Fox and Friends hosts Steve Doocey, Greta, and The Wang

The genius of Fox News lies in its insistence that it is not a propaganda network. It’s right there in the tagline: fair and balanced, a motto which Fox News staffers and on-air personalities obey with unshakable fidelity, as indicated by their smile-like facial grimaces above. Fox News is neither fair nor balanced. Its whole marketing strategy is to flaunt a conservative bias, which is a smart way to secure one of two demographics in the United States that continually feel persecuted by an imagined mainstream.* That’s clever, but what’s brilliant is the constant, monolithic insistence that the network is not just honest and ethical, but the only honest and ethical news source on television. It’s an audacious doubling down on a proposition that everyone, Fox fans and critics alike, knows is a lie. That makes it thrilling to the conservative faithful and infuriating to everybody else, with only old people and your barber in the middle. But today’s discussion is going to ignore the existence of those Fox News viewers who actually believe the network is fair and balanced, on the grounds that such people are too dumb to influence the physical universe, much less American culture. Evidence after the jump.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi15OtKquD0#!

That right there is a four-minute segment created by a Fox and Friends producer to fairly investigate the balanced question, Is Barack Obama a suitable repository for hope? It also provides a journalistic retrospective on change, including such memorable moments as a recorded voice saying “gasoline prices have gone up; food prices have gone up [siren noise.]” (2:58-3:01) The fairness and balance are cemented by the same music that plays when members of the Gotham Police Department put on Joker masks.

It’s an attack ad, in other words. The only differences between this video and one produced by a Romney Super PAC are A) campaign advertisements are not normally four minutes long and B) it doesn’t mention Mitt Romney, presumably so Fox News can still support the candidacy of Donald Trump at the last minute. Otherwise, it is journalism in name only. Very few television journalism segments are constructed around four-second cuts, and even fewer seek to evaluate an entire presidency according to everything that happened in the last four years over as many minutes.

Perhaps I am beleaguering the point, here. I want to establish very clearly, however, that no intellectually honest person could regard this video as news. Even producer Chris White has to know that a picture of a car with an Obama logo on it lunging forward and then catching fire is not a journalistic way to convey information about gas prices. Fox and Friends occupies a liminal space between news and opinion already, but I submit that with this segment they tip their hand. It’s every bad economic indicator from the last four years cut together with footage of the president saying things are going to be okay and music that says but they weren’t!

So it’s May of an election year, and already cable’s most-watched news network is running propaganda videos during its morning show. Since we at Combat! are so fair and balanced with respect to Fox News, we’re going to refrain from commenting on whether that’s ethical and instead consider the question that—say it with me— many have asked: Can the network retain its popularity while openly running attack ads as news segments? Does the frisson come from Fox’s claim to be “fair and balanced” while it broadcasts propaganda, or does it come from the propaganda itself?

I don’t know. I suspect, though, that the eerie success of Fox News is at least partly attributable to the thrill of being in on a lie. Liberals hear the words “fair and balanced” and are infuriated. Fox News viewers can therefore repeat the words “fair and balanced” and infuriate liberals, which is at this point the most fun aspect of conservatism. The more the network winks, though—the more it runs videos like this one on Fox and Friends—the more it diminishes the effect.

It’s fun to lie. It’s especially fun to lie when everybody knows you’re lying but can’t do anything about it. An important component of such lying, however, is pretending. Pretending is what makes the difference between a lie and an inaccurate statement; it’s the gap in fun between insisting that you believe the sky is green and just saying it without any enthusiasm. If Fox News wants to stay at the top of the liar game, it should pretend better. Otherwise, they’ll all have to get jobs in PR.

Combat! blog is free. Why not share it?