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Feb 19 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
The latest filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation suit against Fox theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… nails something critics have long argued for.

Fox is not a news organization. It's something else.

But what is this thing? I will try to answer that.

Next slide, please. 1/
The Dominion suit establishes that Fox stars (like Tucker Carlson) and executives (like CEO Suzanne Scott) were fearful and enraged when some of their own people blundered into delivering a true and accurate report about the 2020 election.

Think about that... 2/
...When its own talent reported the facts truthfully, the result was a company crisis.

This is one way we know that Fox is not specifically a news organization.

There are others... 3/
Erik Wemple of the Washington Post shows how reponsible behavior by a wayward presenter was treated by company executives as a "brand threat."

If responsible journalism can be a threat to your brand, then it's not a news brand you have cultivated.

It's something different. 4/
Below is @BrianStelter with another story from Dominion's latest filing. A truthtelling journalist at Fox was thought by Tucker Carlson to have committed a firing offense. Her crime: when there was no evidence for Trump's claims she said "there is no evidence." 5/
Click to see Jacqui Heinrich's "crime" and you will see what I mean. It is a very careful, limited statement. Mild pushback. But it exposed a weakness for Fox.

Keepers of a resentment machine can suddenly find the resentment coming straight for them. 6/
"Sidney Powell is lying," said Tucker Carlson to his producer.

"Sidney Powell is a bit nuts," said Laura Ingraham to her colleagues.

They did not share this view with viewers. Much is excused by labelling them the "opinion side" of Fox. In fact they withheld their opinions. 7/
If Fox is not a news organization — to me it's not — and it is not "opinion," either (because the Dominion filing shows the hosts are frightened to share their opinions) then what is it, exactly?

Some common answers: It's entertainment. It's propaganda. No, it's just ratings. 8/
When I use the term "Fox," I mean the commercial arm of a political movement that has taken control of the Republican Party.

The product is resentment news. Current ways to resent. Success in that market makes for political power. That's the Fox I know. A kind of machine. 9/
By "machine" I mean to evoke both the manufacture of politicized grievance for fun and profit, and the kind of machine through which Richard Daley rose to power in mid 20th century. A machine in the sense of the Cook County Democratic Machine.

Again: not a news organization. 10/
Dominion's filings describe a time when the audience took charge of the resentment machine. Power traded hands for a bit. Viewer backlash from a correct call in Arizona felt ruinous. Stars with shows and executives nominally in charge of Fox saw how weak their positions were. 11/
I said it earlier: Confident keepers of a resentment machine can find the resentment coming straight at them. The party has to adapt to that. Fox has to accept that its powers are limited. The Fox audience can veto events that in the rest of the world unquestionably occurred. 12/
You're not a news organization if your audience's refusal to accept what happened prevents what happened from regularly airing as news.

That should be obvious to all, but especially after Dominion's latest filing, which shows how thoroughly freaked out the top people were. 13/
Though it is styled as one, Fox is not a news organization. And it's not opinion, either. It is something else: Power formation by means of resentment news.

But it doesn't always work. The crowd seethes back when the machine miscalculates, generating its own kind of power. 14/
Both the Republican Party and Murdoch's fear-and-lothing machine know they cannot control the core audience for commercialized resentment and white nationalism, which will turn on anyone who interferes in the free exercise of its many hatreds. 15/
The power structure at Fox called it "respecting" the audience when they stoked its belief in a stolen election. "Showing 'respect' to viewers by actively misinforming them," as Stelter put it, can stop them from raging at you.

But it is not the behavior of a news company. 16/
For more on the Dominion filing and what it says about Fox, see the actual document here: int.nyt.com/data/documentt… It has some redactions.

