Abstract
In this article, I conduct a textual analysis of Fox News’s leading opinion programs during the Great Recession. I deconstruct the rhetorical strategies these programs deployed to advance the network’s free market interpretation of the economic crisis. Key to Fox’s interpretive strategy was a claim to represent ‘the Forgotten man’ of the downturn. However, in my analysis I show how this claim was established less by advocating policies that directly support working-class material interests and more by presenting Fox News pundits as the protectors and advocates of traditional moral-economic principles. Fox News pundits drew these principles from a long-standing strain of the American populist tradition called ‘producerism.’ My analysis illustrates how – in framing the wealthy and the business class as ‘job creators’ – Fox News programs reworked this tradition in order to include corporate managers in the moral community of producers, alongside members of the working class. This strategy was successful, I argue, because this earlier American political discourse still informs, often in unrecognized ways, the underlying normative assumptions that are expressed in modern debates about class, work, and wealth distribution.
People often oppose certain economic policies not because they have been or would be economically hurt by such policies, or even because they have any carefully calculated views about their economic efficacy, but because they disapprove on moral grounds of the assumptions on which they think the polices rest.
In 1996, the conservative cable network Fox News entered the U.S. media landscape and became the first major news channel to use political identity as a strategy of product differentiation (Curtin and Shattuc, 2009; Jones, 2012). In addition to tapping into a television news market for conservative viewers, Fox News spearheaded the development of new genres of television journalism that emphasized talk and opinion over ‘straight’ news reporting. It incorporated presentational elements from ‘low-brow’ public affairs formats such as daytime television, talk radio and British-style tabloid papers. With this, the news-talk shows that dominate Fox News’s current programming have advanced a new kind of personally ‘involved’ and emotionally expressive approach to news anchoring, which stands in contrast to the personal detachment and professional neutrality that characterize traditional news anchors on television (Peters, 2010).
Both popular and academic commentators have noted the populist rhetorical frames used in Fox’s marketing and programming. They note that from its inception, the network has consistently presented itself as an enemy of cultural elites and as an ally of ‘ordinary Americans,’ following a formula successfully used in Australia and the UK by Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News’s parent company News Corp (McKnight, 2010). But while many analysts of Fox have pointed to the network’s anti-elitist rhetorical posture, few studies have captured Fox’s nuanced use of conservative media traditions that are specific to American political culture. They have not shown how the populist narratives in Fox News programs utilize the representational strategy of the US postwar conservative movement and the broader populist rhetorical tradition it appropriated. To design Fox News’s brand, Murdoch recruited the network’s founding and current CEO Roger Ailes. Ailes was a former political strategist for various Republican administrations, and was well aware of the nation’s most enduring and resonant political traditions and iconographies.
While delivering audiences to the Republican Party is Fox’s political goal, its popular appeal lies in its cultural referents and media formats that are derived from aspects of the American populist tradition often deployed by the right. The effectiveness of its cultural strategy was no better exemplified than during the late 2000s Recession. In the wake of the failed Bush presidency and in the midst of the worst market failure in 80 years, Fox News’s coverage of the Great Recession was surprisingly effective not only at rehabilitating the damaged credibility of conservative economic ideas but also at advancing them. Moreover, it was during the dpeths of the Recession – in 2009 and 2010 – that Fox posted the highest ratings the network has enjoyed in its 18-year history (Holcomb et al., 2012). In this article, I will show how Fox appealed to working-class viewers and became successful in asserting its free market interpretation of the economic crisis.
Fox News programs framed the Great Recession in terms of the ‘forgotten man,’ a historic phrase that American president Franklin Roosevelt used to describe the working-class masses during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Fox’s claim to represent the downtrodden of the recent crisis was established less by advocating policies that directly supported working-class interests and more by presenting Fox News pundits as the protectors and advocates of traditional moral-economic principles. They emphasized the sanctity of skill, hard work and fair remuneration, addressing deeply felt beliefs of workers. In turning to these principles, Fox pundits drew a line between the moral and political views of the business class and the working class without evoking their divergent material interests. These principles have their roots in one of the most enduring strains of the American populist rhetorical tradition: producerism. Fox News pundits appropriated producerist rhetoric to give viewers a compelling moral logic for their opposition to Democratic, Keynesian policy. 1 This strategy was successful, I maintain, because this early political discourse still informs, often in unrecognized ways, the underlying normative assumptions about class, work and wealth distribution that give ‘dignity’ to American working men (Lamont, 2000).
