Network of Lies

 

Brian Stelter, “Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News: Trump and the battle for American Democracy,” One Signal, 2023, 326 pp..

An excellent and thorough analysis of Fox News; well worth reading.  When I grew up I believed that newscasters, even when wrong, at least believed what they were saying or at least believed in the agenda they were pedaling.  Unless, of course, they were writing for The National Enquirer.  Fox “News”  follows the Enquirer model. 

NYT Book Review:

In ‘Network of Lies,’ Brian Stelter Builds the Case Against Fox New

It’s easy to be blasé about a new exposé of Fox News. There have been many, going back at least as far as Al Franken’s best-selling 2003 book “Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, plowing over six more mailboxes, five more crossing guards, four elderly scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans kids and a solar panel.

 

Stelter’s guilelessness matters, for reasons Martin Amis understood. Amis told The Paris Review all the way back in 1998 (when Fox News was 2 years old): “As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.”

Much of the Dominion case material has been previously reported. Yet Stelter finds new nuggets. The essential thing he does is lash this material together, as if he were a prosecutor, and turn it into a narrative with sweep and power. He places time stamps on obvious lie after obvious lie from Fox insiders, nearly all of whom knew they were peddling snake oil.

Stelter has watched a lot of Fox News, nearly as much as anybody alive. In doing so he has been — to borrow a term from “Succession,” the Murdoch family-inspired HBO series — a national pain sponge. He has been glued to the set, eyes peeled, notebook in hand, so others don’t have to be.

He really lets the brown water flow over you. His Fox News is a nightly Russell Stover assortment of ginned-up grievances and predictions of cataclysm and collapse. The network delivers insinuation instead of reason, in this account, irritable gestures instead of journalism, a great deal of voice and little of mind. Fox News is biased against expertise and culture. Its hosts patrol and destroy, as white blood cells do in the body, any hint of sequential reasoning. They deliver the kind of shallow and primitive totalitarian propaganda that George Orwell, in “1984,” called prolefeed. In “Network of Lies” it is a dead-end grotto of the human spirit. Flood the zone with wit, as Steve Bannon did not say.

Stelter spends a good deal of time on Tucker Carlson. There is his “big, hysterical, hyena-like laugh” and his “look of chronic dyspepsia.” More essentially, there is his mainstreaming of white nationalism. His paranoid messages sounded good to certain ears: “You are being manipulated”; “It’s our country, not theirs”; “Your views are not evil.” Stelter describes how, when Carlson left Washington, D.C., and began spending all his time in remote Maine, and on an island in Florida, the isolation changed him because “it separated him from people and events, from the diversity of the real world.”

Carlson’s influence over the Republican Party was enormous. He was like Joaquin Phoenix in “Gladiator,” asking the crowd to give a thumb's up on whether someone, in this case a politician, lived or died. Stelter tracks the long list of reasons (ad boycotts, sexist and racist texts, the dislike colleagues felt for him, his smug sense that he was bigger than his network) that led to his firing.

Carlson and Fox News changed conservatism. Together, they put the wedgie into wedge issues. And they helped erode, Stelter writes, “some Republicans’ commitment to the basic tenets of democracy.” Alongside Trump, Fox changed the tone of American conversation. This is what “trickle down” has come to mean: We live in a stupider, more bellicose world.

Democrats are led by the brain, the old saw goes, while Republicans are led by the gut. This has, by and large, been a healthy balance in America. But what happens when the Republican gut becomes merely colon, rectum, and anus, this book asks, and hot filth pours from it? Reading Stelter I was reminded of a tweet that made the rounds a few years ago: “Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us.”

Stelter’s book never takes its eyes, for long, off Rupert Murdoch, the family patriarch. He is 92 and, not to be ghoulish about it, the death watch is on. Stelter quotes a conservative media insider who tells him, “Rupert’s death will change politics more than Trump’s descent down the escalator.”

Nearly a century ago, the British journalist C.P. Scott is said to have predicted that no good would come of television because the word is half Greek and half Latin. On television these days, cards are being shuffled in the run-up to the 2024 election. Stelter’s excellent book makes one fear that no ace will rise to the top of the deck.