Why Fox Can Survive Its Mega-Scandal

By David Corn  April 4, 2023

Anti–Fox News protesters outside the network’s studios in New York City on March 21, 2023. RW/MediaPunch/IPX

We live in an age of explicit disinformation—that is, disinformation that is publicly confirmed as disinformation yet still succeeds as disinformation.

Donald Trump is a classic case. The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims he made as president, yet he still is supported by tens of millions of American and leads the 2024 GOP presidential field, even as he churns out more lies and falsehoods each day and stands indicted for charges related to a porn-star payoff.

Another example: Fox News.

The defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network for pushing lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election—which claimed the company helped rig the vote counting to steal the election from Trump—has demonstrated (once more) that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox is a propaganda-for-profit outfit, with hosts and executives serving up phony news to fuel and bolster the grievances, prejudices, and unfounded concerns of its right-wing audience in order to pocket big bucks. The evidence showing Fox is not a news network but a bullhorn designed to generate and exploit resentment, irrationality, and hatred keeps pouring out of this case. Last week, an email emerged in which Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, responding to one of the network’s reporters fact-checking a Trump lie about the 2020 election, wrote, “This has to stop now... This is bad business... The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material." No more truth!

This is a “naked lunch” moment. That comes from the title of William Burroughs’ classic 1959 novel, The Naked Lunch. The title for this non-linear collection of vignettes was suggested by Jack Kerouac, and Burroughs once explained, "The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” The Dominion lawsuit has clearly exposed Fox for what it is. Yet these revelations have not forced Fox to ground to a halt. It keeps pumping out the disinformation, and its audience continues to slop up the swill—perhaps even more so in the aftermath of the Trump indictment. Why does this disinformation operation still work after exposure?

There has been a fair bit of social science research on disinformation and false beliefs that can help explain the persistence and profitability of the Fox propaganda machine. In 2021, a report published by the American Psychological Association, focusing on misinformation related to the Covid-19 pandemic, summed up some of this work. It noted,

Misinformation on COVID-19 is so pervasive that even some patients dying from the disease still say it’s a hoax. In March 2020, nearly 30% of U.S. adults believed the Chinese government created the coronavirus as a bioweapon (Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 263, 2020) and in June, a quarter believed the outbreak was intentionally planned by people in power (Pew Research Center, 2020). 

Even though recent reports have bolstered the notion the virus originated in a Chinese lab, there is still no hard evidence of that and no evidence it was purposefully created as a bioweapon. Yet that idea spread quickly. And when a story like that gets started, it flourishes. “The fundamental problem with misinformation is that once people have heard it, they tend to believe and act on it, even after it’s been corrected,” Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of psychology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, told the APA. “Even in the best of all possible worlds, correcting misinformation is not an easy task.” That is good news for Fox.

Here's more from the APA report: 

Starting in the 1970s, psychologists showed that even after misinformation is corrected, false beliefs can still persist (Anderson, C. A., et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 39, No. 6, 1980).

“When we hear new information, we often think about what it may mean,” says Norbert Schwarz, PhD, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Southern California. “If we later hear a correction, it doesn’t invalidate our thoughts—and it’s our own thoughts that can maintain a bias, even when we accept that the original information was false.”

Schwarz identified five criteria that people use to decide whether information is true: compatibility with other known information, credibility of the source, whether others believe it, whether the information is internally consistent, and whether there is supporting evidence (“Metacognition,” in APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, 2015). His studies also show that people are more likely to accept misinformation as fact if it’s easy to hear or read (Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1999).

Research the APA cited applies directly to Fox. To wit:

Six “degrees of manipulation”—impersonation, conspiracy, emotion, polarization, discrediting, and trolling—are used to spread misinformation and disinformation, according to Sander van der Linden, PhD, a professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, and his colleagues. For instance, a false news story may quote a fake expert, use emotional language, or propose a conspiracy theory in order to manipulate readers.

Fox engages in all of those practices—promoting conspiracy theories (see Tucker Carlson), boosting polarization (see Tucker Carlson), relying on emotion (see Tucker Carlson), discrediting experts and demonizing political foes (see Tucker Carlson); deriding and trolling opponents (see Tucker Carlson); and impersonation (see Tucker Carlson, who privately says he detests Trump but then plays a Trump champion on television).

