Overcoming the Fox News-Musk-Trump propaganda machine

A new study reports that a quarter of Americans believe the FBI, not Donald Trump, instigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That one-fourth of the country is so grossly misinformed actuates Ben Franklin’s wry quip about Americans having “a republic, if you can keep it.”

We cannot keep it, and we won’t, if half the country continues to consume disinformation-for-profit as news.

As we begin the 2024 election season in earnest, media neutrality- or the lack thereof- may shape voters’ perceptions and candidate preferences more than reality.

Propaganda is dividing the country

Mainstream media’s “performative neutrality,” as the Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan put it, doesn’t result in the delivery of neutral news. Neutrality, nationwide, isn’t possible if only moderate and center-left media outlets such as CNN and upstarts Scripps News and NewsNation strive to eliminate bias, while media outlets on the right embrace it.

If it wasn’t already obvious, the Dominion voting case made clear that Fox News so profits from extremism that it buries or distorts mitigating facts along the way. This means the only counterweight to center and left attempts at media neutrality is a network on the right that peddles barely disguised propaganda.

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The net national effect on the news is not balance but imbalance, an imbalance that hews hard right. Throw in some sensationalized reporting to generate outrage about crime, immigrants, gays and a stolen election, and pretty soon, a fascist who tried to overthrow the government and terminate the constitution gets invited back for another round.

While barely discussing one of Trump’s many indictments, Fox News ran a caption calling President Joe Biden a “wannabe dictator” who had just had “his political rival arrested.”

Fox was characteristically undeterred by the facts: Trump hand-picked FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Jack Smith, a registered independent who also prosecutes Democrats, indicted Trump based on the vote of 23 Floridians randomly selected for grand jury duty. Biden wasn’t among them.

On the same day Fox ran the caption, conservative former judge Michael Luttig assessed the array of facts presented in Trump’s indictment, and posted on X that “any attorney general of any party would have brought (similar) charges.”

Millions of Fox viewers saw the Biden slam, but they did not see Luttig’s refutation.

The cost of extremism

The societal cost of allowing political propaganda to masquerade as news is rising extremism. The national cost, if we don’t address it, could either be another civil war, or the ascendance of a fascist or even neo-Nazi government with all its brutal implications.

Recognizing the importance of honesty in the news, the Supreme Court, in 1969, unanimously affirmed the Fairness Doctrine in the Red Lion Broadcasting case, which required all news broadcasters to give fair coverage and opposing views on matters of public importance. Given America’s escalating division, the government’s interest in an impartially informed electorate has never been higher.

Balancing publishers’ First Amendment rights against the right of the public to be well informed, the Red Lion court determined that the public’s right to access full information took priority over the First Amendment concerns of broadcasters, writing, “It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited market-place of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market.”

Truth cannot prevail where it is not presented

The quality of public discourse began to tank with the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, with a heavy assist from the rise in social media.

Today’s scorched earth political landscape is anchored by Fox News, the Epoch Times and the Washington Examiner on the right, where opinions predominate the “news,” inflicting immeasurable damage on the depth and breadth of public knowledge.

The rise in extremism makes clear that the absence of state interference in the cable news cycle does not deliver market balance. In addition to make-believe about the J6 Capitol attack, one third of the country still believes Trump won the 2020 election, despite consistent judicial rulings to the contrary. It is no coincidence that Trump’s base gets most of its news from Fox, despite Fox’s nearly $800 million admission that it repeatedly lied to them about the election.

Fox continues to convince these same people that Trump’s indictment for failing to return national security documents, trying to overturn the election and abusing his office to pressure state election officials to lie is based on left-leaning politics rather than the rule of law, creating a political tinder keg.

Moderates should get behind an updated Fairness Doctrine

Moderates eager to wrest the country from the malign influence of strongmen and those who profit from disinformation should champion returning truth to the news.

Restoring fairness requires including conservative voices in a liberal cable news landscape, as well as the reverse. Semblance of accuracy from cable networks would also unfang the habitual response of “fake news” whenever inconvenient facts arise.

