the theory too, but the lede suggests the narrow reading.)

There are some different twists in the Sunday subhed, "Fauci scorched over new 'scientific' paper riddled with 'false claims.'" Scorching is also a fairly low bar to clear, but "riddled" is going to need an extra step: at least some degree of counting and judgment over and above a couple of angry tweets from conservative influencers.* Fox is asserting "riddled" on its own hook (hint: it's the same two claims), but the quote marks are murky. Is Fox explaining that this is a scientific (as opposed to a popular or trade) paper, or is it nudging you with scare quotes? In US practice, the quotes around "false claims" mean those are the exact words someone used, but in UK practice (Fox headlines often have a strong redtop flavor), they could be "claim quotes": placed around a phrase to indicate the substance of an assertion but not a direct quotation.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the federal government's coronavirus pandemic response, is facing criticism on social media over a manuscript published in a top journal where he maintains his position that the virus originated in nature and cites a debunked claim that President-elect Trump told Americans to inject themselves with bleach to stop the virus.

Well, there's your scorching and roasting.** "Criticism on social media" in this case means two regular contributors to the pool of right-wing Twitter accounts that Fox draws on when a Harris or Walz or Biden needs to be slammed, mocked or blasted, plus one newcomer from the National Review stable. No scare quotes around "top journal" (fair enough; the Oxford Academic homepage lists its impact factor as 8.2). And Fauci's offenses? He "maintains his position" on the virus's origin and "cites a debunked claim that President-elect Trump told Americans to inject themselves with bleach to stop the virus." The claim has been debunked, but Fauci doesn't make it. (Nor does the phrase "false claims" appear in the story, so that's a headline invention.)

Fauci, along with researcher Gregory Folkers, published a paper in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal this week with the title, "HIV/AIDS and COVID-19: Shared Lessons from Two Pandemics."

Fauci, who faced intense criticism for his handling of the pandemic, was critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic in the paper.

Oh, stop the press.

"With COVID-19, the role of political leadership at the highest level – or the lack thereof – was again shown to be critical," the authors wrote. "As COVID-19 exploded globally and in the United States, President Donald Trump frequently minimized the seriousness of the pandemic, repeatedly claiming that COVID-19 would just ‘go away’ In the first full year of the pandemic (2020, the last year of his presidency) he failed to use his bully pulpit to encourage people to use available ‘low-tech’ tools such as masks/respirators, better ventilation, and physical distancing to reduce the risk of infection."

All true. But here comes the scary part, still quoting Fox quoting the article:

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Today in hedge deletion

Making stuff up isn't the only way Fox News constructs the world for its followers. Many of Fox's strategies, indeed, mimic the rules of news -- closely enough that the resulting product is hard to tell from the real thing. Here's one from Oct. 28 illustrating how hedge deletion works.

This won't be news to those of you who have written more than a few headlines in your working lives, but headlines are shorter than stories. Things get left out or shortened or worked-around in the eternal battle to catch the audience's eye (or provoke a click), maintain the most (and the most necessary) precision, and fit the space you're given. That's how the Soviet Union became "RUSS" in the thundering broadsheet headlines of the 1940s: If "Afghanistan" wouldn't fit in one column yesterday, what makes you think it'll fit in one column today?

Many of the principles are so widely understood as to go unnoticed: when articles and linking verbs can go, when a colon can attach a speaker to an idea, and so on. Qualifiers and attributions are trickier. Sure, you can leave the "forecasters say" off "Beautiful day in store," but let's be a bit less footloose on "Mayor embezzles millions." And take a lesson from the sports pages before you delete the hedge in "almost pulled off a startling upset."

So -- speaking of compelling the audience to click through -- what to make of a homepage headline like "Harris supporter screams in toddler's face in front of shocked dad at rally"?* For one thing, the audience hates being let down. Here's the headline on the story itself:

Apparent Harris rallygoer screams at baby in stroller in shocking viral video

Oh. Well, let's see how well that's held up by the lede:

A video of a woman screaming at a toddler outside of Vice President Kamala Harris' celebrity-packed Houston rally is going viral on social media as critics slam the shocking behavior seen toward a child.

