Why Academics Should Read “The Fox Effect”

David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt (of Media Matters) have a new book out, titled The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned A Network Into a Propaganda Machine.  It is engagingly written and well-researched, offering a booklength compilation of the research drumbeat Media Matters has produced over the past eight years.

According to the authors, the Fox Effect is a six step process (pp. 168-169):

Step 1: conservative activists introduce the lie.

Step 2: Fox News devotes massive coverage to the story.

Step 3: Fox attacks other outlets for ignoring the controversy.

Step 4: Mainstream outlets begin reporting on the story.

Step 5: Media critics, pundits praise Fox News’s coverage.

Step 6: The story falls apart once the damage is done.

Yesterday’s Daily Show had a segment which nicely illustrates this process*:

There’s plenty of high-profile evidence of this process.  Death panels and  the ACORN scandal immediately come to mind.  There’s also plenty of evidence that Fox News viewers are the worst-informed news consumers.  But political communication scholars have stayed reticent when talking about Fox as a “propaganda machine.”  The specters of “liberal bias” and “do both sides do it” cast a foreboding shadow.

In particular, the problem is one of plausible deniability.  The Fox Effect is well-researched, but it doesn’t have the feel or rigor of an academic study.  The authors don’t offer side-by-side content analysis of MSNBC’s interaction with progressive interest groups.  They don’t offer year-by-year coverage analysis to demonstrate that the organization has moved more aggressively to the right.  The research in this book belongs in our public discourse, but it doesn’t belong in our top peer-reviewed journals.  Fox News has had good strategic reasons to cloud this matter, claiming at times that they’re a news organization, at times that the nighttime programming is partisan, but the daytime programming is straight news (it isn’t), and claiming always that MSNBC is no different.  Proving the Fox Effect to the standards of academic rigor will require some difficult debates about how we measure such phenomena.

Academics ought to investigate this phenomenon.  I have a neat seat project in the works (presenting about it at the Policy History conference in June, will post a synopsis to the blog around then).  But in the meantime, we also ought to read the book and take Brock and Rabin-Havt’s argument seriously.  The story they tell is both compelling and deeply troubling.  On a daily basis, a detached observer of Fox and MSNBC would clearly find that the former is engaging in partisan propaganda efforts unlike anything America has seen in the modern communication era.  The latter, meanwhile, offers partisan news commentary to a partisan audience.  There is no MSNBC equivalent to the Fox Effect.

It is a good deal easier, both in the classroom and in research, to presume that “both sides do it.” The Fox Effect offers a strong argument to the contrary.  It will not be the final word on this subject, but it should certainly inform the conversation.

*Fingers crossed that the embed link actually works.