Abstract
Research on U.S. political media has demonstrated that mainstream and right-wing news are qualitatively distinct in a variety of ways. However, the dominant paradigm of political polarization and its attendant assumptions have restricted researchers from putting these descriptive insights into new and potentially generative theoretical context. In this article, we propose a way forward, arguing for the merits of conceptualizing right-wing news as a quasi-religious phenomenon. Putting empirical findings in dialogue with core theoretical insights from the sociology of religion, we argue that the right-wing news ecosystem has epistemic, functional, and ecological features that are more characteristic of religion than its mainstream media counterpart. We illustrate the usefulness of these distinctions by applying them to the case of Fox News and their reporting of the 2020 presidential election. Finally, we discuss how our conceptual framework advances current and future research on mis/disinformation, international politics, and the structural causes and consequences of right-wing news media’s ascendance.
Keywords
The U.S. news media landscape, like many other major institutions in the contemporary United States, is often described as politically polarized (e.g., Baum and Groeling 2008; Wilson, Parker, and Feinberg 2020; Young 2020). Yet rather than reflecting a straightforwardly “polarized” structure, in which media organizations and audiences are symmetrically distancing along the left-right political spectrum, a large and growing set of empirical findings show that audience attention is overwhelmingly focused on either centrist “mainstream” sources (e.g., The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and major legacy networks) or more recently ascendant “right-wing” outlets (e.g., Breitbart News, the Daily Wire, and NewsMax). Even more strikingly, this research finds these two media systems are characterized by important qualitative differences, the most notable being mainstream news sources’ continued commitment to traditional journalistic practices of “fact-based” reporting and coverage of emerging news items versus right-wing sources’ disciplined focus on a handful of ideologically charged topics (e.g., immigration) and willingness to spread political propaganda and dis/misinformation (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018; Faris et al. 2017; González-Bailón et al. 2023). Such findings strongly imply the news media divide in the United States is characterized by difference more so than distance. Mainstream and right-wing news media ecosystems, in other words, do not reside on opposite poles of a shared ideological spectrum, as the language of “polarization” implies; rather, they constitute qualitatively distinct informational worlds.
Yet despite the growing corpus of empirical research showing that the divide between these two dominant news media ecosystems is more a function of qualitative differences in kind than quantitative differences of degree, how to best theorize this divide remains an open question. Several researchers have questioned the appropriateness of the polarization paradigm’s assumptions of ideological symmetry and functional similarity with regard to the U.S. news media landscape (e.g., Fiorina 2015; Fiorina and Abrams 2008; González-Bailón et al. 2023; Grinberg et al. 2019; Grossmann and Hopkins 2016; Young 2020), yet few conceptual advances beyond invocations of “asymmetry” have been put forward as alternatives. In fact, in current news media studies, it remains a common rhetorical norm for researchers to conceptually frame their work as case studies of political polarization only to then share empirical findings and arguments that contradict many of the paradigm’s assumptions.
In this article, we propose a theoretical way forward that moves beyond polarization framings to more fully conceptualize the substantive character of the divides separating mainstream and right-wing news media systems. Putting empirical findings on the qualitatively distinct features of right-wing news media in conversation with classic theoretical insights from the sociology of religion, we argue that right-wing news in the contemporary United States is, in many important respects, religious. More specifically, we assert that right-wing news is (1) epistemically religious in favoring worldview maintenance and sacred truths over and above “mere facts,” (2) functionally religious in that it privileges building moral community over informing individuals, and (3) ecologically religious because patterns of competition, stability, and change in right-wing media resemble schismatic dynamics sociologists have long found characteristic of the formally religious sphere.
Theorizing right-wing news as epistemically, functionally, and ecologically religious advances scholarship on political media in several ways. First, it sheds further light on what is qualitatively distinct about right-wing U.S. news media by going beyond a focus on polarization or propaganda and mis/disinformation alone. Akin to how sociologists of religion have convincingly argued that unscientific beliefs in things like a “young earth” or creationism should be understood more as reflections of religious identity and worldview than ignorance of scientific knowledge per se (Roos 2014), we argue that the right-wing media system’s disregard for empirical facts is more reflective of a quasi-religious worldview than a straightforward lack of political knowledge (i.e., being misinformed).
Second, attending to the quasi-religious nature of right-wing news organizations and their audiences encourages researchers to recognize the distinctly social (and not just psychological) power of the right-wing media system in the United States. Indeed, whereas existing research highlights psychological dynamics such as confirmation bias or lack of reasoning in enabling the ascendance of right-wing media (Kahan 2015; Knobloch-Westerwick, Mothes, and Polavin 2020; Pennycook and Rand 2018), our approach foregrounds important sociological factors such as sacralization, moral community, and meaning-making that make right-wing media compelling to large groups of people.
Finally, this approach has the potential to provide much needed context for well-documented empirical phenomena such as the relative sparseness of the center-right and far-left spaces in political media (Benkler et al. 2018; Freelon 2019; Wihbey et al. 2017). This method can also explain the attraction of offline political behavior such as rallies and other flashpoints of collective effervescence (Bernheim et al. 2020; Feinberg, Branton, and Martinez-Ebers 2022; Snyder and Yousaf 2020).
