Fox News: Dodo Zone

Created in 1996, Fox News, with its ultraconservative and reactionary political positions, is the most watched news channel in the United States: an inquiry into the Fox circus.

Bill O’Reilly is angry. Well, “Papa Bear,” as his team calls him, is always angry; it’s his trademark. Tonight, the host of the talk show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” has chosen to dissect the results of a Gallup poll showing a decline in conservative ideas on societal issues. Gay marriage: disaster! Out of wedlock babies: disaster! The poll reveals a country that is a lot more tolerant than it was 10 or 15 years ago. America is “unable to discipline [itself] into formulating a philosophy of life,” rants O’Reilly. Bill strikes, and his audience falls down dead. In living rooms in the American heartland, fists are raised, people tap their feet, they expertly enjoy O’Reilly’s words as he pours out his bile, and they share his ray of hope: on the subject of adultery, Americans remain intolerant. Phew! “America is not France,” concludes the host. They applaud, and then they go to bed. Bill’s audience is white, male, Republican, and especially older: 72 on average … Bill is right. America is not France.

Fox News Isn’t a News Channel. It’s a Zoo.

The French don’t understand Fox News; they still think it’s an American news channel that got caught up in that story of “no-go zones” in the heart of Paris, neighborhoods ruled by Shariah law where the police wouldn’t set foot. Our little Frenchies made themselves hoarse with their indignation (Anne Hidalgo) or took these words as jokes (“Le Petit Journal”), but they missed what Americans have known forever: Fox News isn’t a news channel. It’s a zoo; a theme park for the paranoid; a Disneyland full of crazies. In the United States, it’s free to watch, as long as you can handle watching long commercial breaks aimed at senior citizens.

If you’ve never watched it, test it out. Even if you don’t understand a word of English, you won’t get bored. Fox News is a unique mix, an unlikely cocktail of embittered viewers, incendiary hosts, and Barbie-like newsreaders. Ah yes, the blondes of Fox News … they alone are worth the trip, even without subtitles. “It’s simple: Old men love pretty blondes. A significant proportion of the channel’s audience is made up of men who don’t even listen to what they’re saying because they’re so busy ogling the pretty girls,”* observes Bruce Bartlett, a former advisor to Reagan and the Bushes, regularly invited on the channel until he published a book criticizing George W. Bush, whom he accused of having “bankrupted America and betrayed the Reagan legacy.”

“The people at Fox informed my editor that they had received an order to never invite me again, and to not even mention my name on the channel. An order from high up …” confides Bartlett. “That’s still true, nine years later.”

The Blondes of Fox News

But let’s get back to those blondes with their exaggerated look. Their styling is so cartoonish that even they sometimes seem surprised by the staging that they are forced to undergo when they take their first steps as reporters or presenters. “Some are shocked when they’re in the hands of hairstylists and makeup artists for the first time, and they find themselves with big hair, made up like Playboy playmates,” says Joe Muto.* Muto was O’Reilly’s assistant producer before becoming the “mole” of Fox News who divulged information, with videos and photos as corroborating evidence, and which came at the cost of Muto being summarily fired when he was discovered. Even a journalist with recognized professional skills like Megan Kelly, (blonde) star host of “The Kelly File,” has had to play a bimbo for a long time to climb the hierarchy.

The second essential ingredient in the Fox circus, less sexy but definitely more important, is its audience. Fox News was born in 1996 from a meeting between the under-represented right in the media and a man named Roger Ailes. Imagine a chubby Alfred Hitchcock at 75, but the bad guy version. This former adviser to Nixon and the older Bush, who worked at NBC, is the brains and the boss of the cable channel. Even Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, has recognized privately that Ailes is “paranoid, crazy,” and that he “really believes that stuff” that his channel talks about.

Murdoch even tried to get rid of him before realizing that he risked killing Fox News, the cash cow of his media empire. Murdoch, the old crook, as an expert on the media, also admires the virtuosity with which Fox News knows how to rub its embittered audience the right way. “On this channel, even the most boring personalities in the political world are reborn as triumphant heroes,” remarks Gabriel Sherman in an enlightening biography of Roger Ailes. [“The Loudest Voice in the Room: The Inside Story of How Roger Ailes and Fox News Remade American Politics”] And the best is that Ailes’ viewers, the voters, are the protagonists of his programs; they are presented as the victims of Socialist rulers or the rebels who dig their heels in to take back the government. These spectators, on their couches, are flattered to be the most important participants, the foot soldiers in Ailes’s army.

Sushi Is an Effeminate Food for Lefties!

