The Foxification of News

The Foxification of News (also known as the Fox News Effect) is a term used to describe the apparent effect of News Corporation's Fox News Channel on print, broadcast and online news media. Fox News Channel premiered on October 7, 1996 with former NBC executive and political adviser Roger Ailes as its CEO. Since it's debut Fox News has engendered considerable controversy and debate about the apparent conservative bias in both its news coverage and opinion shows. Despite these accusations, News Corporation President and CEO Rupert Murdoch and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes have maintained that its news coverage is unbiased and that critics are confusing its news coverage with its opinion programs. Fox News come under the most scrutiny and criticism from progressive media watchdog groups such as FAIR, Media Matters, and Adbusters.
Fox News often presents itself as the alternative to a mainstream media dominated by liberal discourse By arguing that it gives its audience the 'real' story without liberal bias' it appeals to an affiliatory audience: American conservatives and right-leaning independents. Fox News has had an effect not only on conservative opinion, but also other networks and even vote share. In some ways, Fox News' appeal to a conservative audience has placed the impetus on other print, broadcast, and online media to appeal to particular audiences to bolster ratings and profits. Whereas CNN continues to lose viewers, more people tune in to Fox News Channel and MSNBC. This trend has come about through the establishment of 24-hour news cable services and the ubiquity of the Internet.
In Canada, Quebecor Media debuted its Sun News Network on April 18, 2011. It seeks to emulate Fox News Channel's mix of conservative news and opinion and tap into what it perceives as a market within Canada that has not been served. The months leading up to the debut of Sun News Network were filled with controversy, which continues to this day through its bitter feud with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. as Fox News brought on Roger Ailes, a former presidential adviser to Republican presidents, Quebecor brought in Kory Teneycke, who was formerly director of communications for Prime Minister's Office under Stephen Harper. This has led to more concerns about the intentions of the Sun News Network and the type of messaging that it would give to the public. It also demonstrates Fox News' influence on media in other countries. The Fox News Channel has strengthened the attraction of affiliatory audiences in news media.
The rise of media choice
Evolution of cable news
Although there was a significant partisan press tradition within the United States and Canada throughout the 19th century, in the early 20th century newspapers began to adopt more of an objective stance in order to appeal to a wide range of readers. With the rising population in cities and large towns and a broader middle-class readership, objectivity was seen as a method of avoiding alienation of potential readers in order to increase circulation and profits. This model was carried over into radio and television so that news channels could attract both listeners and viewers. In the early days of television, news options were limited to ABC, CBS, and NBC. These were the three dominant networks from which citizens in the United States could get their news and they maintained the same standard of objectivity. However, this is no longer the case today.
The debut of cable news services in the United States lead to explosion of media choice. There are now 400 channels offering news, sports and entertainment. While this has certainly opened up the array of choices for consumers of news, critics argue that this has only strengthened the ability of people who want like-minded media to seek it out, or for people who dislike news and politics, to avoid it entirely. Alison Dagnes in Politics on Demand, traces the origin of the modern cable news network to the debut Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network in 1979. C-SPAN is a non-profit network that provides viewers with access to everything from Senate Committee Hearings to regular legislative business in the House of Representatives. In Canada, the Canada Public Affairs Channel (CPAC), which debuted in 1992, serves a similar function. Both channels offer their viewers political information without any editorial content or filters. Dagnes argues that "long before the Internet became a household technology, C-SPAN was the sole source of uninterrupted and unfiltered political information." C-SPAN and CPAC are both non-profit and considered by their founders to provide a public service.