Limitations of the Political Polarization Paradigm in Media Research
“Political polarization” has been the dominant paradigm in studies of political division in the United States for the past half-century. It is the frame through which articles, books, labs, institutes, federal grants, and conferences (and much more) have expressed their mission of studying and communicating findings related to the increasing political turmoil and animosity between parties and people in contemporary U.S. society. 1 This work has established key insights into the nature of political division in the United States, including how partisans continue to be more suspicious and antagonistic toward their cross-partisans (i.e., affective polarization; Iyengar et al. 2019; Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Iyengar and Westwood 2015), how parties are reflecting more divergent beliefs and policy positions over time (i.e., issue or ideological polarization; Baldassarri and Gelman 2008; Pew Research Center 2014), and how partisans are increasingly choosing to live in different parts of the country (i.e., geographic polarization; Lamont et al. 1996; Martin and Webster 2020; Nall 2015).
However, unlike ideological or affective polarization, studies on political media have not discovered something like symmetrical distancing between partisan news sources, as the language of polarization implies. Instead, this work has documented the ascendance of a robust right-wing media ecosystem, with no left-wing equivalent, that is qualitatively different from mainstream news in a variety of ways. Yet polarization and related concepts continue to be applied to this phenomenon. For example, reviews of literature summarizing research on mis/disinformation and political division in news media will use polarization as their frame while paraphrasing studies showing that right-wing media is overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, responsible for these trends (e.g., Kubin and Von Sikorski 2021; Tucker et al. 2018; Wilson et al. 2020). Polarization can also be found in the titles of articles that are concerned exclusively with right-wing disinformation in media on issues such as climate change (e.g., Farrell 2016a; McCright and Dunlap 2011) and COVID-19 (e.g., Dolman et al. 2022; Hart, Chinn, and Soroka 2020; Jiang et al. 2020). Even in studies where polarization is not in the title, polarization, politicization, partisanship, or some other corollary are regularly used to explain effects that are the direct result of messaging from right-wing media (Faris et al. 2017; Gauchat 2012; Mann 2024; Mann et al. 2023). 2
To be clear, we do not blame researchers for using this guiding paradigm of political division to frame their work. It is, in fact, in the very definition of a scientific paradigm for it to be largely unquestioned and taken for granted (Kuhn 1962). The overextended conceptual use of polarization is not a failure of individual researchers. Rather, it is a structural issue in which the frame’s strong conceptual utility in accurately describing some ideological and affective trends has lent it an inertia that has carried it into fields where it is ill-equipped to make sense of the phenomena being described (e.g., the qualitative distinctiveness of right-wing media).
This argument about the limits of the polarization paradigm, although not often made explicitly, has been implicitly appreciated for some time. For the past several decades, research on U.S. political media has continually demonstrated that what is conventionally thought of as “mainstream” and “right-wing” news media have been characterized by fundamentally distinct incentives and audiences. This research—which spans the emergence of modern right-wing talk radio, cable news, political blogs, left-wing comedic political commentary, and social media—has delivered consistent accounts of how “center” and “right” media have operated throughout these technological developments. Berry and Sobieraj (2013), for instance, identify and define the “outrage” style of political media that emerged in the late twentieth century that is emotionally evocative, personality-centered, and reactive to news as opposed to reporting it. This outrage style was popularized among right-wing audiences thanks to radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, and it eventually found a home on cable television through Fox News hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson. Young (2020) observes that liberal outrage (e.g., Air America, the well-resourced but ultimately failed attempt at liberal outrage radio in the early 2000s) never really “took off.” Instead, liberal frustration and anger appear in comedic programs such as the “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central or “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver on HBO. News organizations often characterized as “mainstream” or “center-left” (e.g., ABC, NBC, The New York Times) have maintained their liberal audience, leaving explicitly left-wing news organizations unable to achieve an audience similar in magnitude to the one enjoyed by their right-wing counterparts.
The intuition that liberal loyalty to mainstream news has stunted the growth of left-wing political media has been empirically and comprehensively demonstrated with the advent of social media and easily accessible digital trace data. Perhaps the best examples of this research come from the Berkman Klein Center, a joint venture between Harvard and MIT that seeks to “explore and understand cyberspace.” 3 Faris et al. (2017), for instance, examined political media ecosystems on Twitter and Facebook during the 2016 presidential election and emphasized two findings important for our purposes here. First, they discovered that audience engagement heavily and disproportionately focused on two locations along the left-right ideological spectrum: the center-left and the far-right. 4 The former was dominated by mainstream news organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the major legacy networks. The latter was, rather surprisingly, dominated by Breitbart News, at the time, a fairly new player in that space, and to a lesser extent, Fox News, the Daily Caller, and others. Second, they found that whereas mainstream news organizations (including the few on the center-right, such as The Wall Street Journal) reported and responded to emerging news items, right-wing sources were remarkably disciplined in their consistent focus on illegal immigration and (empirically false) claims about its contributions to crime and other social problems (see Light, He, and Robey 2020; Light and Miller 2018).
Later, this same team of researchers combined the previous analysis with more data from social media platforms, including YouTube, and concluded that the right-wing media ecosystem is a fundamentally unique space that functions virtually independently from the mainstream and has rendered itself especially susceptible to what they call “propaganda” (i.e., dis/misinformation, extremism, and media manipulation more generally; Benkler et al. 2018), a finding broadly supported by other researchers of misinformation (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017; Benkler et al. 2018; Grinberg et al. 2019; Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler 2018). More recently, a large team of social scientists of politics and social media were given unprecedented access to Facebook data and concluded “there is an asymmetry between conservative and liberal audiences, with a substantial corner of the news ecosystem consumed exclusively by conservatives; and . . . most misinformation . . . exists within this homogeneously conservative corner, which has no equivalent on the liberal side” (González-Bailón et al. 2023:392).
