Ailes hasn’t just made Fox News a media empire; he’s changed the news industry. In order to stay competitive, the other cable networks and news services have had to change their strategies. In 2005, MSNBC started to see the dollar signs and began investing in programming costs over newsroom costs. In 2005, it spent 58% of its costs on programming expenses, but by 2010 that number sat at 88%. It brought in personalities like Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow. The results are astounding: MSNBC surpassed CNN’s viewership in 2010 with a staff of just 600 people in 4 bureaus.[30] Ailes’ experiment didn’t just succeed for Fox News. It has been proven correct for MSNBC too.
CNN, on the other hand, took a different path. Watching the other two networks go their right- and left-of-center ways, CNN figured there must be some room left for the facts.
Over the same period of time, CNN canceled much of their hard personality-driven shows—like “Crossfire,” starring Democratic party media consultants Paul Begala and James Carville versus right-leaning pundits Tucker Carlson and Robert Novak—and replaced them with less overtly opinionated anchors like John King, Anderson Cooper, and Wolf Blitzer.
While the network still leverages its vast bureaus to achieve high ratings in times of international conflict, like 2010’s Arab Spring, the result was an astounding plummet in the ratings. In prime time, CNN is now a third-place network—it’s beaten by MSNBC and Fox’s personality-driven journalism night after night. Fox News is in first place on the right, and MSNBC is second on the left. CNN sits at the bottom in the middle, providing real news that nobody wants to hear.[31]
Although CurrentTV has been around for years now, it too has recently jumped on the bandwagon. After MSNBC and anchor Keith Olbermann had a fairly public dispute, Current snapped up the partisan media personality, and has seen an increase in market share, and an increase in profit.
Our news networks have turned into affirmation distributors.
Gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow—of journalists seeking to deliver truth to their audiences. Instead, the advertisers and their salesforces have taken over. The sales teams want to sell you the delicious stuff that you keep coming back for more, even if it’s at the expense of the truth.
Like our food companies, our media companies—the companies that produce and deliver much of the information that we consume—have been consolidated down to a handfuclass="underline" Time Warner, AOL, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, CBS Corporation, and Comcast. Together, these companies represent many of the movies we watch, newspapers we read, magazines we subscribe to, books we buy, and Internet services we use.
These companies are all publicly traded corporations—ones with responsibilities to their shareholders to do their best to maximize profits. It’s called fiduciary responsibility, and this means driving down costs, increasing revenues, and growing the company. Every board member and every officer of a large corporation must grow their company and maximize shareholder wealth or face unemployment.
Food companies want to provide you with the most profitable food possible that will keep you eating it—and the result is our supermarket aisles filled with unimaginable ways to construct and consume corn. Media companies want to provide you with the most profitable information possible that will keep you tuned in, and the result is airwaves filled with fear and affirmation. Those are the things that keep the institutional shareholders that own these firms happy.
Choice Lessons
These issues aren’t new. In 1790, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, found himself the proud inheritor of all of his grandfather’s printing equipment and books. He quickly set up the Philadelphia Aurora, stating that “This paper will always be open, for the discussion of political, or any other interesting subjects, to such as deliver their sentiments with temper and decency, and whose motives appears to be, the public good.”[32] Or, like the now familiar Fox News slogan, that it would be “Fair and Balanced.”
Over the course of the next decade, Bache used his paper to denounce President Adams’ administration, and Adams’ party: the Federalists. The Federalists passed the Sedition Act in 1798, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing,” and quickly arrested Bache. Whether Bache’s accusations were true or not didn’t matter: public outrage ensued, and in the election of 1800, the Federalists didn’t just lose—their party was all but destroyed.
What’s different today is that new tyranny of the majority is more efficient than it used to be. It’s driven in real time by the tiny but meaningful transactions we have with our media providers every day. That’s why the world of politics is dividing into the world of MSNBC and DailyKos versus Fox and Andrew Breitbart. We now have the option to participate in the news realities we want to tune into, with the tribes we elect to be part of.
The New Media
Even more than television, Fox routinely tweaks the news on the Web to make the news more palatable to its audience. Even when it takes content from other sources like the Associated Press and puts it on its website, the organization tweaks the headlines to make them more attractive to its conservative audience. The AP’s story “Economic Worries Pose New Snags for Obama” turned into “Obama Has a Big Problem with White Women.” “Obama to Talk Economy, Not Politics, in Iowa” turned into “White House Insists Obama’s Iowa Stop for Economy, Not 2012.” And “Malaysia Police Slammed for Cattle-Branding Women” turned into “Malaysian Muslims Cattle-Brand Prostitutes.”
Fox isn’t about advancing a conservative agenda. For its parent, News Corporation, it’s about the dollars. Fox changes these headlines on the Web not because it has an agenda, but because people click on them more, meaning that more advertisements can be shown, and more money can be made. And Fox’s headline tweaking is just the beginning. With the Web, our choices aren’t even bound by the number of channels our cable boxes offer. With the Web, our choices are limitless.
Of course Foxnews.com isn’t the only web operation that does this. The Huffington Post is also into these shenanigans. On any given day, the Huffington Post’s homepage is a bizarre sight: a defense of New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman coupled with the “Top Embarrassing Photos of Obama’s Vacation.” “A Computer Chip Mimics the Human Brain,” it tells me, next to the warning: “Don’t Go Shopping with People Harder Than You.” Along the sidebar, we’re treated to images of celebrity wardrobe malfunctions and “make out sessions.”
These things are there, not because of Arianna Huffington’s contempt for the public, but because we click on them, and we click on them more than we click on anything else. The Huffington Post is a reflection of its readership’s interests. In just writing this bit about the site, I’ve found myself lost in its enormous sea of link-bait. There’s so much I need to know that I didn’t know I needed to know!
The Huffington Post has turned content-creation on its head, using technology to figure out what it is that people want, and finding the fastest way to give it to them. Just like the Cheesecake Factory tests its delicious cheesecakes in a test lab to make sure they’re delicious before they are set in front of you, the Huffington Post uses your behavior to understand what you want. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory though, they can do it in real-time.
30
This analysis comes from the excellent Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media reports, 2004–2001. http://stateofthemedia.org/previous-reports/
32
Smith, Jeffery A. franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic (p. 102). Oxford University Press: 1990.