How Fox News primed Trump’s mob with anger, hope and ultimately the reason for action

This article is part of a series about a legal threat sent to Crikey by Lachlan Murdoch, over an article Crikey published about the January 6 riots in the US. For the series introduction go here, and for the full series go here.

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In the two months following the November 2020 presidential election, the Fox News cable network promoted and amplified the “stolen election” conspiracy theory, creating the overheated political environment that made the Trump coup at first possible, and then actual.

It can’t be understood as journalism, although it lathers its output with that oh-so-journalistic feel. And it’s more than propaganda. It seems more like practical activism as, knowingly or not, Fox led its MAGA audience through the three steps all activists know from Saul Alinsky’s organising guidebook Rules for Radicals: build anger and feed it with hope that urges on action. 

Anger

Anger kicked off the day after the November 3 vote as Sean Hannity launched into his evening show with “Tonight, every American should be angry, outraged and worried and concerned about what happened in the election and the lead-up to the election.”

The next night, Tucker Carlson legitimated that anger with a call to slow down the count: “Normal people are becoming paranoid. Americans who love this country are beginning to fear it. Why? … Because shutting down legitimate discourse and inquiry always has that effect.”

Over the next two months, Fox kept the fraud story bubbling along: amplifying “news” reporting that evolved fact-free claims and dubious assertions; and promoting and platforming Trump’s legal team, election “experts” and Republican senators pushing the fraud conspiracy.

A Media Matters review of Fox programming in the nine days after networks declared Biden the winner on November 7 found Fox “cast doubt on or pushed conspiracy theories about the election results” — and sometimes both — 574 times.

Of these, 208 were in Fox’s “news” shows while 366 were in opinion programming. The top program for these false reports was the morning program Fox & Friends (96 claims in the nine surveyed days), followed by the evening Hannity show with 76 total claims in the period.

Like any good drama, the Fox coverage had its plot twists to keep the audience engaged (another Alinsky tip to activists, by the way).

As Trump led in early counting due to the “red mirage” caused by the initial counting of election day Trump-leaning votes, the fraud claims focused on Democrat-leaning mail-in votes with stories about blocks of votes mysteriously dropping into the count, particularly in largely Black cities like Detroit and Atlanta.

As the count ground on — and ground down Republican hopes — the conspiracy shifted to increasingly bizarre claims of rigged electronic voting machines focusing on two relatively small players, Dominion and Smartmatic, with allegations of vote-switching and vote-dumping to change the total figures in key swing states. (Both companies are suing Fox in billion-dollar defamation suits over the claims. Courts in New York and Delaware have rejected the company’s attempt to dismiss the actions.)

While Fox’s journalistic conceit required the occasional sceptical questioning, the sheer volume and repetition of the allegations did its job. Even now, polls show 70% of Republican voters believe the election was stolen.

The Fox reporting spread across social media, encouraged by the Trump-Fox tweet-retweet dance. According to Twitter analytics company Tweetbinder, “Fox News” and “Fox & Friends” were two of the three most commonly cited handles in Trump’s tweets. (“Barack Obama” was the other.) Washington media have long understood Trump’s stream as a virtual live-tweeting of whatever was on Fox at the time.

During the Big Lie build up, Fox returned the favour. According to First Draft, in the period from early 2020 until January 19 2021, when Trump was banned after the January 6 coup, he tweeted 12,392 times. Between them, the three news cable networks broadcast on-screen images of 1954 of them, with Fox allocating 582 minutes to the screen-shots.

The Fox persistence ensured all other media kept at the story. The tsk-tsking fact-checks and head-shaking on other networks worked to help the story along while giving Fox’s commentariat the sort of talking point it and its audiences love: here’s the story the elite media don’t want you to hear. 

Hope

The anger demanded hope that the stolen election would not stand. In that first week, reporting of alleged fraud itself held out a hand to grieving Trumpists. On that first Friday, as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada were slipping away, Trump-supporting Senator Lindsey Graham assured Fox viewers that in those states there was going to be “real evidence” of voting irregularities.

But while Trump’s repeated court challenges provided regular content updates and talking points for the network, it failed to change the inexorable process of the count.

The hope narrative quickly pivoted to the demand that Republican-dominated legislatures in Biden-voting states should overturn the popular vote and nominate Trump-supporting delegates to the Electoral College (where the president is officially determined). The demand was promoted and amplified on Fox as constitutionally permitted — indeed, required — by the circumstances.

Action

Although the network was often moving too slowly for Trump’s satisfaction (and too quickly in calling results for Biden), it was early in calling for action by Republicans with the coded call to count “all legal votes”.

It translated almost immediately into attacks and abuse on election officials, with demonstrations outside key counting sites. Officials in the key swing state of Michigan, for example, reported armed people turning up outside their office, as well as abusive calls and messages, including threats to their lives and the lives of their families.

Almost simultaneously, calls for Republican legislatures to override the “tainted” vote with appointed Electoral College delegates became a steady drumbeat on Fox. From the first week, commentators were encouraging Republicans to commit to the plan. Just two days after election day, Hannity urged the action on both Graham and Senator Ted Cruz. Both nodded on to his lead.

Over the next two months, commentators, Trump lawyers, and right-wing constitutional “experts” paraded through Fox shows to talk up the action, and the legislatures-must-intervene beat sped up from allegro to presto.

And on January 6, with two months of Fox’s anger and hope behind it, the Fox beat drummed Trump’s mob into the Capitol to force by violence the action Fox’s anger and hope had fed.