However, a year after C-SPAN's debut, Ted Turner founded the Cable News Network (CNN). According to Dagnes, after the profits reaped by CNN during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, MSNBC and Fox News Channel were both subsequently launched to capitalize on the apparent success of cable. Despite CNN's original status as one of the most profitable cable news networks, MSNBC and Fox News, which have positioned themselves as more partisan networks, are now much more successful and profitable. The shift into partisanship may not have seemed like an obvious one. Despite debuting to over 17 million cable subscribers, Fox News was not initially successful. As The Economist noted: "the network was more famous for being opinionated than profitable." It was not until 2002 that Fox News began to overtake top rival CNN in terms of ratings and profits. The idea of reaping profits from TV news is a relatively recent one. As Av Westin, a journalist and producer with over 55 years experience, said in a speech delivered to students at Gonzanga University: "News was a 'loss leader,' bringing prestige but little or no monetary gain." In the same speech, Westin decried the use of partisan discourse in broadcast and print media directly blaming the "Foxification of News." Fox News Channel was the first to provide a 24-hour news channel and web service with a particular political lens by which its audience could experience news and opinion.
The Internet and the uses of news in the digital sphere
The fact that news is now political and profitable is a definite change from the norm that once dominated print, broadcast, and online news. And the idea of having a blatant political position colour both news and commentary has coincided not just with the rise of the number of cable channels, but with the Internet. The ubiquity of the Internet has definitely had an effect in connecting particular audiences with news and commentary that represents their point of view on the issues. Much attention has been given to rise of blogs and how they have been able to tap into specifically liberal or conservative audiences leading to success and prestige. Whether it is FAIR criticizing inaccuracies in a recent report by Fox News Channel or The Drudge Report promoting a sting video by Conservative activist James O' Keefe, or Firedoglake promoting a Democratic convention or RedState.org promoting the latest Tea Party meeting, partisan audiences have a variety of sources to choose from. One concern, however, is that this leads to an echo chamber effect in which a person only exposes themselves to information that conforms to their worldview.
Natalie Jomini Stroud, author of Niche News: The Politics of News Choice, proposes the idea of "partisan selective exposure." This is the idea that partisans will seek out information from print, broadcast, and digital media that is sympathetic to their views. Stroud lays down a theoretical framework and provides much empirical data and evidence to demonstrate that there are definitely niche audiences that seek out news from sources that confirm their worldview. One of her most compelling experiments involves Google News. Google News is a service that allows users to search for and even subscribe to specific news sources. Participants in the experiment were directed to a website that had four news stories. Two of the stories were about domestic issues while the other two were about domestic issues. Furthermore, two of these articles would be listed as coming from CNN and the other two from Fox News Channel. These were mixed and matched to change which articles would be seen and the source of each article. The results of the experiment were that when an ideal situation occurred of coverage of a preferred issue from a preferred source was available most participants would opt for it. Often whether the article came from was just as important as what it was about, with Stroud finding that liberals would rarely express approval or interest in Fox News Channel and vice versa for conservatives towards CNN.
Stroud's experiments clearly illustrate a trend in which certain groups place a particular emphasis on the source of the news and whether they perceive it to more clearly fit in with their particular worldview. Throughout Niche News, Stroud documents how audiences avoid sources that perceive as having a bias against their group and how the plurality of media choice doesn't mean that either side exposing themselves to forms of media with an opposite point of view. As Stroud concludes: "Unchecked, partisan media create and inflate gaps in the citizenry: gaps between those with partisan inclinations and those without gaps between those who affiliate with the political left and those who affiliate with the political right..."
Affiliatory audiences
An affiliatory audience is one that has a particular affiliation or point of view. The concept of partisan selective exposure discussed in earlier in the article is an example of affiliatory audiences and how they choose to read the news. Affiliatory audiences are often successfully established through providing specific content to its audience. In their July 9, 2011 issue entitled "Back to the coffee house" The Economist detailed how new media have returned us to a more personalized, conversational and partisan era represented by the European coffee houses in the 18th century. As the authors say: "The Internet is making news more participatory, social, diverse and partisan, reviving the discursive ethos of the era before mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics."
