Fox News has lost control of its viewers
Fox News has lost control of its viewers
Fox News was founded to control the GOP base — but now the hosts are in the thrall of their worst viewers
By AMANDA MARCOTTE
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED APRIL 17, 2023 6:05AM (EDT)
(Salon) Roger Ailes came up with the idea for Fox News in the 70s, when he was working as an image consultant for then-president Richard Nixon. From the get-go, the idea was that a TV network would be a top-down propaganda outlet that would manipulate and control voters, especially more conservative ones. "People are lazy," read a document titled "A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News" that was presented to Nixon in 1970. "With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you." Even though the document was unsigned, it's widely believed to be the work of Ailes, who wanted a "pro-Administration" mouthpiece that could go around the traditional media.
The plan didn't get off the ground during the Nixon administration. It's arguable, and Ailes certainly believed, that if such a network had existed at the time, Nixon would have very well been able to survive Watergate. A Fox News would have been able to blast Republican voters with non-stop excuses that they could use to ignore the uncomfortable reality that their president was irredeemably corrupt. The proof of concept is evident: Donald Trump has survived multiple scandals that all make Watergate look like small stakes, largely because Fox is on hand to feed GOP voters all the rationalizations they need to stick by Trump's side.
Ailes, who died in 2017, was able to make his right-wing "news" network a reality in 1996 when he used Rupert Murdoch's backing to found Fox News. A defamation lawsuit against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems, which a judge delayed start of until Tuesday, has already revealed that Fox News does not work as Ailes imagined it would. It is not a top-down propaganda outlet exploiting the empty heads of its right-wing audience in order to exert mind control over them. On the contrary, pre-trial documents filed by Dominion show the opposite: Fox's content is determined largely by the audience. Fox viewers want their favorite network to affirm the various racist conspiracy theories that proliferate on right-wing social media, and Fox leadership, eager to keep viewers and ad dollars, has been all too willing to comply. Even when, as the documents show, they're well aware that the "news" they're reporting isn't true.
....(snip)....
"Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical," host Sean Hannity wrote in one text, arguing that Fox needed to step up its game in airing these election conspiracy theories, even though he knew full well that Biden was the actual winner.
....(snip)....
It's likely that the relationship between Fox News and its viewers did, at one time, exist how Ailes imagined it, where Fox News tells people what to believe and they obediently listen. The advent of social media, however, shifted the locus of power away from the network to its viewers. On social media, there's no real check on how wild conspiracy theories can get or how far misinformation can spread. To compete with that, Fox News has to offer the same high-octane right-wing nuttery. It's likely that the trial will result in even more embarrassing evidence of how much Fox has reshaped itself to appeal to its audience's ugliest desires. ................(more)
https://www.salon.com/2023/04/17/fox-news-has-lost-control-of-its-viewers/
= new reply since forum marked as read
trusted name in News.
And you're welcome! Had to pull out a disinfectant for the phone after that.
more information-lots more!
... however:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-skews/
The Fox News Channel won a 2004 court case allowing the cable channel to lie to viewers.
Rating:
False
False
About this rating
Rumors have circulated since at least 2009 claiming that the Fox News cable television channel fought successfully in court for the right to lie, misinform, or deceive viewers. The claim that Fox News legally won the "right to lie" has been repeated across the internet despite its being factually inaccurate on more than one level.
First, the case from which the rumor stemmed resulted in a Florida appeals court ruling in February 2003, not 2004. More germane to the rumor, however, is the fact that the case at hand did not involve the national Fox News Channel; rather, it was a breach of contract lawsuit filed by two reporters against their former employer, Tampa Bay television station WTVT. (The situation was somewhat more complicated because WTVT was an affiliate of the Fox television network and was also owned by Fox, but the Fox television network and the Fox News Channel are two distinctly different entities.)