In this article, I conduct a textual analysis that examines the populist rhetorical strategies Fox News’s leading opinion programs used during the late-2000s economic crisis. These programs include: (1) The O’Reilly Factor, Fox’s flagship program that has maintained the number one ratings position in U.S. cable news for more than a decade, (2) Hannity, a program that has been ranked second in the cable news field for a comparable amount time, and (3) Glenn Beck, a show that was short-lived but rose quickly to the third highest ranked ratings position during the pivotal years of 2009 and 2010. These programs dominated Fox News when the most consequential economic policies of the Obama administration were passed and when the conservative Tea Party street movement was ascendant. While each of these shows has their own special presentational characteristics and ideological preferences, in this article I will only address their similarities, namely, how each host of these programs repeatedly claimed to represent (and even embody) the ‘forgotten man’ of the Recession and how they all drew of upon the same stock of producerist themes, archetypes and moral logics in their free market framing of the crisis.
In the following pages, I will demonstrate the specific ways in which Fox News’s top programs helped create a discourse that I call ‘entrepreneurial producerism.’ First, I will explain the traditional narrative components of producerism and then compare this cultural tradition to Fox News’s customized version of the discourse. Second, I will illustrate how Fox News’s top shows – in using rhetoric about ‘the job creators’ – reinterpreted the labor theory of value in order to include the business class in the moral community of producers, alongside members of the working class. Finally, I will discuss how Fox News’s break with tradition in its entrepreneurial producerism finally began to undermine Fox News’s populist narrative of the Great Recession.
From traditional producerism to entrepreneurial producerism
Michael Kazin, a leading historian of American populism, maintains that, from the 19th century and well into the 20th century, the ‘producer ethic’ has been, ‘the central element in populist conceptions of “the people”.’ Kazin stresses that producer populism is first and foremost a moral discourse, but one that has been particularly used by mass orators and political parties to critique or justify class hierarchies and the system of wealth distribution. Like all populist discourses, producerism dichotomizes society into two opposing camps, the ‘producers’ and ‘parasites.’ 2 In Fox News programming, these groups are called ‘the makers and the takers.’
In this tradition, the government is seen as captured and controlled by an idle, aristocratic class that enriches itself by expropriating the wealth of the producing class. The intellectual roots of this discourse derive from the Lockean, ‘republican theory of property distribution’ that asserts a just society is one that distributes resources on the basis of what labor is contributed (Huston, 1998). Producerism’s other key tenet is drawn from the ‘labor theory of value’ of classical political economy, which maintains that all wealth is a result of productive human labor. Producerist tenets and narratives were especially popularized in America by the farmer and artisan working-class organizations of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian era politics. And the producer/parasite binary was at the heart of turn-of-the-20th-century populism and was revived again in the anti-monopoly rhetoric of the labor movement during the 1930s. It became an important dimension of conservative populism in the 1960s and the Great Society, and was especially asserted during the Reagan administration with its racialized mythology of the Cadillac-driving ‘welfare queen.’
During the Great Recession, Fox News played on these themes in an attempt to both protect and strengthen the hegemonic hold of conservative economic ideas in the face of crisis. Fox programs repeatedly suggested that the financial collapse was the result of ‘undisciplined’ borrowers and Democratic policies aimed at increasing home ownership among low-income citizens and racial minorities. In this way, the network’s framing of the crisis very much played on preexisting racial stereotypes about welfare-dependency and state-based parasitism. In one episode of Hannity (2009), British politician Daniel Hanna, a recurring guest, proclaimed, ‘you cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.’ Echoing this more succinctly, a guest on Glenn Beck (2009a) claimed, ‘Stimulus forwards the indolent at the expense of the productive.’
In contrast, Fox’s top hosts celebrated producers, but included among them the business elite. They repeatedly argued that business owners and the wealthy are the ones who shoulder the biggest tax burden and thus contribute the most to government and all that it provides for the entire population. This group, they stressed over and again, produced the most value in society. This was the hallmark of Fox’s ‘entrepreneurial producerism.’ This discourse advanced supply-side economic theory and the familiar ‘trickle-down’ argument of the right, opposing regulatory restraints on the business class and taxes on the wealthy. But entrepreneurial producerism did not so much offer an economic argument, but rather a moral rationale for supply-side policies as a way of rewarding hard work.