Finally, political media researchers have documented how the right-wing news system in the United States is characterized by relatively high levels of intrafield competition and instability. Whereas large, mainstream news media firms have mostly maintained their audiences for more than half a century, right-wing media has been much more turbulent, with websites and social media pages, including fake news disseminators, created and then deleted or abandoned in strikingly high frequencies (Benkler et al. 2018; Bhatt et al. 2018; Freelon, Marwick, and Kreiss 2020; Grinberg et al. 2019).
Theorizing Religious Dynamics in the Right-Wing News Ecosystem: Epistemic, Functional, and Ecological
In sum, existing research demonstrates the right-wing news ecosystem is qualitatively distinct from its mainstream counterpart in at least three significant respects: It is characterized by (1) a ubiquity of mis/disinformation, (2) personality- and outrage-centered programming, and (3) high levels of intrafield competition, instability, and change, all of which have no equivalent in the mainstream space and thus cannot be adequately theorized via assumptions of the polarization paradigm. Instead, we need conceptual frameworks that better illuminate the substantively unique features of right-wing news: Scholars need framings that capture what makes right-wing news in the United States different in kind (as opposed to degree) from the mainstream.
In the following sections, we develop such a framework, putting political media researchers’ descriptive findings about right-wing news into conversation with foundational insights from the sociology of religion. In doing so, we identify and elaborate on several strong parallels between the differences characterizing the right-wing news system and sociological accounts of religion’s epistemic, functional, and ecological features. As we elaborate, the epistemic dimension focuses on the right-wing media ecosystem’s guiding assumptions about truth and knowledge, the functional focuses on the wider effects of such systems on society (i.e., what they “do” socially), and the ecological focuses on how these functional and epistemic differences predict distinct patterns of competition, stability, and change within a particular media ecosystem (see Table 1). By conceptualizing contemporary right-wing news as a quasi-religious phenomenon, we illuminate a more theoretically general characteristic (i.e., “religiousness”) underlying this media system’s many documented empirical differences from the mainstream and help develop a deeper sociological understanding of what makes these differences so profitable, persuasive, and powerful in the contemporary era.
Mainstream versus Quasi-religious Political Media Ideal Types.
Right-Wing News as Epistemically Religious
As noted previously, contemporary research demonstrates that perhaps the most glaring difference between mainstream and right-wing media ecosystems is their respective relationship to truth. Findings consistently show that whereas center-left and center-right news outlets and audiences maintain a relatively strong commitment to fact-based reporting and journalistic objectivity, the right-wing news ecosystem is awash in mis/disinformation, conspiracy theories, and unapologetic partisanship (González-Bailón et al. 2023; Grinberg et al. 2019; Pennycook and Rand 2021).
In the face of such findings, many have argued that right-wing news outlets, and especially their audiences, need to be better informed or educated about distinguishing between truth and falsehood, with calls for more and better fact-checking and enhanced media literacy within the conservative media sphere (Follett-Campbell 2022; Graves 2016). This position is understandable and well-meaning, but we argue that such proposals overlook how mainstream and right-wing news media are characterized by fundamentally different epistemic perspectives. More specifically, we assert that whereas the mainstream privileges empiricism and objectivity as central to the production of trustworthy knowledge (Ward 2011), the right-wing media system approaches knowledge and truth claims through the epistemic lens of a more axiomatic, belief-centered worldview that closely resembles religion.
Among mainstream news organizations and audiences, the epistemic status of information is understood and evaluated in terms of “facts” that can be empirically verified or refuted. Reporters, anchors, and producers are viewed (by themselves and their audiences) as having an obligation to disseminate information to the public that, to the greatest extent possible, accurately reflects empirical reality (Zelizer 2004). These epistemic norms are reproduced in research aiming to operationalize and measure news quality. In their study on “fake news” in the 2016 election, for example, Grinberg et al. (2019) categorize online news organizations on a sliding scale where institutional norms such as fact-checking, bylines, and corrections or retractions indicate lower likelihood of being a fake news disseminator.
In some instances, this epistemic litmus test seems relatively straightforward: Did a reported event, such as a natural disaster or widespread election fraud, happen or not? Did the elected official being quoted actually say that? In other cases, the empirical accuracy of the truth claim becomes more complex as media producers and audiences focus less on the factual status of an event’s occurrence (Did it happen or not?) and more on its meaning or interpretation (e.g., Why did it happen? Who is responsible? What are the consequences?). In such instances, media organizations not only report facts but are also asked to put them in interpretive contexts. Here, the media can be charged not so much with fabrication or plagiarism but with claims of bias. But ultimately, in the mainstream media space, truth claims are grounded on empiricism: What is factual is what can be seen, heard, touched, or otherwise perceived by the senses.
In the event that an explicitly normative perspective is communicated by a mainstream journalist, it is clearly marked and categorized as “opinion,” “commentary,” or “editorial,” distinguishing it from the organization’s usual fact-based reporting. 5 Contemporary mainstream media organizations continue to adhere to a long-standing practice in U.S. journalism that journalists working for the news sections remain independent from those writing for the opinion sections (Esser and Umbricht 2014; Høyer and Pöttker 2005). Today, this centrality of and commitment to empiricism can be clearly observed in mainstream media’s sensitivity to problems of political mis/disinformation and the rise of “fact-checking” practices and organizations (Graves 2016).