A paper published last year in Nature and titled “The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction” reinforces these points:

When deciding what is true, people are often biased to believe in the validity of information and ‘go with their gut’ and intuitions instead of deliberating. For example, in March 2020, 31% of Americans agreed that COVID-19 was purposefully created and spread, despite the absence of any credible evidence for its intentional development... This illusory truth effect arises because people use peripheral cues such as familiarity (a signal that a message has been encountered before),, processing fluency (a signal that a message is either encoded or retrieved effortlessly), and cohesion (a signal that the elements of a message have references in memory that are internally consistent) as signals for truth, and the strength of these cues increases with repetition. Thus, repetition increases belief in both misinformation and facts. Illusory truth can persist months after first exposure, regardless of cognitive ability and despite contradictory advice from an accurate source or accurate prior knowledge.

Both Fox and Trump are skilled at repeating false stories that trigger emotional responses, line up with an overarching narrative, and, thus, feel true.

The paper explains that many of us tend to use shortcuts to assess the truth: “Overall belief in news headlines is higher when the news headlines complement the reader’s worldview.” Political partisanship and “lazy thinking,” it adds, lead to the acceptance or embrace of misinformation. And the paper bolsters obvious points, such as this one: “People trust human information sources more if they perceive the source as attractive, powerful and similar to themselves… People believe in-group members more than out-group members.” As well as this: “The emotional content of the information shared also affects false-belief formation. Misleading content that spreads quickly and widely (‘virally’) on the internet often contains appeals to emotion, which can increase persuasion. For example, messages that aim to generate fear of harm can successfully change attitudes.”

Fox does all of this: Good-looking (or not-bad-looking) hosts who claim they are representing the audience in various political and culture battles present controversies in highly emotional contexts. (Woke lefties are trying to destroy the US of A!) And the anxiety and hysteria they promote delivers the message (and the dopamine shot). As this paper puts it, “Using feelings as information can leave people susceptible to deception, and encouraging people to ‘rely on their emotions’ increases their vulnerability to misinformation.”

The Center for Information Technology & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara recently posted an article headlined “Why We Fall for Fake News.” Spoiler: it’s because of cognitive biases. And it identified four main biases in this regard. One is “attention-getting signals”—a headline that sends a compelling message can be more important than the actual information in a story. Another is the “bandwagon effect”—repeating a notion, making it seem popular, will enhance its acceptance. A third is partisanship: put simply, people tend to believe what aligns with their political views. And conservatives may be more susceptible to this. (“Research demonstrated quite clearly that most politically-oriented fake news during the 2016 US election campaigns was consumed by conservatives, with Donald Trump supporters being especially likely to encounter and visit fake news sites,” the CITS paper says.)

The fourth bias is persistence: cognitive biases last a long time and “provide barriers to un-doing false beliefs.” That is, once someone believes something it is very, very, very hard to persuade them otherwise. If you’ve been convinced Fox is an important and trustworthy source, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and NBC News on the explosive emails, texts, and depositions in the Dominion case are not likely to change your view of the network.

Much social research emphasizes this point. It is tough to correct a factually incorrect view. “Misinformation can often continue to influence people’s thinking even after they receive a correction and accept it as true,” the Nature paper says. There is even a name for this: the “continued influence effect.” Fact-checking false news reports often doesn’t stop a lie from circulating and gaining traction. Ditto for showing that a source of information is wrong or unreliable. People want to believe what they want to believe. Consequently, Fox remains a primary source of information for millions of Americans, despite the recent revelations that thoroughly discredit the outfit. Employing all the basic techniques of disinformation, Murdoch’s operation provides viewers a service more important than providing information: reinforcing their strongly held views.

My hunch is that a key part of the formula is that Fox also reinforces the self-identity of its viewers. It allows them to feel part of a larger community—a tribe—in which their fears and grievances, especially the irrational ones, are shared and respected. As numerous exhibits in the Dominion case show, Fox execs realized how vital it was for them not to challenge their viewers’ detached-from-reality belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The same dynamic appears to be governing its coverage of the Trump indictment.

