When the drone team writes the stories

So if you're a fan (and who isn't?) of the agenda-setting function of the Fox News homepage, you too might be wondering about the news value of timeliness: why some events take longer than others to break through, even if you've already seen them elsewhere. Here's a working suggestion: Events don't become stories until the elements of a story -- a cast, a plot, a complication, and so forth -- are in place. So if those pesky algae blooms in the Reflecting Pool weren't a story before 5:59 a.m. Saturday, one reason could be that the president didn't pin the blame on the Radical Left Lunatic vandals until 9:59 p.m. Friday.*

Or it might take just a little more time -- and the right touch -- to explain to people why there's actually a stable genius in charge. Hence the two-day-old Axios interview that replaced the Dumocrats' Reflecting Pool attack at the top of the homepage Saturday afternoon, in which that thing on Wednesday really was an unconditional surrender:

President Donald Trump is revealing new details surrounding the United States’ negotiations with Iran just days after both countries signed a memorandum of understanding calling for the war to end. 

In an interview with Axios’ Marc Caputo published Thursday, Trump weighed in on the 14-point MOU between the two countries and pushed back on claims that the agreement is not the same as an unconditional surrender from Iran. 

"Well, it really probably is unconditional surrender," Trump said.

"Is it?" Caputo questioned.

"I think so," Trump replied. "Look, they have no military. They're all at the bottom of the sea. 159 ships. That's what they had." 

Well, I guess that settles it. But you said something about "new details" -- those Foxclusive gems that justify the wait?

Trump went on to double down on the U.S.'s efforts to decimate Iran’s military operations as he highlighted the successful assassinations of some of the country’s most powerful leaders. 

"There's no airplanes," Trump said. "They had a lot of 'em. There were 200 of them. They're all gone. Navy. 159 ships, right? All at the bottom of the sea. Leadership, their first stringers all gone, including Khomeini,** the first one. They then put a new group in there. Very good, but very nasty. I dealt with 'em. They're gone. They're all gone."

If you say so. But what about those crippling secret strikes?

According to Trump, the U.S. spent nearly two months wiping out Iran’s ships in a covert, overnight operation.

"Do you know that for the last two months, I've been taking many ships out there and nobody knew it," Trump continued. "You know why they didn't know it? Because we knocked out their radar. We knocked out all of their defensive stuff and they were unable to see. Last week we had one night, 25 ships. One night, 22. One night, 19. One night, 21. So every night all these ships out."

Starting to wonder about the two-month overnight ship massacre? Given that Fox has been attributing the "159 ships" figure to Trump since at least April 23?

Trump went on to provide more details surrounding the undercover efforts.

"Oh, people were saying, ‘Where is this oil coming from?’ Nobody knew," Trump added. "We'd leave at one o'clock in the morning, all lights off, and we'd have our Navy destroyers going alongside and they had no equipment because we destroyed all of the equipment that would normally be used to detect this."

"And I went for a month and a half taking many ships out there every night at one o'clock in the morning. And we were never detected until about a week ago. And then I announced that we're doing it."

You can be forgiven for thinking that the writer -- "a media and culture writer for Fox News Digital, and a Fox Flight Team drone pilot" -- has gotten two meanings of "take out" confused. Trump has shifted gears to another familiar claim ("taking out" = helping tankers escape the Persian Gulf), but Fox is still back at the last intersection, trying to flesh out the stroke of military legerdemain that decimated the Persians' triremes*** and compelled them to the peace table. 

It's a great story for Fox readers, as long as you take the time to tell it right.

* All times Eastern US
** 1900-1989. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
*** If you say "Is this the face that launched 15.9 ships?" I will personally hit you upside the head with an AP Stylebook.

 

Major Shot has been strasser!

Still wondering why I think you used ChatGPT to write your literature review? Because I saw the movie.

So, the back story: There I was, trying to respond to a friend on social media, and I could not remember* who said "I shall remember to pay it -- to myself." My first self-guess was Capt. Renault, but the rest of me laughed at that; it's the kind of thing he might have said in a different movie, but not the kind of thing he had any occasion to say in this one. So, as one used to be able to do with some confidence, I entered the string in a Google search, in quotes, and added "Casablanca" to keep Google AI from being too helpful, and you may see the results above.

One hardly knows where to start, though the omission of "that iconic line" from the "AI overview" -- not to mention the hundred cartons of American cigarettes -- is a reasonable candidate. I'm really taken with the phrase that sums up the problems of the enrire world, and the Rick-Ferrari relationship has certainly taken an unexpected turn. But if you're wondering about your grade, it's probably because you either left "Your prompt sounds like..." somewhere in the text or you just didn't watch the movie.

* Sorry, first saw it sometime before "Star Wars" came out.

 

Today in framing

 You can count on the Fair 'n' Balanced Network to get right to the substance when public figures attend sporting events, right? Say, Opening Day at Fenway?

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu were booed by fans at the Red Sox home opener Friday.

The two Democrat politicians took the field at Fenway Park before Friday's game against the San Diego Padres for a pregame ceremony. 

And the 36,000-plus fans in attendance showered the Democrats with relentless boos.

Footage of the booing went viral on social media, providing a boasting opportunity for Massachusetts' GOP gubernatorial hopefuls. (Three of whom are then quoted.)

So naturally the same will be on order for Monday night's event at Matison Square Garden, with boos in the lede: 

President Donald Trump received a massive reaction from a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden for Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs on Monday night.