In contrast, knowledge and truth claims within the right-wing ecosystem are not so much evaluated according to whether they accurately reflect empirically observable reality (i.e., their status as facts) but according to their relationship to a universe of meaning that transcends observable reality. Here, we are drawing direct inspiration from sociological understandings of religion as a particular type of belief system or symbolic framework that actors use to make interpretive sense of reality—a conceptualization of religion that goes back at least as far as Weber ([1904] 2011) and is at the center of work by more contemporary luminaries, such as Berger (1967) and Geertz (1973). Berger, for example, argued that religion constructs a relationship between the social order and a more enduring, sacred cosmos—a relation that imbues the transitory facts of human experience with more transcendent meaning, purpose, and legitimacy. Whereas Berger was most interested in theorizing this relationship’s consequences for legitimating and maintaining social order, Geertz (1973:110–12) noted the distinct epistemic features of the religious perspective, especially its contrast to a more scientific or empiricist worldview:
The basic axiom underlying what we may perhaps call “the religious perspective” is everywhere the same: he who would know must first believe. . . . It differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions the realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized skepticism which dissolves the world’s givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses, but in terms of what it takes to be wider, non-hypothetical truths. Rather than detachment, its watchword is commitment; rather than analysis, encounter.
Here, Geertz eloquently makes a point that sociologists of religion have long understood: Religious truth claims occupy a different epistemic register than empirical ones. From the perspective of the faithful, religious truth claims are doctrines that can be believed or rejected, but they are not hypotheses to be tested.
From this perspective, it is not for the sociologist to “prove” or “disprove” a person’s or population’s belief in the transcendent but, rather, to attempt to observe and analyze such a belief’s worldly consequences for those who hold it (Weber [1904] 2011). From the religious perspective, questions of truth or falsehood in everyday life are not evaluated according to the proper application of empiricist methodologies (whether that be the scientific method, journalistic fact-checking, or legal proceedings) but, rather, based on their relationship to higher-order, sacred truths that transcend “the discordant revelations of secular experience” (Geertz 1973:112).
Although not a formal religious institution, we argue that the dominant approach to truth in the right-wing news ecosystem operates in much the same way. This is not to say that right-wing news organizations and audiences do not care about empirical knowledge or facts; but it is to say that the most important epistemic litmus test for truth claims in this media system is not whether such claims accurately represent empirically observable events in the world but, rather, to what extent they confirm or challenge the sacred tenets of the belief system. Empirical truths, to the extent they are recognized and reported on as such within right-wing media, are ultimately subordinate to more axiomatic, “self-evident,” sacred ones. This claim was recently supported by Pretus et al. (2023) in a study where they find misinformation sharing among right-wing participants is strongly associated with items reflecting sacred values. 6 Using neuroimaging technology, they find these items elicited cognitive responses indicative of norm compliance and mentalizing (i.e., regions of the brain associated with gauging group response and behavior rather than deliberation) and were largely unaffected by fact-checking.
The epistemic supremacy of the sacred in right-wing news is especially noticeable when facts come into direct conflict with the beliefs, symbols, or personas that most strongly define the contemporary “cosmos” (Berger 1967) of far-right conservatism. For example, and as we discuss in more detail in later sections, we can look at Democrats’ and Republicans’ responses to their presidential candidates’ losses in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Among Democrats, the reality of their losses was rarely, if ever, in question by political and media elites, and discourse related to avoiding the result was largely confined to the possibility of specific strategies within existing legal frameworks (e.g., faithless electors in 2016). In the case of Biden’s win in 2020, the reality of the outcome was explicitly rejected by political and media elites, distrust in the legal institutions responsible for carrying out elections was sowed among right-wing audiences, and the peaceful transfer of power was violently interrupted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Examples abound of similar cases where far-right news outlets and audiences subordinate, contradict, and outright deny truth claims that challenge or undermine central tenets of the belief system even as these truth claims have considerable empirical support. Recent examples include right-wing media’s consistent dissemination of COVID-19 misinformation (Ash et al. 2020; Basch et al. 2021; Malhotra 2020), the denial of anthropogenic climate change (Farrell 2016a, 2016b; McCright and Dunlap 2003, 2010), and denial of the negative or at the very least, nonexistent association between immigration and crime (Light et al. 2020; Light and Miller 2018; Ousey and Kubrin 2018).
In addition to helping scholars gain deeper insight into right-wing media’s penchant to deny or contradict inconvenient (one might say “heretical”) facts, understanding right-wing media as epistemically religious also helps make sense of why it has become such a hotbed for the proliferation of conspiracy theories concerning, for example, election fraud, the January 6 insurrection, and QAnon (Rothschild 2021). 7 As Geertz (1973:112) noted, the religious perspective “moves beyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which correct and complete them,” or in the language of Berger (1967), situates the “nomos” of commonsense reality within a “cosmos” that imbues it with deeper meaning. We do not wish to fully equate conspiracy theorizing with religious faith, but the belief that events in the observable world are caused or influenced by agents in a largely unobservable realm is evident in both types of thinking. Moreover, both religious and conspiratorial thought interpret observable events not on their own terms but as signs of a deeper truth (on the strong parallels between conspiratorial and religious belief systems, see Franks, Bangerter, and Bauer 2013; Frenken, Bilewicz, and Imhoff 2023; PRRI Staff 2021; Robertson 2017; Robertson and Dyrendal 2018).