The legal battle to which the rumor refers was about a husband-and-wife reporting team, Jane Aker and Steve Wilson, who in 1996 put together a story about the use of the Monsanto-produced synthetic bovine growth hormone (BGH) Posilac by Florida dairy farmers. WTVT's management asserted that the reporters' BGH piece was alarmist and one-sided and ordered the reporters to edit their story to produce a more "balanced" piece. Aker and Wilson defied those orders; as a result, the BGH story never aired, and the pair were terminated by WTVT in 1997.
The two reporters sued the station for breach of contract and retaliatory firing the following year, maintaining that they had been unfairly terminated from their jobs for "resisting WTVT's attempts to distort or suppress the BGH story" at the behest of Fox corporate and Monsanto, and that the station's management had fired them in retaliation over their threats to file a complaint about WTVT's "deliberate news distortion" to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC):
In September 1997, WTVT notified Akre and Wilson that it was exercising its option to terminate their employment contracts without cause. Akre and Wilson responded in writing to WTVT threatening to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC"
alleging that the station had "illegally" edited the still unfinished BGH report in violation of an FCC policy against federally licensed broadcasters deliberately distorting the news. The parties never resolved their differences regarding the content of the story, and consequently, the story never aired.
In April 1998, Akre and Wilson sued WTVT alleging, among other things, claims under the whistle-blower's statute. Those claims alleged that their terminations had been in retaliation for their resisting WTVT's attempts to distort or suppress the BGH story and for threatening to report the alleged news distortion to the FCC. Akre also brought claims for declaratory relief and for breach of contract. After a four-week trial, a jury found against Wilson on all of his claims. The trial court directed a verdict against Akre on her breach of contract claim, Akre abandoned her claim for declaratory relief, and the trial court let her whistle-blower claims go to the jury. The jury rejected all of Akre's claims except her claim that WTVT retaliated against her in response to her threat to disclose the alleged news distortion to the FCC. The jury awarded Akre $425,000 in damages.
Another common misconception is that Fox News invoked First Amendment protections in order to retain the "right to lie" during the lengthy legal battle between the couple and the Florida Fox affiliate. There was no mention of any such claim in the appeals court decision, and Akre herself does not corroborate it. Ultimately, the FCC concluded in 2007 that the conflict between Akre and Wilson and the affiliate boiled down to an "editorial dispute ... rather than a deliberate effort by [WTVT] to distort news."
The "right to lie" claims are similar to another false story about Fox News' trustworthiness, that the network was banned in Canada because it does not meet stringent Canadian broadcast standards for truthfulness.
I guess I stretched this to "SCOTUS says Fox under no obligation to post factual truth on their news broadcasts."
My bad.
Whenever I was down that way, I would pick up a print version but have an electronic sub and just checked the "print" version in the mobile app (I usually use the regular web version but have to use the app now to see the "print" view) and found it. 
The WaPo article at your link even has a snapshot of a tweet with an image of the paper version of the ad -
They won't ever get "the data". Maybe some "alt-data".
I don't know how many times I used to see OPs here that encouraged DUers to weigh in and "DU" some poll.
Trump, Nixon, Harding, even Reagan and W had some issues.
Trump really needs to be the first US president to go to prison. Make history! 
That it was all the fault of their intellectually and politically warped audience? An audience which was never coopted or guided by Fox but were, actually, the defacto source of all Fox's valuable propaganda. A case of "letters to the editor" gone wildly amok.
Fox was innocent all along but their viewers drug them into the sewer where they accidentally got rich and became the primary source of info for 40% of America's tee vee viewers.
I think we should take this moment to reflect, as progressives, on our role in this 
.
From Hugo Lowell, the young "The Guardian" reporter who appears on MSNBC as a contributor -
Link to tweet
@hugolowell
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Huh Guardian now ranks #5 for domestic U.S. audience reach online among competitors in segment, pretty impressive
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10:18 AM · Apr 18, 2023
I expect this is in contrast to the bullshit that Faux paid the NYT to print in a full page ad (i.e., there are all kinds of statistics out there and he didn't link to where he got his stats but there are several orgs that track this)