These Americans turn to Fox for affirmation of their biases, predilections, hatreds, and desires. Fox does that and much more, providing them a steady stream of new fears and worries that fit into their distorted worldview. (Drag queen groomers!) And the market rewards Murdoch and Fox for doing so.

For the rest of us—and, yes, we all have our cognitive biases—Fox has been proven a sham, a big con. It ought to be ostracized within the political-media realm, considered an American equivalent to the state media of a totalitarian regime. But its alliance is not to the state but to a political market, which overlaps with but is not quite the same as a political force. It used to tell its viewers, “we report, you decide.” It would be more accurate to say, “You (and your fears) decide what we report.” As long as there is money to be made by peddling disinformation—meaning, as long as millions of Americans yearn to have their misguided beliefs ratified—Fox will likely face few consequences for being exposed as fake news.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

Bruce Springsteen, Capital One Arena, March 27, 2023. Reviewing a collection of Bruce Springsteen outtakes and odds and ends over two decades ago, I observed that his music embodied the essence of rock ‘n’ roll: yearning. Consider the two signature songs from his break-out Born to Run album. In the title track, the protagonist craves a love that will allow him to escape the “death trap” of humdrum life and reach “that place where we really wanna go and we’ll walk in the sun.” In “Thunder Road,” the narrator declares, “It’s a town full of losers. I’m pulling out of here to win.” The message was clear: there’s something better out there, and it ain’t no sin to want it. But now, nearly 50 years down the road, Springsteen’s music embodies another fundamental piece of the human story: survival.

This is the leitmotif of his current tour with the E Street Band, which I witnessed last week in Washington, DC. Just the presence on the stage of this band of post-70 brothers was a testament to persistence and longevity. After decades of playing together and bonding with hundreds of millions of fans around the world, they are still able to perform as one of the best ensembles in the business. That is no small feat. Even though Springsteen has cut his shows from the once-legendary four-and-a-half-hour-long marathons to a compact two and three-quarter hours, these outings remain physically taxing and, more important, a challenge when it comes to matching the intensity of the performances of the early, middle, and later years. Yet Springsteen and the guys pull it off.

The show was more structured than previous tours—probably a result of his time performing the same spoken-word-and-music piece, Springsteen on Broadway, for over a year. The 73-year-old Springsteen stuck to the set list he had developed, took no requests, ad-libbed little. He went deep into his catalogue to play “Kitty’s Back” and “E Street Shuffle” from his pre–Born to Run days. He ran through some of the expected greatest hits. (He has too many to feature all of them.) One highlight was “Because the Night,” a tune he wrote with Patti Smith, that featured a soaring guitar solo from Nils Lofgren. The other E Streeters—guitarist Steven van Zandt, drummer Max Weinberg, pianist Roy Bitton, bassist Garry W. Tallent, violinist Soozie Tyrell, and keyboardist Charles Giordano—were in impressive form. (It’s amazing that Weinberg can still pound the drums with such strength for nearly three hours a night.) Saxophonist Jake Clemons demonstrated he has fully filled the hole left by the 2011 death of Clarence Clemons, his uncle. Curtis King Jr., a longtime backup singer for Springsteen, provided beautiful and exquisite vocals on “Nightshift,” Springsteen’s recent cover of the Commodores hit.

The show had all the usual, crowd-pleasing highs of a Springsteen outing, including a rollicking and playful rendition of “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” and an audience shout-along on “Born to Run.” But the spiritual center of the performance came from Springsteen’s 2020 album Letter to You. Springsteen served up three songs from that collection that contemplates the coming end of his long and notable run. “Ghosts” is a tribute to past bandmates who have left this world, particularly George Theiss, a musical mentor to Springsteen when he was in his teens. “Last Man Standing” is a remembrance of Springsteen’s first band, the Castiles, which was fronted by Theiss, now that Springsteen remains the final surviving member of the group. And after all the high-energy rocking, Springsteen closed the show by coming out alone with an acoustic guitar and playing “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” a lovely and haunting song about what might remain after death. (“For death is not the end / And I'll see you in my dreams.”)