New York Times coverage. (Gift link) nytimes.com/2023/02/16/bus…

This thread:

17/
"The 'wackadoodle' foundation of Fox News' election-fraud claims" by @davidfolkenflik shows how extreme the fantasia got. npr.org/2023/02/20/115…

Also, if you're writing me about Fox registering as an entertainment company or some such thing, do read popehat.substack.com/p/fox-news-v-f…

18/

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Jay Rosen Profile picture
Feb 1
You may recall. An investigative journalist in Las Vegas, Jeff German, was stabbed. Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles was charged with murder. German was working on a story about Telles the week he was killed. Thing is, German was working on other stories too. 1/3
To continue Jeff German’s work, and as an act of solidarity, "The Washington Post teamed up with his newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, to complete one of the stories he’d planned to pursue."

He had heard about a Ponzi scheme... washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/… 2/3
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Jay Rosen Profile picture
Oct 26, 2022
"CNN won’t ban guests who have supported the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, but the network will attempt to keep conversations with those people in safe zones of truth, said people familiar with Licht’s thinking." cnbc.com/2022/10/26/cnn…
“...Most trusted brand in the world when it comes to journalism, right up there with the BBC,” Licht said. “I think what happened a little bit here in the past was it’s easy to take the quick sugar high of ratings and outrage. So, I’m trying to do no harm to a great brand.”
"Licht hasn’t told anchors or reporters to become more centrist, contrary to popular belief, according to [sources familiar]. He does want viewpoints from both sides of the political divide to appear on CNN. But he won’t stand for guests who push disinformation, he said."
Read 10 tweets
Jay Rosen Profile picture
Oct 23, 2022
In 2020 I wrote this thread. Tonight I accidentally deleted it. So I had to do a reconstruction job using the Internet Archive.

The thread is about something pretty big that I feel I got wrong. And it gets more and more wrong as time moves on. So if that's your thing... 1/
In January of 2009, I published at my site: "Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press." archive.pressthink.org/2009/01/12/ato… It was one of my most successful posts. But it had a flaw that I now consider fatal. This thread is the story of that flaw. 2/
Most of that 2009 post was my attempt to introduce a different way of thinking about the political influence of journalists, beyond criticisms of bias and constructs like "working the refs." I found it in a simple diagram from media scholar @danielchallin Here's a screenshot. 3/
Read 25 tweets
Jay Rosen Profile picture
Oct 12, 2022
"... news organizations that have built world-class climate desks but then let their business desk cover the fast-fashion giant Shein or the quarterly earnings report of Saudi Aramco as if there was no climate expertise in their newsroom whatsoever." ebu.ch/news/2022/10/w…
"When I compare climate journalism across the globe, I see the biggest difference between the United States and the rest of the world. In the US, comparatively more journalistic energy is still spent on having to prove and defend basic climate science..." ebu.ch/news/2022/10/w…
"All it took for the last IPCC report to be washed out of the news cycle within hours was an actor misbehaving at the Oscars. It had taken seven years to produce that report..." ebu.ch/news/2022/10/w…
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Jay Rosen Profile picture
Sep 1, 2022
If you can't clearly answer that question, your thinking on how to be solidly truthful but not overly ideological has not advanced very far.

Buzbee is editor of the Washington Post. This is by @Jon_Allsop for @CJR. cjr.org/the_media_toda…
Via @Jon_Allsop here is the Sally Buzbee response when asked whether democracy is at greater threat from Republicans or Democrats.
If you run a "mainstream" newsroom and someone asks you whether democracy is at greater threat from Republicans or Democrats, the key to avoiding a both-sides meltdown is to start like this:

"We hold everyone to the same standards."

Here's how the rest might go... [next slide]
Read 4 tweets
Jay Rosen Profile picture
Aug 29, 2022
Via @froomkin:

After forty years of covering Congress, AP reporter Alan Fram recounts not what he learned, but what he saw. apnews.com/article/fram-c… And here's the part that most interested me. (Next slide...) 1/3
"Congress is dominated by masters of political hardball who’ve survived a Darwinian culling of the nation’s most ambitious politicians. Covering them is like attending a riveting theatrical drama, except you get to wander behind the curtain and chat up the actors." 2/3

[more-->]
That is a clear statement of what I have called the savvy style in political journalism. Notice: the likening of politics to a game, the admiration for those who play "hardball" and prove their toughness, the comparison between reporting on politics and attending the theater. 3/3
Read 4 tweets

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