Right-Wing News as Functionally Religious
In addition to the outlined epistemic differences, right-wing political media in the United States can also be distinguished from the mainstream by a key functional difference. Starting in the post-World War II era and continuing until the present day, U.S. mainstream news has operated according to an assumption that its most important societal function is to inform the general public. In the early twentieth century, U.S. news media was largely the purview of political partisans and social movements aiming to spread their respective messages and recruit adherents (Burkhardt 2017; Cook 2012), but after World War II, emerging communication technologies combined with an imagined national audience (Anderson 1983) made possible the establishment of mainstream journalistic institutions tasked with speaking to geographically, racially, culturally, and politically diverse groups. During this period, political polarization and economic inequality were at all-time lows, New Deal Democrats enjoyed nearly hegemonic political dominance, and by all indications, public trust in mainstream knowledge institutions such as journalism and science was peaking (Barber and McCarty 2015; Ladd 2012; Piketty 2014). Under these conditions, the U.S. government was able to exercise aggressive regulations on a news media system that was largely consolidated into a handful of entities appealing to a mass national audience.
This period marked the birth and swift ascendance of professional journalism and its aspiration to accurate reporting and journalistic objectivity (Esser and Umbricht 2014; Schudson 2001). This understanding of the appropriate role of news media was exemplified in federal regulations such as the Fairness Doctrine, introduced in 1949, which sought to regulate and balance political perspectives on radio and television. The Fairness Doctrine gave the FCC the authority to revoke the licenses of broadcasters that did not adequately discuss “important issues” or did not portray opposing views on controversial topics. The Fairness Doctrine’s effectiveness in improving political reporting and discourse is debated (Cronauer 1994; Hazlett and Sosa 1997; Pickard 2018), but we are interested in its implication that general audiences benefit when political arguments are balanced by exposure to opposing views. This implies a deeply rational conception of political discourse, where news media’s function is to disseminate information rather than strengthen in-group understandings in relation to an out-group.
From a more normative and civic perspective, under these conditions of mass democracy, where the operations and powers of government are geographically dispersed and vast, gaining direct knowledge of political events, activities, and perspectives is impossible for most of the population. As such, political news organizations in the postwar era took it as their task—and were taken to task by the U.S. government—to cultivate and deliver this information to the public. Only if and when supposedly self-governing citizens receive this information do they have the necessary material to engage in the rational discussion and debate that is the procedural cornerstone of the public sphere and an integral feature of democracy (Habermas 1984; Habermas, Lennox, and Lennox 1974).
Within the contemporary right-wing news media sphere, in contrast, we argue the primary aim is no longer to produce news for a general citizenry in need of information but to cultivate moral community among specific groups in want of collective identity and meaning. This characterization is drawn from the enduring Durkheimian tradition in the sociology of religion, one that views religion and the sacred more generally as emerging from a community’s need to acknowledge and define itself in relation to the profane (Durkheim 1995). Put differently, if the assumed function of mainstream news is to produce content that informs individuals for the purpose of rational deliberation and debate in the public sphere, the primary function of right-wing news is to produce content that bonds and unifies a group around strongly shared normative ideals and commitments and strongly delineates boundaries between moral in-groups and out-groups. In the U.S. case, such content has been identified in studies and journalistic data science that document the disproportionate prevalence of in-group and out-group rhetoric in right-wing news media (e.g., “we” and “they” language, Yourish et al. 2022; explicit patriotism/nationalism, Gelpi, Roselle, and Barnett 2013; and sentiments of moral outrage and righteousness, Berry and Sobieraj 2013; Young 2020). Furthermore, right-wing social media disproportionally provides interactive spaces not so much for rational discussion and deliberation among their audiences but for affirmations of political significance, outlets for political anger, and degradation of political and social out-groups (Bail 2021; Caren, Jowers, and Gaby 2012; Mann et al. 2023; Ribeiro et al. 2020; Zannettou et al. 2018).
Right-wing news organizations not only cultivate content for the production of moral community, but they regularly extend ritualized political events and practices, such as rallies, into televised and online media spaces. For instance, Fox News stopped carrying all of Donald Trump’s rallies after his initial presidential run, but these rallies have become a staple of Newsmax programming, which sees its ratings increase dramatically during rally broadcasts (Fung 2023; Peters 2022). Despite Newsmax consistently promoting the empirically false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, the station was recently added to DirectTV’s standard cable package, which boasts upward of 13 million subscribers (Rizzo 2023). These live displays have proved compelling to conservatives watching from their living rooms, reaping major financial benefits for far-right networks and their carriers. No similar phenomenon has emerged on the political left, and no market seems to exist where these kinds of performances would be either well attended or widely watched outside of presidential campaign cycles.
The reasons for this functional (and market) divergence between mainstream and right-wing news organizations and their audiences are numerous, and a full accounting is beyond the scope of the current article. However, we think two factors are particularly worth mentioning here: (1) post-Civil Rights changes in the demographic and cultural composition of American conservativism and (2) the centrality of charismatic personalities within right-wing media networks. Regarding the first point, the years following the Civil Rights movement saw the Republican Party adopt the infamous “Southern strategy” of appealing to prosegregation White voters through opposition to federally imposed racial integration. This gave Republicans more electoral power and emboldened them to challenge Democratic hegemony through further consolidation of White conservatives. In subsequent decades, the Republican Party successfully added White conservative evangelicals to their coalition, making it a party of increasingly shared racial, religious, and ideological identity; they achieved a level of cultural homogeneity necessary for defining clear out-groups that threaten their political project (e.g., immigrants, liberals, and the nonreligious; Whitehead and Perry 2020). Republican liberals fled to the Democratic Party, which was becoming a coalition of various demographic groups and identities defined primarily by shared progressive policy positions (Fiorina 2015; Fiorina and Abrams 2008; Grossmann and Hopkins 2016). 8
At the same time that Republican elites began speaking to a more culturally homogenous audience and Democrats to an increasingly diverse constituency, trust in mainstream knowledge institutions such as science and journalism faltered among conservatives, who perceived the increasingly liberal composition of these professions (Gross 2013) as an indication of liberal bias in the content of knowledge itself (Gauchat 2012; Gross 2013; Ladd 2012). Conservative retreat from these institutions was accompanied by the rise of a discrete and coordinated movement to establish new and explicitly conservative knowledge institutions (e.g., think tanks and right-wing news outlets) that would provide a counterpoint to the dominance of ostensibly left-leaning authorities (Gross, Medvetz, and Russell 2011; Medvetz 2012). These right-wing news organizations, in turn, found their conservative audiences more racially, ideologically, and religiously similar than ever, making selling news that catered to their preferences (and grievances) versus a general (and much more diverse) U.S. public a highly profitable endeavor (Berry and Sobieraj 2013; Ladd 2012).