“I’ll See You in My Dreams” is not quite a farewell song. But it’s close. It’s certainly recognition that there are more days behind than ahead—and a reminder that Springsteen, his band, and all of us who are still here have, in a way, survived together, and that this deserves celebration.

Here’s a performance of “Nightshift” from the tour’s stop in Dallas:

Here’s “I’ll See You in My Dreams” performed in Greensboro:

This Bird Has Flown, Susanna Hoffs. Is there such a thing as rock-chick-lit? If not, Susanna Hoffs, a co-founder of the Bangles (“Manic Monday,” “Walk Like an Egyptian”), has invented a genre of fiction with her new and first novel, This Bird Has Flown. Drawing upon her vast experience in the music biz, Hoffs gives us the story of Jane Start, a 33-year-old singer-songwriter who appears to be past her prime. Ten years ago, she had a hit record, a cover of a tune written by Jonesy, a very Prince-like megastar. (In what we call real life, Prince wrote “Manic Monday” for the Bangles, and the tabloid media, at the time, speculated about his personal interactions with Hoffs.) Start’s successful track was accompanied by a provocative video in which she donned a hot-pink wig and emulated Sharon Stone’s famous spread-the-legs scene in Basic Instinct. Yet a decade later, Start’s star has fizzled. Her second album, full of sophisticated and layered tunes, flopped, and her record label said adios. Now, after a breakup with her film-director beau (who dumped her for a model-turned-actress), a down-and-out Start is living with her ’rents and doing the odd personal appearance here and there, including a cheesy bachelor party in Vegas.

Life ain’t looking too grand, when Pippa, her ever-loyal agent, coaxes Start to voyage to London—there’s a deal in the works to use her hit song for a Gentle Caress toilet paper commercial—and on the plane she encounters a handsome and earnest Oxford professor named Tom Hardy (who would be played in the movie adaptation by Hugh Grant, were this book written 20 years ago). It's love at first kiss (at 35,000 feet). But, of course, trials and tribulations ensue. Something transpiring beneath the surface of this Oxford prof could spell trouble. Meanwhile, a skyrocketing pop star named Alfie has become smitten with Start. And out of the blue, the ever-manipulative Jonesy comes knocking with an offer that could revive Start’s career. But it’s complicated, as is everything with Jonesy. Will our hero take a fall or successfully navigate through the challenges of the past and the present?

Hoffs juggles all this deftly with delightful prose. The story moves spritely in this page-turner, as Hoffs spins her vast knowledge of pop music and her own days as a chart-topping musician into a rom-com infused with sly musical references and dead-on observations about the industry and the world of celebrity. Start is an engaging alter ego. She has the soul of a Bangle but not the success. When we meet her, she is racked with insecurities and perhaps too much a prisoner of her cravings for love. But life conspires to provide her a shot at redemption, both personal and career. And she will even receive the chance to finally resolve her complex relationship with Jonesy. Does the story end on a minor note or with a resplendent major chord? Hoffs skillfully plays this song until the final beat.

Here are two of my favorite Bangles tracks:

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

April 1, 2023: Trump’s indictment is yet another stress test for America; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 28, 2023: A Reagan bombshell reminds us of the GOP’s reliance on dirty tricks; elite bonding; Shrinking respects and breaks the sitcom formula; and more.

March 25, 2023: The real perversion in Trump’s porn-star-hush-money caper; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Possible Trump Indictment Edition); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 21, 2023: The Iraq War: a personal remembrance of dissent; Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero’s stunning investigative memoir; and more.

March 18, 2023: Is anti-wokeness all the GOP has?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Mike Pence); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 15, 2023: A debate (of sorts) over the Columbia Journalism Review’s huge Trump-Russia fail; Iris DeMent sings out about our current troubles; and more.

March 7, 2023: I visit paradise (the Tucson Festival of Books); do we need the blood and guts of All Quiet on the Western Front?; and more.

March 4, 2023: The (very selective) Covid wars; the never-ending story of George Santos; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Bezalel Smotrich); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 28, 2023: Ron DeSantis’ war on freedom; Racist of the Week update; Your Honor’s double jeopardy; Richard Thompson keeps getting better; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.