Consider Britain’s due impartiality requirement, which requires both accuracy and impartiality in the news. Both Trump and his former UK counterpart, Boris Johnson, call efforts to subject them to the rule of law “witch hunts.” But Johnson was dramatically censured by his own party for lying, while Trump was not. As a former member of Parliament told the New York Times, the severity of Johnson’ censure demonstrates Parliament’s “commitment to the fundamental importance of truth” in British politics.

The United States urgently needs to re-adopt the same fundamental commitment.

Elon Musk’s naivete about the First Amendment doesn’t help

Online disinformation is also out of control.

Since purchasing Twitter, Elon Musk frequently touts his efforts to “free the bird,” meaning, cut online content moderation.

In so doing, Musk handed dangerous anti-Semites, white nationalists and fascists a megaphone, and, instead of accepting the predictable market reaction, blames the Anti-Defamation League — not the hate speech he’s protecting — for losing approximately half of his advertising revenue.

Musk styles himself grandly as a “free speech absolutist” despite the fact that free speech protections have never applied to privately-run platforms such as Twitter, which Musk has renamed “X.”

Instead of fine-tuning content moderation, Musk terminated key employees engaged in content safety, allowing online hatred to flourish, predictably setting the company up to lose advertisers. Musk then blamed the Anti-Defamation League for X’s loss in revenue to cover his own poor management decisions — a classic Trumpian strongman finger-point exercise in projection.

Negativity and alarm sell online, too

Even without algorithms that amplify divisive content for profit, basic human survival instincts cause us reflexively to tune in to danger. That is why we pay disproportionate attention to negative information over positive.

Ditto, negative thoughts. When faced with real or perceived threats online, old flight or fight instincts are triggered. Pugilists stay in the thread and escalate rhetoric (fight), while others simply leave the discussion (flight), morphing public debate into a one-sided echo chamber fairly quickly.

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Despite these known distortion effects, Musk officially welcomed accounts previously suspended for hate and harassment back to X, including Trump’s, and hate speech and extremism on the platform have increased dramatically as a result.

Foreign terrorist groups are flourishing anew on X, alongside America’s own re-activated tinfoil hat brigade led by QAnon, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and right-wing militants.

Even a self-proclaimed “absolutist” should understand that inviting fascists and anti-Semites, including an incendiary ex-president, to stand in the public square screaming “fire” will eventually burn the square down.

Just as Musk’s free-for-all for the right is killing the town square, disinformation from Trump and Fox is killing national discourse and the democratic norms that depend on it.

The First Amendment does not object

Observing the corrosive effects of disinformation is easy.

Fixing it, not so much.

Requiring fairness in reporting is easier where licensing is involved. Given that the Fairness Doctrine pertained to broadcast media, extending it to cable news outlets would require a new regulatory framework — no small feat in a hyper-partisan Congress. However, since Red Lion still stands, logistical challenges of enforcement, while complex, would not be impossible.

Networks will invoke the First Amendment as grounds for avoiding government intervention, but the First Amendment has never served as a blanket shield from regulatory oversight. It does not shield electoral fraud, threats, obstruction, incitement to riot, defamatory speech, or yelling “fire” in a crowded theater unless there’s an actual fire. Those profiting from them will not curb their ratings-boosting excesses voluntarily.

Requiring that cable “news” be factual rather than editorial is not novel. In 1945, applying antitrust principles to the press, SCOTUS said that the First Amendment “rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public …”

The government has an affirmative duty to protect press freedoms; protection and regulation are two interrelated sides of the same coin. “It would be strange indeed … if the grave concern for freedom of the press which prompted adoption of the First Amendment should be read as a command that the government was without power to protect that freedom.” Preservation of democracy is surely as vital as antitrust.

James Madison said, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance … people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” In other words, democracy depends for its survival on an informed public.

Addictive anger-tainment is the opposite of information, and it is ripping us apart. Returning truth to the networks won’t be easy, but the effort is essential if our union is going to hold. Whether moneyed interests who profit from disinformation want our union to hold is another question altogether.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25-year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.