In addition to catering to an already more homogenous audience, right-wing media outlets developed a style of programming and content delivery that revolved around singular, charismatic personalities who actively engaged their listeners and viewers not as abstract members of a general audience but as fellow members of a community with shared identity, values, grievances, and foes. One can think, for example, of the outsized political influence and large followings of conservative media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage in the late twentieth century or charismatic figures such as Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson in the twenty-first, all of whom cultivated large and loyal fanbases by speaking directly to and amplifying the preferences and prejudices of their largely White, conservative, and ostensibly Christian audiences.
Moving closer to our present day, it was from this personality-centered, celebrity-saturated news ecosystem that Donald Trump launched his recent political campaigns. We argue this was not a coincidence. Given Trump’s charismatic hold over today’s Republican base and party, he is often thought of as the origin of the quasi-religious fervor that characterizes the contemporary U.S. right-wing news system. Indeed, Trump’s charismatic authority has been studied, appreciated, and theorized by sociologists and has even been recognized as essentially religious (Light 2023). From the collective effervescence of his rallies to the religious imagery and language sprinkled throughout the t-shirts, mugs, posters, and other Trump products, which constitute a small industry in themselves, Trump has clearly attained a sacred status among many of his followers.
However, it would be a mistake to understand Trump’s charisma as simply a producer and not also a product of the quasi-religious character of the right-wing news system. Wagner-Pacifici and Tavory (2019), for instance, see Trump’s charismatic ascendance as an eventuality of a long-simmering desire for a more exciting (i.e., less bureaucratic) politics, stoked in no small part by the increasingly extreme delivery and expectations of charismatic right-wing news personalities. Similarly, as Joosse (2018) notes, sociologists since Weber have demonstrated that charismatic authority is not an inherent property of the individual but is the product of the relationships and interactions between the leader and their current and potential followers (see e.g., Junker 2014; Katz 1975; Reed 2013). The charisma generated through these relationships and interactions are mediated by what Weber (1978) called a “charismatic aristocracy,” or an inner circle of enthusiasts who consistently generate content on behalf of the emerging charismatic persona (and who often increase their own charismatic mystique through their proximity to the leader; Joosse 2017).
On this point, we note the many right-wing news media personalities who have formed President Trump’s inner circle. Trump, himself a media star before his political rise, has surrounded himself with a coterie of conservative news media figures throughout his political career, such as his 2016 running mate, Mike Pence, who first cut his teeth on conservative radio; his former chief strategist and adviser, Steve Bannon, who was formerly editor in chief at Breitbart News; and his current Secretary of Defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, and these are just a few examples. Trump’s charismatic power is not just a contributor to but also an important effect (even apotheosis) of the charisma-generating structure of the right-wing media system—a power that existed before his political rise and will likely survive his eventual departure.
We do not argue that these two factors alone can sufficiently explain the rise of the community-building and -binding power of contemporary right-wing news media, but we do believe they played outsized roles in creating the conditions for it to function religiously in the Durkheimian sense we outlined here (and profit from it in ways that would humble even the most lucrative American megachurch). Increased racial, religious, and ideological homogeneity among U.S. conservatives made it practical and profitable to cater to a particular demographic as opposed to a diverse general public, and personality-centered programming encouraged this audience to coalesce around and bond through the charismatic authority of news media megastars (up to and including Donald Trump). These factors helped bring conservative news audiences and organizations together, not so much through communicating current events but by cultivating bonds of shared group identity, devotion, and grievance.
Right-Wing News as Ecologically Religious
In addition to making better theoretical sense of right-wing news media’s unique epistemic and functional characteristics, conceptualizing right-wing news as a quasi-religious system can help scholars understand the relatively volatile nature of its organizational ecology. In the sociology of organizations more broadly, analyzing organizational ecologies attends to the characteristics of the broader environment in which organizations compete, grow, and decline. In using the analogy of “ecology,” analysts seek to highlight key “evolutionary rules” that help determine the survival or death of certain kinds of organizations in particular niches—not unlike the Darwinian dance of survival to which all biological species are subject (Carroll 1984; Carroll and Swaminathan 2000; Hannan and Freeman 1984, 1989).
We begin by returning to empirical findings that document striking differences between the relative stability of mainstream news media systems versus the turbulence of right-wing news media systems over time (Benkler et al. 2018; Bhatt et al. 2018; Freelon et al. 2020; Grinberg et al. 2019). All U.S. news media organizations share a social environment that is the same in many important respects (e.g., a capitalist economy in which revenues must be generated through ratings/advertising, a common regulatory structure dictated by the FCC), but we argue that the volatility of the right-wing ecology is in part a result of schismatic tendencies among these media organizations and their audiences, ones that closely resemble dynamics of competition and change sociologists have long argued characterize the formally religious sphere.