As the national anthem was being sung, Trump was shown on the MSG big screen above the court, and a mixed reaction from the crowd ensued.

While there was some cheering, as Trump saluted the crowd from his suite, the boos from those in attendance rang louder before the video panned back to NYPD officers holding flags on the court.

Trump was accompanied by his granddaughter, Kai Trump, who was on his right with her hand over her heart. Knicks owner James Dolan was also in the suite with Trump on his left when he was shown.

This reception by fans in New York City was much different from another key sporting event this year – the College Football National Championship.

College football fans ate up the moment that Trump was on the Jumbotron at Hard Rock Stadium. Similarly, Trump was shown during the national anthem before the game. As he was surrounded by his grandchildren, Trump waved to the crowd, who went raucous with cheers.

New York fans clearly didn’t share the same sentiment as those from Florida.

(Our lone tweet is from an OutKick content creator: "Loud boos at Madison Square Garden when President Trump was shown on the Jumbotron during the the national anthem. Some cheering too, but the boos were definitely louder.")

On the optimistic side, it's a nice lesson in the value of the active voice in covering your tracks.

All in the family

Saturday afternoon's top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage comes to you courtesy of -- let's be sure we have all the characters straight here -- a Fox reporter watching a Fox talk show host tell a different Fox talk show that Peace Is At Hand:

Lara Trump told “Fox & Friends” on Saturday that there is hope that the situation with Iran wraps up very quickly, we are hoping, maybe in the next couple hours.” 

The host of “My View With Lara Trump” made the remark after President Donald Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room of the White House on Friday regarding the war. 

“I think this president wants to do what's right. Period,” Lara Trump said of her father-in-law. “He has never looked at things, 'well this is politically advantageous, so let me do this.' He looks at things as in is this right for America? Is this right for our future security? And that is 100% what you got with this Iran situation.”

Meanwhile (give or take a few minutes; it was posted at 1:16 p.m. Eastern US), the family's other chief peacemaker was busy suppporting his contention that America -- could it have been a dead country only two years ago? -- is BACK and now the HOTTEST country in the world:

Even by the standards of the WWII-era Chicago Tribune's attempts to explain the world through baseball, this one's just weird. We might have the world's shortest-range infield practice in the foreground, except the kid with the bat has gotten set again in a hurry, and the kid at third base is playing really deep, which may be why he's holding his bat by the knob. Or maybe he's the goalie, except there seems to be a translucent baseball at the end of his shadow, unless that's a portal to the underworld. I don't know. But back to Lara at the policy desk:

“Of course the president didn’t want to have a conflict with Iran just ahead of these midterms. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have had to do this. But the can got kicked down the road, it landed in his lap and much like so many other things with this president, he is the one to get the job done, whether we are talking about Maduro and making sure that you know, he is held accountable, whether we are talking about ensuring Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon,” she said.

“Obviously the hope is that this wraps up very quickly, we are hoping, maybe in the next couple hours we get a solution here, but he is going to do what’s right no matter what,” Lara Trump added.

Her interview with the president is set to air at 9 p.m. ET on Saturday.
You may have to scroll a bit,  because the link takes you to the day's Iran liveblog, but if you hang in there, you'll get to the interview itself. Here's a preview:

During the interview, Lara Trump said “I’d imagine if you could have timed things perfectly, having a conflict just in front of the midterm elections at time like this, isn’t ideal.”

“So you have really a very small window, so if you wanted to play that game then you would wait until the midterms are over and then the following hour, you'll attack Iran because they cannot have a nuclear weapon, most people agree with me on that,” Trump responded.

“But then it gets maybe carried into, you know, the next election whether it’s a midterm or not. So you have a very short window for doing anything having to do with war. But I don’t view that window, I view it I have to do what’s right,” he added.

So glad the family has everything figured out for us.

It ain't about the prompts

This is not the end of professional editing in media texts, and the beginning of the end of professional editing in media texts is damn near old enough to vote, so it isn't that either. But it is a quantifiable data point in the study of how and where value is assigned to professional routines.

Your brow might furrow beneath the green eyeshade at several points in the text above (drawn from the day's liveblog, the salience of which is another indicator). "Signalling" or "signaling"? They're equally correct, so if you did what the style manual says, fine (hope you looked first). Hyphenating "-ly" adverbs? If that's the rule, a tip of the hat to you.

But -- because editors should always have at least one brain cell in the gutter -- those may not have been the first to catch your attention. "Diarrhoea" is a correct spelling, but not on my, and CNN's, side of the ocean. A link at the top of the story indicates that the writer is based in London, suggesting that CNN hasn't learned from the utterly dagenham story that called Carolina-Duke a "local derby" when a UK writer was loosed upon the game.

Read more »

So how long did you think ...

 

... it would take for the tale of the White House Correspondents' Association dinner to become an Obama story? If your answer was "oh, about as long as it took for the 'somberly contemplative and unusually conciliatory'* attitude to fall away," take a bow.

Fox, unsurprisingly, is long past being interested in providing news on the attack; its job now is to help make the case for the ballroom. No wonder that a 5:15 p.m. tweet from the former president is at the top of the page, even if Fox's own story (posted at 9:35 p.m.) points out that "law enforcement officials have not formally confirmed a definitive motive as the investigation remains ongoing."

Do stay tuned.

* PBS's phrasing, not mine.

Theory time: Walking around with no legs

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

Media effects are downstream from media sociology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opposing interpretations are welcome.