In an editorial in the same issue entitled "The Foxification of News",The Economist argues that print, broadcast and online media are de-emphasizing objectivity and using the same techniques to attract audiences utilized in in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These techniques were only fully replaced by objectivity in the early 20th century. Objectivity was necessary since it broadened a newspaper or news channels audience and advertising revenue by not alienating particular viewers. However, this model has now been reversed and more profit (Fox News earned over $800 million more than MSNBC and CNN combined ) is gained from appealing to a particular audience. CNN continues to lose viewers to Fox News and MSNBC. Fox News serves an affiliatory audience since it offers a particularly conservative brand of news and opinion. Bill Shine, Senior VP of Programming for Fox News Channel, told The Economist that Fox News' success lies in the fact that "we offer opinions not seen anywhere else.". In fact, with so much information available to potential consumers of media, offering a particular perspective can be seen as a wise business choice. The Economist article concludes that as long as a publication states its particular point of view, transparency is much more valuable than objectivity.
Stroud explores the use of a particular perspective in order to frame and highlight issues important to a particular audience. She recasts the concept of agenda setting as something more personal to the viewer rather than the traditional top-down view which argued the news media setting what issues are most important to the public. People are free to highlight their own particular concerns and their awareness is largely based on the issues that they consider to be important. However, this can have the consequence of potentially keeping someone somewhat ignorant or mistaken about a particular issue. For example, some studies have suggested that viewers of Fox News were more likely to believe that Iraq did indeed have weapons of mass destruction and that there was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Alison Dagnes in Politics on Demand looks at this issue by contrasting what she calls strong media theories, which suggest that media have a single, overarching effect on all viewers (i.e. the thesis presented by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves To Death about television making viewers less informed with "dumbed down" content) and Klapper's theory of minimizing effects in which social ties and personal preferences have an effect on media exposure. These two views are essentially contrast a macromedia theory with a micromedia theory. Both do not have to be seen as separate dichotomies but as mutually inclusive approaches to understanding the overall effect of news media. The evolution of media choices has been the result of new technology that have had an overarching effect on the kind of print, broadcast, and online media that an individual exposed to, however, factors such as social ties, personal taste and partisan interests play a role in what kind of print, broadcast, and online media that people consume.
Fox News' style of communication
In a recent interview, Roger Ailes argued that Fox News had to be more conservative in order to counter a perceived liberal bias in the rest of the media. However, this sentiment has been prevalent all the way back to Fox New's debut in 1996. And this messaging is a key part of what has made Fox News so successful in its appeal to its target audience by framing all of its content as essential and unique viewing and reading. While many critics and media theorists concentrate on perceptions of bias or how partisans select their news, there really has not as much focus on the style of Fox News and how it makes its brand appealing to its target audience.
Fox News has also developed a particular style of communication that variously contains appeals to patriotism, overt partisan discourse, and also employs the use of hyperbolic claims. This has made Fox News an appealing brand for its target audience and has allowed Fox News to steadily climb in viewers over the last 10 years. Fox News has commercialized and mainstreamed a style of discourse identified by political historian Richard Hofstadter as the paranoid style. This style of discourse warns its target audience about supposed external and internal threats to its well-being by a specific group. Fox News and even right-leaning blogs make this case constantly to their audience (conservatives and right-leaning independents) constantly warning them about the dangers of liberal media bias and liberal cultural domination. In fact, liberalism is often presented as having a cultural, political, and social hegemony that Fox News is obligated to counter-balance with its style of coverage. By construing itself as the only place for that audience to get a particular form of news.
Hoftstadter utilized this term, not as a way of dismissing all right-wing discourse but as a way of highlighting a style of communication prevalent during certain periods of American history, which appear in both progressive and conservative movements. Hoftstadter wanted to get away from the clinical definition of paranoia when he discussed the paranoid style. His intention was to probe a style rhetoric that primarily makes its appeal to "angry minds." The paranoid style is a successful rhetorical strategy that Hofstadter viewed as only being cyclical and apt to disappear after a period of time. However, Fox News' critiques of the "liberal media" and antagonism towards those it perceives as part of that media and cultural establishment all works towards its appeal to the affiliatory audience that watches the Fox News Channel. This has made it into of the most watched networks in the United States.