Fraught with profound contradictions, the successful deployment of entrepreneurial producerism was no easy task for Fox News programs. They had to use elaborate rhetorical strategies to conceal, redirect and manage the core contradictions of this discourse. Fox programs claimed to speak for ‘the many,’ while suggesting that the producing class was an embattled ‘few.’ And Fox News had to frame the producing class as an economically ‘successful’ group that was simultaneously victimized and marginalized. Noting these contradictions, one progressive blogger described Fox’s Recession era rhetoric as ‘rich-guy populism’ and liberals have wondered how it could be taken seriously by anyone (Reed, 2009). But I argue that the populist moral rhetoric, not political economic reasoning, prevailed, allowing Fox pundits to defend policies that seemingly only benefit the wealthiest citizens while claiming to ‘look out for the little guy.’
‘The job creators’: Fox News’s reinterpretation of the labor theory of value
Throughout Fox News’s coverage of the Recession, hosts across its leading programs equally referred to the rich as ‘job creators,’ and this term is very important because it is what is used on Fox to define businessmen as part of the laboring class. In an episode of Hannity (2010a) in which Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner asks host Sean Hannity, ‘do we really need to give millionaires and billionaires a tax cut?’ Hannity responds, ‘you use this word millionaires and billionaires, it sounds pejorative to me … you say rich, let me use another term for rich, job creator, taxpayer’. Recognizing how Weiner’s income-based descriptions of the rich highlight their extreme class difference from Fox viewers, Hannity attempts to reinstate their moral standing with the working class by stressing their identity as ‘job creators’ and economically productive people.
The concept of ‘job creator’ and its association with the rich, however, poses a set of problems for Fox News because having the ability to give or deny job positions is not so obviously productive work. In its long history, producerist discourse has associated social value with laboriousness. In fact, the very term ‘working class’ is etymologically linked to its 19th-century predecessor, ‘the producing class’ (Williams, 1985: 64). Contrasting colonial American enterprise to aristocratic idleness in the Old World, Benjamin Franklin once called the U.S. the ‘land of labor’ and for hundreds of years the ‘hard worker’ has been considered the ideal civic subject. In contrast, wealth by birth has been looked down upon. Echoing these cultural values, Fox News programs constantly reiterate that the wealth of the worthy rich is the product of individual effort, not natal class or cronyism.
In another Hannity episode (2010b), his guest complains that by raising taxes, ‘we’re trying to punish … people that are most successful. Like, if you’re successful, man, you must have done it illegally rather than with hard work’. As evident here, in Fox programs the term, ‘successful’ is regularly used to describe the worthy rich. Unlike the term ‘rich,’ the term ‘successful’ treats affluence and market dominance as merited. One finds this rhetoric on The O’Reilly Factor (2009a) as well. In an episode where guest Lamont Hill argues that Democrats ‘want to reward hard work’ by providing better healthcare, education, and housing to the 95 percent of Americans who, Hill stresses, ‘go to work everyday.’ O’Reilly responds, ‘Rewarding hard work is when you succeed.’ The market determines the value of producers. When translated into these moral terms, the privileged position of most elites is redefined as a product of the labor-value of their work. In Fox News’s social imaginary, all actors whose worth is defined by the market share a solidarity as ‘workers’ and ‘producers.’ In this way, Fox News commentators emphatically argue that the wealthy are workers too. More, they are often framed as the hardest workers.
Fox News’s constant emphasis on the hard-working personalities of ‘job creators’ aligns them with the working class by defining them as members of, to use one Fox pundit’s words, ‘the productive people of the private sector’ and, in turn, by defining them against unearned privilege and the idle, something that is regularly associated with the public sector. But businessmen do not fit the labor theory of value. So, how can ‘job creation’ and mere business ownership be said to create value? To address this, Fox News programs must construct the job creator’s economic activity as useful, value-creating labor. So what kind of labor do ‘job creators’ do in the world of Fox News?