Harris' Texas rally Friday was joined by celebrities such as Beyoncé, Jessica Alba and Willie Nelson to make a last-ditch appeal to voters in the red state ahead of next week's election.

Enough background. Ready for some hedges and attribution?

A video posted to social media shortly after the event shows a woman in a light blue T-shirt standing outside what appears to be the Houston Metro station walking over to a little girl in a stroller among the throngs of people decked out in Harris-Walz apparel.

The woman in the light blue shirt is seen leaning down to the toddler in the stroller and screaming in her face. It is unclear what the woman said and what provoked the incident.

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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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Left hand, right hand

How are things going at the local print product these days? Consider these facing pages from the Sunday morning A section.

To your left at the top, just under your thumb if you were reading this on actual newsprint, is the weekly Gruff Old Reporter column, this week about a county commissioner who was elected despite his troubles with the law. I have a low tolerance for "commish," "300 grand," "the feds" and the like (no "hizzoner" this week, because no mayors were involved) unless the next scene has either Roz Russell or Cary Grant shouting into a telephone,* but at least there's some substance amid the writering:

Newly elected Monroe County Commissioner Mark Brant says he's eager to serve his constituents — but first he has to serve time.

Brant is scheduled to report to federal prison in Morgantown, West Virginia, on Friday, making this a Thanksgiving he'll always remember — even if he'd rather forget. Brant was sentenced to 18 months in Club Fed, fined $500,000 and agreed** to give up the more than 300 grand the feds found in his Monroe home after he pleaded guilty to what Uncle Sam calls "maintaining a drug-involved premises."

Now over to the right-hand page:

MONROE -- On Monday, Nov. 18, Mark Brant was sworn in as District 2 Monroe County

commissioner by Monroe County Clerk and Register of Deeds Annamarie Osment.

Erm. OK, assuming we all know who Mark Brant is (but don't remember him from the facing page), just snick off that opening prepositional phrase, start with the name, stick a "Monday" after "commissioner" and call it a lede. But could there be anything of some interest to your non-Monroe readers?

In the Nov. 5 general election, despite a federal indictment, Brant won the election with 6,811 votes. Write-in candidates, Democrat Danielle Hoover and Dwayne Dobbs, received 687 votes collectively.

Oh my. And?

It has not been made public when and where Brant's prison term will commence.

Does something seem out of order here? Skip down to the fifth paragraph:

... In March, Brant pleaded guilty to one federal count of maintaining a drug-involved premise.

In the old days, people called "copy editors" sat around newspaper offices on Saturday night and ... edited. Not just buffing your grammar, writing your heds and making sure stories didn't begin "On Monday," but remembering stuff. If one editor didn't know whether Nixon was impeached (no) or how Edgar Allan Poe spelled his middle name (the Times was wrong again), another would. And somebody who either remembered where Jesus talked about the left hand not knowing what the right hand doeth or had the good sense to look it up would have wandered over to to the city desk and noted that a couple of the discrepancies here really ought to be fixed in a big smoking hurry if we expect people to pay for this stuff.

I'm staunchly pro-local-news, and I'm a subscriber, even if I read the morning paper on a tablet in pdf form. But somebody at the Gannett hub seems bent on making that habit seem unnecesary.

* If you have not seen a Linotype in action, just go ahead and get off my lawn.
** Pesky parallel structure. 

But can you use it in a sentence?