Canadian content
In Canada, the attempt has been made to appeal to a similar affiliatory audience as Fox News through the creation of the Sun News Network. Sun News uses a similar style of discourse as Fox News and has received similar criticisms from media groups and media organizations in Canada. The concern was that Sun News Network would be essentially "Fox News North" and it would be dedicated to deliberately misleading the public about important facts. When the CRTC began reconsidering whether or not false information could be given to the public further stoked fears about the arrival of the new network. For all intents and purposes, Sun News Network offers a similar style of programming as Fox News channel, which is a conservative spin on news and opinion. Some critics have taken this as a sign that Sun News Network will be unsuccessful. However, Fox News Channel was also unsuccessful in terms of ratings and profit until about 2002 when it started its climb into its presently dominant position. Furthermore, the Canadian TV news market is actually quite small when compared with the US. Only about 65, 000 viewers tune into watch news at prime time within Canada during an average minute of viewing.
One way that Sun News Network has recently involved itself in acrimonious dispute with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation over the $1 billion it receives from Canadian taxpayers. Also, the Conservative Party of Canada has placed the CBC under review and demanded that it hand over documents related to how its utilizes its finances. This has been done despite a recent poll indicating that a majority of Canadians support the CBC's funding at current levels or would even like to see it increased. Also, Heritage Minister James Moore originally promised that the CBC's funding would remain intact. Furthermore, a panel that is reviewing the CBC called upon journalists from the Sun News Network to give testimony (no journalists testified, but Quebecor President Pierre Karl Pelladeau did), which raised questions about the network's political independence.
The recent dispute between the CBC and Sun News Network is similar the dispute between Fox News and NPR with similar calls for defunding in both controversies. This illustrates Stroud's concern about the negative effect of partisan processes going unchecked in a democracy and how it creates a black-and-white political world, dividing citizens through appeals to resentment rather than having them work together towards accomplishing similar goals. Although there has been an increase in media choice and a plurality of perspectives, this has only made news in North America appeal more and more to niche audiences and ultimately narrowed our point of view.
Understanding the new media
In Understanding Media, Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that the new electric technology would create a world of total involvement in which person would be inextricably linked to one another and would participate conversationally in each other's lives. With the evolution of cable news and the rise of the Internet, a participatory news media has been created and each person can have up to the date news and opinion about events as they unfold from multiple sources, whether they are blogs, social networks, or cable news channels. However, due to the economic and political motivations involved in news media that conversation is only hitting limited audiences who aren't always interacting with each other.
The Foxification of News has occurred due to the rapid advance of communications technology and since it is both more politically and economically satisfactory to tailor content to specific, affiliatory audiences. According to a study conducted in 2006, Fox News increased Republican vote share by 5.9 per cent in areas that had Fox News Channel, and overall increased their vote percentage by 0.4 to 0.7 percent. Overall, 3 to 28 per cent of Fox News viewers were convinced to vote Republican. Natalie Jomini Stroud confirms in Niche News that partisan selective exposure can increase political participation, but that it also leads to screening out of other viewpoints that do not conform with one's own. The solution presented by Stroud and echoed by Alison Dagnes in her book Politics on Demand is that increased media literacy, discussions about bias, and creating more awareness of the current trends in the news media are the best ways of dealing with these effects. Transparency is about how information is presented to the public is also necessary. With objectivity eroding a clear, transparent statement of interest is needed.
This has been problematic with Fox News Channel and Sun News Network. Although Fox News Channel advertises itself as "Fair and Balanced" and Sun News Network advertises itself as offering "Hard News and Straight Talk" it is clear that they offer a conservative brand of news and opinion and it is misleading to not clearly state this particular bias. The recent controversy between the CBC and Sun News is disturbing since Sun News does not always explicitly state the ideological reasons for opposing Canada's public broadcaster and the economic ones (Radio-Canada is Quebecor Media's biggest competitor in Quebec). Marshall McLuhan said that "Nothing is inevitable, provided we are prepared to pay attention." As long as the appeals to niche audiences are understood and more media literacy is practiced than people will better understand how the Foxification of News has increased the attraction of affiliatory audiences.

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