‘Job creators’ mainly amass capital, organize personnel, and live by the rules of the market. This is illustrated in an episode of Glenn Beck (2010), where Beck compares the U.S. federal government to ‘one company,’ which he sarcastically names ‘evil capitalism, Inc.’ In Beck’s depiction, this company does not live by the market, and cannot govern in the face of its collapse. He suggests that the key to getting the ‘American engine’ to ‘start up’ is to put to work the skills and insight of the CEO, which he equates with ‘common sense.’ Beck explains: this one company, ‘evil capitalism Inc.’ has these four [product] divisions.… What you do as a good CEO is you’d see these [underperforming] divisions and say, you suck! Do what this [successful] division is doing.… As a CEO, if you had one division consistently outperforming others, you wouldn’t punish it. But that’s exactly what America’s CEO [president Obama] is now doing.
The essential skill that Beck identifies with the CEO is an ability to recognize productivity and market performance of workers and products, and a willingness to distribute financial resources and organizational support accordingly. In Fox News programming, the term CEO stands for effective leadership and running a business stands for good governance. In an episode of Hannity (2010c), where Hannity and his guest laud Republican senate candidate Linda McMahon for being a former CEO, Hannity states, ‘You know what the biggest problem is? A lot of these people [implicitly Democratic politicians] running for these jobs, they never ran a business. I’ve run a business. I know what it is like to meet payroll, to pay worker’s compensation, Social Security, taxes.’ On one level, Fox programs represent the CEO as embodying fiscal discipline and responsibility in contrast to the ‘reckless,’ misuse of money that is exemplified by Obama and other Democrats. Frequently, the wise money management of a CEO is equated with what is done in frugal families – ones that understand how to budget and ‘tighten their belts’ in hard times – or by small business owners who, like CEOs, are accountable to market forces and understand the workings of the economy. In another episode of Glenn Beck (2009b), guest Mark Sanford, the Republican Governor of South Carolina, challenged polls that show a majority of Florida citizens support taking federal stimulus money for infrastructure projects. He said: there is a silent majority out there who doesn’t fit … with those polls … who overwhelmingly are hard working small businesspeople, who know what it’s like to meet the bottom line, who had to actually make adjustments in their small businesses, who’ve actually had to make real world sacrifices.
In Fox News programming, an equation is regularly made between big and small businessmen, suggesting that all private sector actors have – as evidenced by their superior fiscal self-discipline – a greater sense of economic realism than those working in the public sector or those receiving public aid. When depicting the business world, Fox News programs often use a discourse of what could be called ‘market empiricism,’ that is, a notion that the market is an institution that most accurately reflects the conditions of empirical reality (i.e. ‘the real world’). In turn, the public sector is represented as a sphere of distorted reality that has been created by those who want to selfishly and irresponsibly insulate themselves and others from the moral obligation of work.
One sees the discourse of market empiricism in The O’Reilly Factor (2009a) episode cited earlier, when O’Reilly explains the nature of the economy in the lead segment. In this episode, it is notable how O’Reilly seeks to legitimate his economic analysis by aligning it with the views of a famous, former CEO, Jack Welch, and Wall Street traders. O’Reilly states: Welch is echoing what Wall Street believes that all this social engineering Barack Obama is promoting has little to do with getting the economy on track. Until the president understands that Wall Street is not buying into his western European vision for America, the economy will remain at risk. Ideology and capitalism are not a good mix. Free markets are tough places where the strong survive and the weak go under. Big government cannot dictate a vibrant marketplace.
Here, the business world is represented as a pragmatic, and even naturalistic sphere of action. When O’Reilly comments about ‘ideology and capitalism’ not mixing, he treats government figures, namely president Obama, as ideologically driven proponents of social engineering who only have political, over-intellectualized knowledge. Unlike public sector workers and politicians, business figures are driven by practical concerns and rely on a-political, utilitarian modes of reasoning.
In another episode of The O’Reilly Factor (2009b), where O’Reilly interviews the controversial former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the value of producers is again constructed against the public sector’s supposedly false standards of merit. In this interview, O’Reilly asks Palin to respond to critics that question her intelligence and capability posing the question, ‘Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?’ Palin responds: I believe that I am because I have common sense. And I have … the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fat resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles.
To Palin, educational credentials are not as good a measure of worth as living by ‘private-sector, free enterprise principles.’ So, producers are defined not only against government workers but also educational elites who do not measure worth in market terms. Because the market is constructed as the fundamental apparatus for measuring merit, educational credentials – a standard of worth assumed to be most valued in the public sector – are viewed as inflated or altogether illusory indicators of capability and work ethic.