It’s important to say that the head general isn’t hamming it up when it comes to his paranoia; he is unhealthily secretive, is firmly convinced that al-Qaida wants to bump him off, and chose the bullet-proof glass in the windows of his office himself. He is a dreaded man who asks his troops, in particular, his lieutenants, to hold up the convictions of crusaders for the right wing, the very antithesis of the famous “fair and balanced” principle Fox News claims in its slogans. During election night, we thus saw one of his right-hand men discretely eating his sushi far from the man they call “The Chairman.” For Roger Ailes, sushi is an effeminate food for lefties!

Fox News’ stroke of genius is to throw to its ferocious audience the red meat it demands. So what about the news? Bartlett wasn’t at all surprised to see the station reporting nonsense about the so-called “no-go zones” in Paris: “They do that all the time,” he says. “They put ideology and politics first; their main goal is to promote what the right wing of the Republican Party supports and, as it happens, those people hate Muslims, Europeans, foreigners, especially those with dark skin. You have the same extremists in France, but the difference is that France doesn’t have a TV station entirely devoted to the ideas of the Le Pens.”*

Fox has its obsessions (Benghazi, for example) and its own editorial “no-go zones,” like climate change. “We never hear about it on Fox because conservatives think it’s propaganda,” remarks Bartlett. “If they admitted it was real, they would have to accept the establishment of measures like the carbon tax. They would rather destroy the planet than admit that certain measures they’re opposed to are appropriate.”*

The manager at Fox who conducted the first hiring interview with Muto, a certain Jessica, didn’t tell him otherwise: “We are entirely guided by our viewers. The reason why people who watch this channel love us is that we give them the stories they want to hear. In return, they are very loyal.”* That can go too far. Thus, when some crackpots in Texas suspect the federal government of wanting to invade and systematically exploit their state under the guise of military maneuvers, Fox News is careful not to call their mental health into question. “They validate extremist ideas that no one in the respectable media would take seriously,” stresses Bartlett.*

‘No-Go Zones’

To back the maneuver, Murdoch’s New York Post published an article on the subject, without confirming that it was true, but indicating “a concern among certain conservatives,” after which Fox News cited The New York Post, and everyone started citing Fox News. We saw the same contagion phenomenon with the infamous “no-go zones.” Anderson Cooper, star anchor at CNN, approved the expression — and the idea that the zones were real — after a pseudo-expert, who got the “news” from Fox News, was interviewed on his channel.

In the case of the Parisian “no-go zones,” another factor is at play: Fox News’ inadequate international network. After 9/11, the conservative channel had six correspondent bureaus in contrast to CNN’s 31; since then, nothing has changed. “They neglect their foreign offices,” observes Muto, the former employee. “I think they have a producer and a correspondent in charge of almost all of Europe. They’re barely interested in what happens outside of our border because Roger Ailes is persuaded that the American public doesn’t care about the world.”*

It’s also a calculation. Behind its pretensions of being the country’s most watched news channel, Fox News is an ultraprofitable business ruled by economy; most of the salaried employees are paid peanuts, and the foreign correspondents are financed a tiny bit at a time. The other stroke of genius of Murdoch-Ailes is to have imposed their channel all over the country (100 million American homes get the channel) by paying cable operators to air Fox News.

Fox’s center of power, its business center, is the Republican right. There is currently a passionate debate about whether the channel is a kingmaker for the right wing or a paper tiger. The two camps have made good arguments, but everyone agrees that it’s definitely Roger Ailes’ ambition to play a kingmaker role. “In the last eight months of 2011,” figures Sherman, “the Republican presidential candidates [for 2012] made more than 600 appearances on Fox News or Fox Business News … Their air time during that period was 77 hours and 24 minutes.”*

The influence of Fox News is particularly strong since several White House hopefuls have or had TV shows on the channel.

No candidate on the right would risk an attack on the news channel: “I don’t know if they’re kingmakers, but they can certainly destroy someone,” says Muto.*

Fox News has prospered in the last 20 years, while the Republicans have only been in the White House for eight years. Meanwhile, from 1952 to 1988, a period allegedly dominated by the left-leaning media, seven out of 10 presidential terms were filled by Republicans. Fox News, entirely occupied with cultivating an atmosphere of “self-brain washing,” to use Bartlett’s expression, solidifies the ideas of the right, increasing its inability to define a strategy in touch with the times. In a rare moment of honesty, O’Reilly, seeming to sense danger, said, “The conservative movement seems obsessed with hatred, unfortunately.”* These are the words of an expert, the words of an incendiary.

*Editor’s note: These quotes, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.