Within the context of formally religious ecologies, sociologists understand schisms as occurring through the creation of new religious organizations able to successfully marshal the resources and loyalty of a subset of previously existing congregations within the same denominational structure (Sutton and Chaves 2004). There are countless examples of such schisms in American religious history (particularly among Protestants), such as the splitting of the Baptist Church into the “Southern” and “American” factions in the 1850s over slavery and the more recent split within the United Methodist Church over issues regarding LGBTQ+ pastors and same-sex marriage.
Sociologists of religion have identified a number of different factors contributing to religious schisms, but a primary factor is a sense of the institution’s perceived “accomodationism” in terms of belief or membership. In his influential formulation of church-sect theory, for example, Niebuhr (1954) theorized that with a religious institution’s growth comes inevitable tensions to accommodate to the broader secular world, including pressures to soften rigid social boundaries and become more inclusive, establish organizational relationships with secular authorities, and revise doctrinal stances that diverge from or are openly antagonistic to the beliefs of the wider society. Such accommodations aid church growth up to a point, but Niebuhr argues that these changes eventually make the accommodating organizations subject to internal critique, leading to the development of alternative organizations (usually termed “sects” or “cults”) that attract followers disillusioned with the increasing “worldliness” of their former churches (Dynes 1955; Iannaccone 1988; Johnson 1963). Over time, such sects/cults may themselves become more accommodating and church-like, leading to the development of yet more sects and cults as the cycle continues.
Here we suggest, due in significant part to the quasi-religious epistemic and functional characteristics outlined in the previous two sections, that the organizational ecology of right-wing U.S. news media exhibits similar schismatic tendencies. More specifically, whereas organizations in the mainstream news ecology are still rewarded by their audiences for fact-based reporting, perceived journalistic objectivity, and serving a general and diverse audience (cf. Benkler et al. 2018), news organizations in the right-wing ecology are more likely to be rewarded for strict adherence to sacred truths, maintaining strong sociocultural distinctions between themselves and the mainstream media, and a commitment to in-group loyalty. In turn, right-wing media are more likely to suffer organizational decline (and possibly death) for appearing accommodating to out-group influences, such as disseminating information threatening to the right-wing’s core political beliefs or the boundaries of their moral community. In this sense, our framework characterizes far-right media as operating within a quasi-religious ecology where media organizations are akin to churches and sects competing for their audience members’ desires for belief and belonging.
Illustrative Case: Fox News and the 2020 Election
Having outlined the three primary dimensions of difference between quasi-religious and mainstream news systems, we now turn to a case from contemporary U.S. political media to illustrate how our ideal types can be used in media analysis. We examine Fox News in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral loss in the 2020 presidential election, when Fox went from calling the election for Biden to pushing narratives that the election was somehow stolen or fraudulent. We show this was the result of Fox being pulled further into a quasi-religious media system they had until then only partially inhabited. Indeed, until this historical moment, Fox News had successfully straddled the line between mainstream and quasi-religious news ecosystems, instantiating these spheres into its bifurcated corporate structure via their news desk and opinion divisions, respectively. The case of the 2020 election, however, was a pivotal moment where executives were forced to choose between their journalistic and “religious” commitments, and they resolutely chose the latter, illustrating the epistemic, functional, and ecological distinctions described previously.
For background, the 2020 U.S. presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was a seemingly close race that would be determined by a few states’ electoral votes and large numbers of mail-in ballots due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Arizona was one such pivotal state, and like several others, the mail-in ballots were key in swinging Arizona’s vote count toward Biden after early, in-person voting returns favored Trump. As results of these mail-in ballots were released, individual networks’ election teams analyzed vote counts against remaining counties and projections to determine whether they could safely call a state for either candidate. Following this process, Fox News became not only the first network to call Arizona for Biden (effectively calling the election) but did it so early that other networks were surprised by the call’s aggressiveness. Eventually, other networks followed suit, the call was correct, and Biden won the 2020 election. From a mainstream journalistic understanding, this was a normal series of events in an election where a global pandemic kept many people from voting in person and where news organizations were tasked with reporting results accurately as they saw them. From a quasi-religious understanding, however, the best-known and most widely watched conservative news outlet calling the election for their opponent before any other network was a striking betrayal.
Smaller and lesser known right-wing media sources were poised to exploit this situation by embracing claims of fraudulent voting and reporting them as news. NewsMax, a news site with an established presence but importantly for this moment, more flexibility with regard to journalistic norms because of their unambiguous embrace of their quasi-religious function, was particularly successful in exploiting the situation. Their commitment to their quasi-religious function allowed NewsMax, along with other smaller conservative outfits, to uncritically report the voter fraud theory and refrain from calling the race for Biden. For our purposes, the most important details of this incident are (1) the traditional journalistic features of Fox’s News reporting division that led them to break from the quasi-religious mission of their opinion desk and (2) the presence of smaller, right-wing competitors that felt no obligation to separate news from opinion programming.
Within minutes of Fox News’s call, right-wing protesters were chanting “Fox News sucks” outside election facilities and calling Fox “fake news” on social media and other online forums. To illustrate this backlash, Figure 1 shows Facebook interaction data pulled from CrowdTangle, a tool provided by Facebook that allows researchers to examine engagement trends on Facebook pages and groups over time. Interactions include likes, comments, and other reactions to a page’s posts; the data do not include how many times a post was viewed (i.e., impressions). Once Fox News called Arizona for Biden (represented here by the vertical dotted line), we see a significant shift in activity from the Fox News website to the NewsMax site. Data pulled afterward until May 2021 indicate this realignment was durable. Although Fox News seems to have recovered a large share of its previous audience, NewsMax now enjoys more interactions on a weekly basis than it did before Fox News’s election call.
