Perspective | Is Fox News to blame for American rage?

Perspective | Is Fox News to blame for American rage?

The Fox News logo is seen outside News Corp. headquarters in Manhattan on Feb. 26, 2021. (Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post)

Today at 6:02 p.m. EDT

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A good rule of thumb for discerning readers: Take Kevin Drum seriously. As a blogger, then as a columnist for the Washington Monthly and Mother Jones, Drum has always been an honest broker of analyzing social trends. His thesis that America’s crime wave in the latter 20th century was due to the effect of lead exposure on children was interesting. Drum has also been willing to entertain counterarguments to that thesis. The point is, when Drum arrives at a conclusion to explain a social trend, it needs to be taken seriously.

Drum’s latest essay for Mother Jones, titled “The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage,” asks why the American body politic started getting so gosh-darn polarized beginning in the early 21st century. His primary answer is Fox News: “We need to look for things that (a) are politically salient and (b) have changed dramatically over the past two to three decades. The most obvious one is Fox News.”

Discerning individuals should read the whole thing. Again, it is to Drum’s credit that this is not the only hypothesis he considers in this essay. The bulk of his efforts is devoted to assessing alternative causes: the surge in such conspiracy theories as birtherism and QAnon, the growth of social media, the possibility that things have just gotten worse in this country. He rejects all of them for sound reasons. Conspiracy theories are a hardy perennial in American history, and a constant can’t explain variation. Social media postdates the increase in U.S. polarization. And no matter what you hear from your most partisan friends, there are a lot of ways that the United States is better off now than a generation ago.

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Fox News meets the proximate trigger requirements: It launched just before the increase in polarization, and its animus toward liberals and the state has persisted. Drum writes, “The conservative media ecosystem includes talk radio, websites, email newsletters, and so forth. But all of these outlets had only a temporary effect in the early ’90s before fading out in the face of a booming economy. Only Fox News has had an enduring impact.”

So, is Drum right? I had to pore over a lot of the same data when I was researching “The Ideas Industry.” The way I would put it is that Drum is not wrong. But there are three omitted elements of the story that complicate his narrative.

First, the bulk of the political science research shows that elite polarization preceded mass polarization by a few decades. So one of the things that is going on in the 25 years before the turn of the century is that partisan elites are trying to radicalize their wings of the party. In that sense, Fox News is an outcome and not a cause of that elite polarization. Sure, Rupert Murdoch is at fault, but so is Newt Gingrich.

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Second, Drum argues that the rise of Fox News is the causal factor in the dramatic decline of trust in the federal government after 2001, and I am not sure I buy that thesis. The precipitous decline of trust in government occurred while the GOP controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency; these were years when Fox News was cheerleading the Iraq War and downplaying Hurricane Katrina. It seems difficult to parse out how Fox News could be responsible for that decline in trust at the same time that its “fair and balanced” coverage always privileged the GOP.

Finally, and most importantly, even if Fox News was the primary cause of political antipathy, the feedback effects are now so powerful that Murdoch is no longer in command. The first data point that this was true came in 2015, when Donald Trump got the best of his feud with Fox News after Megyn Kelly had the impertinence to ask him a challenging question during a debate.

After that dust-up, I wrote, “Fox News has cornered the market on conservative news coverage on television. But if the network were to ever alienate a significant chunk of its viewers, one could envisage a disintegration of viewership.” Drum confirms that point in his essay, noting that Fox News began hyping its attack on critical race theory after “facing flagging ratings and increased competition from the even more far-right outlets Newsmax and OAN.” In other words, Fox now promotes partisan rage because otherwise it loses viewers (as happened when it aired the select committee hearings last week on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot).

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The lesson Fox News learned after the November 2020 election and Jan. 6 insurrection is that its viewers will defect to Newsmax or OAN if they are, you know, told the truth about Trump’s lies. And Fox News cannot afford to lose those viewers.

Drum’s essay is a powerful brief against Fox News, and I do not entirely disagree with it. But Drum presents it as though Fox News still has agency to alter its course. There are a few data points that might support that belief. In the main, however, Fox News can no longer afford to cross the #MAGA bandwagon. Its agency and influence have been denuded.

To use an MCU analogy: I can buy that Fox News triggered Bruce Banner’s rage and turned him into the Incredible Hulk. What I doubt is that Fox News is as powerful as Natasha Romanoff in getting the Hulk to turn back into Bruce Banner.