In these ways, Fox News’s leading programs worked to naturalize the association between utilitarian intelligence, the practical world and the free market, emphasizing social affinities between the business class and the working class. From this position, Fox News was able to present reasons to politically oppose Obama’s stimulus spending and to support greater privatization of the public sector. The result of privatization is portrayed not as a loss of services or opportunity for workers but rather as a way to expand the realm that most recognizes their work ethic, brand of intelligence, and skill-set.
Conclusion: the pitfalls of valorizing managerial skill through the producer tradition
In the midst of one of the deepest economic downturns in generations, rather than avoiding the issue of class as one might assume an ideologically conservative news network would, class became a central theme in Fox’s Recession coverage. However, Fox’s top programs carefully reconfigured the rhetoric of economic class in moral terms, avoiding more technical, economic debates. Particularly significant was the way Fox’s top pundits developed a moral critique of the Obama administration’s policies, using the language of producerism.
However, Fox News’s appropriation of the producerist tradition entailed a fundamental break with the 19th- and early 20th-century conceptions of the producing class. Jeffersonian-Jacksonian producerism of the 19th century defined producers as artisans and farmers, asserting a laissez-faire economic ideology. Early 20th-century Progressives and the New Deal coalition focused on the industrial proletariat, supporting a more interventionist state. In spite of their differences, these versions of producerism emphasized the value created by direct labor, that is, by the people closest to the point of production. But Fox News defined entrepreneurs as producers because they were ‘job creators,’ even though they were a step removed from providing a product or service. While the entrepreneurial producerism on Fox News attempted to represent managerial activity as exemplary of utilitarian intelligence and skills, the types of utilitarian skills that have been most lauded by the working-class political movements of the past are absent: the skills that physically and directly lead to the making of stuff. To make this plausible, Fox News equated all entrepreneurs with small business owners who seemed similar to the small producer artisan or farmer of Jeffersonian America – both owner and manual laborer, entrepreneur and skilled craftsperson.
In a ‘special’ episode of Glenn Beck (2009c) that aired on 13 March 2009 titled ‘You are not alone,’ Beck plays a documentary that lays out Fox’s general populist narrative of the Recession and calls the audience and the growing Tea Party movement to political action. The main figures in Beck’s documentary are small business owners who work with their hands (e.g. a carwash owner, a couple running a produce stand, a bakery owner). By constantly referencing and celebrating managerial skills and duties in mom and pop businesses, Fox News programs could champion policies serving the business class. But the deployment of Fox’s entrepreneurial brand of producerism carried the risk of inciting the audience’s resentment toward managers. So, Fox used a moral version of class identity to hold the political alliance together.
Still, the contradictions remained and became visible in the 2012 US presidential election. The Republican Party nominated Mitt Romney as their candidate and chose to make his career as a former investment banker the centerpiece of their campaign strategy. Republicans presented Romney as a ‘job creator,’ but the Democrats countered that Romney was not a producer of anything. Democrats developed attack ads that revived traditional populist critiques of Wall Street and incited old working-class suspicions about whether or not financiers and corporate managers actually create value or do anything useful. The Republican Party and Fox News falsely assumed that Mitt Romney’s tie to the private sector was, by itself, enough to present him as a member of the producing class. Embodying – in an almost cartoonish way – the image of corporate management and big finance, Romney represented not a general but a specific and elite faction of the private sector. By placing the image of the CEO class so centrally in their producerist representational strategy, Fox News and the Republican Party exposed the contradictions of their entrepreneurial producerism far more than was the case during the apex of the Tea Party movement and in the build-up to the 2010 midterm elections. This left the discourse susceptible to leftist critiques and ultimately contributed to the Republican Party’s resounding defeat in 2012.
When assessing Fox News, we as media scholars need to pay less attention to its accuracy than its successes and failures at deploying its business-class-centric brand of producer populism. Only in this way will we gain a better understanding of both the power and limitations of Fox News’s unique representational strategy. Looking forward, it will be interesting to see how or whether Fox News will reformulate its articulation of producerism. Will Fox News programs be more discreet in valorizing CEOs and the wealthy? Will the network return to its more disciplined representation of small business owners and the private sector working class as the central figures of the network’s populist imaginary? Or will Fox programs repeat the same mistake of allowing their supply-side dogmatism to cloud their judgment about which political styles, images and figures resonate in the U.S. and which do not?
Footnotes
Funding
This research received support from the UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2011–2012.