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When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”
“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”
But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.
Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.
When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” The article notes that most people care about and interact with the government through economic or affordability issues—prices, jobs, health care, social programs, and taxes—and that most laws are also about these issues. But, he points out, political rhetoric overwhelmingly focuses on issues like race, crime, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and guns: the so-called culture war.
Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”
“In other words,” Morris writes, “when cable news producers decide to cover an issue more, voters subsequently say it is more important to them, and that issue is more predictive of how they’ll vote. TV news coverage, and cable in particular, has the power to choose which issues are most ‘salient’ for upcoming elections.” He notes that “this effect is almost entirely, or maybe even entirely, driven by Fox News,” and that right-wing politicians benefit most from it. Democrats get their highest marks from voters on issues not covered by cable news.
Morris concludes that “more than the Republicans or Democrats, left or right, it’s the companies that abuse our attention for profit that are the real winners of American politics.”
This conclusion echoes a 2006 conversation a reporter for Financial Times held with Fox News Channel founder Rupert Murdoch and chief executive officer Roger Ailes. In that conversation, when asked if running the Fox News Channel was “like running a political campaign,” Ailes responded: “No more than running a Dairy Queen. You have a customer, you have to market it to help them get to your product, the product has to be good, you can’t drop too many on the floor or in the sprinkles or you’ll lose money. All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.”
Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. “Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”
Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised “town halls” geared to different audiences, in which he arranged the set, Nixon’s answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon’s makeup, and the crowd’s applause. “Let’s face it,” he said, “a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But, carefully managed, television could “make them forget all that.”
Ailes found his stride working for right-wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, and a short-lived television show hosted by right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996.
Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the “orchestra pit theory.” He explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
This is a theory Trump has always embraced, and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration—to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT—and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” Bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right-wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.
Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of “affordability” is a “Democrat con job.” In an interview yesterday with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former president Joe Biden’s having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.”
As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy—as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and his mental acuity—Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism, and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as “garbage,” to attack female reporters, and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the Walz home shouting the slur.
The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division CNN, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But, as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Bros. Discovery for itself.
David Ellison, son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co-founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen, and as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.
The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of CBS, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is CNN, which Netflix doesn’t particularly want but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that “Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”
During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right-wing politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans launched a new form of journalism. S.S. McClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and a partner started McClure’s Magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens’s exposé of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker’s exposé of workers’ violence during a coal strike.
Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city, and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled “The American Contempt of Law.” It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.
“Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?” McClure asked. “The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.”
“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”
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Notes:
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/27v4xxenpo8wotkw1238e/rao-jmp.pdf
https://www.ft.com/content/5b77af92-548c-11db-901f-0000779e2340
Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President, 1968 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970), pp. 36, 41–45.