Abstract
Kalemba Kizito looked critically at Fox and other news organizations. What Kizito reveals is that Fox News and its audience are distinct from the others. Its most popular programs are not news but commentaries by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, which, by the way, do not make any claim to be accurate and fact-checked. A large segment of the Fox audience relies only on Fox for their news and commentary. All the other news networks, including MSNBC, reply extensively on multiple sources and fact-check their news and commentary. High proportions of non-Fox news audiences also use multiple sources for their news and commentary. Fox News operates in an information silo where its audience misses most domestic news and virtually all international news. Additionally, there is little distinction between news and commentary. The outcomes are predictable. For one, a significant proportion of White America, who constitute the Fox audience, has been led into a dangerous worldview where they believe that their freedoms and government have been taken from them.
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Notes
- 1.
Apartheid refers to an official policy of discrimination on grounds of race. While commonly associated with South Africa, I argue here, that it is universally applicable to Western racial segregation.
- 2.
Cry Freedom echoes Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial critique in “Can the Subaltern speak?” Who tells the story of the marginalized is often an apparatus of the ruling/power elite?
- 3.
In a recent 2018 interview, Herman was asked how the propaganda model could be improved. He intimated that: We modified it in 2002 to include free-market ideology as an important ideological premise, complementing anticommunism. We could improve it by spelling out in much more detail how elite divisions and local factors affect the media and allow dissent more space … We could update on the growing command of militarism and war and the consequent growth in war propaganda (E.S. Herman 2000, 98). The recent uptick in racism during the presidential term of Donald Trump is also an example of how Whites’ harness the media to propagate racism. The model can improve by accounting for race as a critical filter, given its prevalence in elite media.
- 4.
Founded in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit legal organization that works for the promotion of Civil rights and social justice. They monitor and track domestic hate groups in the U.S., and actively pursue litigation in the area of Civil Rights. Their work is cited in government reports as well as in scholarly work.
- 5.
How Fox News helped turn masks into another culture war flashpoint. https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/how-fox-news-helped-turn-masks-another-culture-war-flashpoint.
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Kizito, K. (2021). Media: Fox News, Racism, and White America in the Age of Trump. In: Austin, D.W., Bowser, B.P. (eds) Impacts of Racism on White Americans In the Age of Trump. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75232-3_9
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