I don't know where your tipping point was, but I started to tire of election post-mortems about last Thursday. Like public opinion surveys, what's exciting about them isn't usually very valid, and what's valid about them isn't usually very exciting. Whether old media or new media, they tend toward the sort of see-you-shoulda-listened-to-me brand-building that ages poorly. (And -- actual southerner here -- I'd be happy if the broadcast oligarchs of 2026 tell James Carville to just go stick his head in a barrel and yell for a while.*)

So above is a morning-after lede from the AP for your consideration, offered less as a diagnosis than as a way of thinking about what news could look like over the ensuing months and years. What struck me, as an old paid-to-read-this-stuff hand from back in the Carter administration, was how unusual it seems to see "Trump" and "felony conviction" in the same paragraph -- compared with, say, the number of times you saw "Biden" close to "disastrous debate" in AP stories in the past five months.** That points us toward some conclusions about how the agenda-setting paradigm, and what we know about media effects in general, can help attack the conventional wisdom.

My starting point is some of the self-justifying blather I'm seeing on the right flank: People weren't fooled -- they knew exactly what they were voting for, and that's what they wanted. I agree that a large proportion of US voters knew exactly who they were voting for: the lying, gropey, vengeful old clown who thinks all the world's a sound stage and hates all the people they wish they could hate. What they were voting for is a different question, and that's where Fox News comes into the equation.

We've known for two decades that Fox users are more likely than users of grownup media to believe in things that aren't so. Kull et al (2003) looked at beliefs about justifications for the second US-Iraq war: presence of WMD, strong Qa'ida-Iraq links, and worldwide support for a US invasion. Fox users were the most likely to hold at least one misperception; public media users (and in those glorious days, newspaper readers) the least likely to hold any misperceptions.

Because it doesn't hit the usual metrics of polling drama during campaign season (see above, under sexy vs. valid), you might not have seen an October survey from Ipsos that looked at the relationship between news source and political understanding. Unsurprisingly, participants who get their news from Fox and other right-wing outlets saw immigration as the most important problem facing the country; for participants overall, it was the economy; in the category of national newspapers and (non-Fox) cable, the MIP was "political extremism or threats to democracy."

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Always get the dog's name

Before we move on to (ahem) today's events at Madison Square Garden, let's take a moment to see how much of American journalism can be packed into a single tabloid front page: here, the New York Daily News of Feb. 22, 1939:

● Always get the dog's name! That's Fritz, barking at the cops in an attempt to defend his injured master, Chester Brooks, 61, of W. 5th St., Manhattan.
● Style policy reveals style politics.* If there's a dog name rule, there's probably also a rule that tells Daily News staffers which other names are important; hence, "kisses wife" but "hugs son Gerald, 2."
● Don't just tell me what I'm seeing; tell me why I'm seeing it. Isidore Greenbaum was run in for jumping on the stage and trying to punch Fritz Kuhn -- not, regardless of the Hillary Clinton comment that got Fox News's panties in a wad last week, a "neo-Nazi," but the real thing.
● Sometimes it's OK to break the fourth wall. If a World Series victory allows the paper to declare heroes, surely attempted Nazi-punching could license the declaration of an "anti-fascist hero."

The parallels between the German-American Bund's 1939 rally and (ahem) today's events are entertaining if a bit inexact. The Trump rally, after all, is nine days before a national election in which he's the candidate of a major party. If Trump will be "actually reenacting" anything, the more likely template is "all his other rallies of the past few weeks"; batshittery about dog-eating aliens or sex-change surgeries during study hall is likely, with a nonzero chance of Arnold Palmer's penis and some somnolent dancing to Ave Maria. (Update: Should have anticipated the sort of gutter racism that seems to get the Trump cult especially excited, as it's on full display.) And the sort of large-scale revulsion that was shared even by the right-wing press seems unlikely at this writing.

For all that, the buildup in the Trumpist media has been steady. Fox had two side-by-side
stories about the Clinton outrage at the top of the homepage on Friday, and rally precedes led the page Saturday night and Sunday morning. But that's hardly out of step with Fox's campaign coverage in general. Indeed, several ongoing themes for both Fox and the Trump campaign suggest closer parallels with a different gathering at Madison Square Garden: the Oct. 30, 1941, America First rally, held as US involvement in the Atlantic war deepened (a U-boat sank the destroyer Reuben James the next day). See if the "enemy within" vibe from the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a bit of a ring to it:

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