Total interactions for the Fox News and NewsMax Facebook pages from January 2020 to May 2021.
This case provides a striking example of the epistemic, functional, and ecological differences we have described. First, this audience backlash was the product of people being epistemically trained in an environment where truth is based on sacred beliefs and the decrees of charismatic community leaders (e.g., Trump and an aligned network of celebrity political pundits such as Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson) and not on the transparency and methodologies of, in this case, impartial election forecasters and the courts. Assuming a commitment to empirical truth on the part of Fox News and its core audience cannot explain these dynamics because this would suggest the audience will accept the empirical truth claims (i.e., Biden won), albeit with a negative emotional reaction. We argue that this empirical truth is explicitly rejected because it is illegible in a quasi-religious system where ultimate truth is based on transcendent beliefs over and above “mere facts.”
Second, this case constituted a functional crisis for the country’s largest conservative news organization. In this moment, the news division was front and center to call the election—a rare occurrence because Fox’s prime-time programming is typically opinion, where they allocate and make most of their money and receive the vast majority of their ratings, not news (Berry and Sobieraj 2013; Jones 2012). But now these opinion audiences were tuned into the news reporting and received a message out of pitch with the expected music of in-group belief reinforcement: Joe Biden was more popular than Donald Trump, their charismatic figurehead, and had won the presidency. A large share of Fox News’s audience, cultivated in the quasi-religious environs of their opinion programming, were unprepared for unadorned news of partisan defeat. The resulting backlash forced Fox News to choose between their journalistic and quasi-religious functions, and they resolutely chose the latter: They fired those in their news division most closely associated with accurately calling the election and alienated others, who subsequently quit (Abrams and Grynbaum 2021; Ellison 2021; Farhi and Ellison 2019; Grynbaum 2022; Hayes and Jonah 2021). At the time of this writing, Fox News seems committed to this path, even after being sued and having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for their subsequent claims of election fraud (Bauder, Chase, and Mulvihill 2023). In the end, after accounting for the reputational and economic costs of such lawsuits, Fox has found it even more costly (in both senses) to run afoul of the quasi-religious expectations of their core conservative audience (expectations they themselves played a significant role in cultivating).
Finally, this case is a useful illustration of the ecological dynamics of quasi-religious political media. Here, we see a dramatic interplay between right-wing media firms where a much smaller organization (NewsMax) was able to quickly eat into the audience share of the larger firm by remaining more committed to their quasi-religious epistemology and function. NewsMax appealed to audiences disillusioned with Fox News’s perceived accommodations and siphoned resources and loyalty from Fox’s former adherents.
Discussion and Conclusions
A large and growing corpus of empirical findings demonstrate that right-wing news organizations and audiences in the contemporary United States are qualitatively different from their mainstream counterparts. Yet the dominant theoretical paradigm in contemporary media studies, political polarization, conceptually obfuscates rather than illuminates such differences. Political polarization remains an insightful framework for understanding other social divides characterized by quantitative differences in degree, but we argue that other conceptual frameworks are needed to account for divides characterized by qualitative differences in kind.
We attempted to provide such a framework. Leveraging classic theoretical insights from the sociology of religion, we argued that understanding right-wing news as epistemically, functionally, and ecologically religious theoretically synthesizes and illuminates much of what is so different about conservative news media in the United States. To briefly summarize, the right-wing ecosystem is more prone to propaganda and mis/disinformation because it is characterized by a faith-based rather than an empiricist approach to knowledge and truth claims (epistemically religious), more ideologically exclusivist and combative because it aims to build and reinforce a strong moral subculture rather than inform a general public (functionally religious), and more subject to rapid organizational changes and instability because its sociocultural environment is characterized by schismatic, “church-sect-like” dynamics of competition, decline, and growth (ecologically religious). We now focus on the implications of this conceptual framing for political media scholarship, discussing how this frame can be used to further already existing lines of inquiry in media studies and generate new ones.
Mis/disinformation studies are perhaps best positioned to benefit from going beyond polarization framings and more fully recognizing the religious qualities of right-wing media. As described briefly, scholars of religion and science have long noted that religious belief presents significant conceptual and methodological challenges for those researching scientific knowledge, understandings, and trust (Evans 2011, 2018; O’Brien and Noy 2015). Most relevant for considerations of political mis/disinformation, Roos (2014) shows how one of the most widely used instruments for measurement of scientific knowledge, the National Science Foundation science literacy scale in the General Social Survey, includes measures less correlated with scientific knowledge per se than measures of religious belief (e.g., belief in evolution and the big bang). Therefore, knowledge (or lack thereof) of certain scientific facts is unrelated to “being (mis/dis)informed” but instead indicates a comprehensive religious worldview with implications for a range of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Here, we make a similar argument in the realm of political information: Maintaining a methodological agnosticism to the empirical truth status of certain items usually categorized as dis/misinformation (e.g., the 2020 election was fraudulent) opens a range of research possibilities that are orthogonal to preoccupations with their truth status. What is the contribution of such beliefs to in-group ties? What do these beliefs indicate about the status of believers versus nonbelievers? What does belief suggest about features of the believers’ sacred cosmos? These are only a few examples of research questions suggested by an understanding of right-wing media as quasi-religious.
Relatedly, our conceptual framework suggests both the need for and potential benefits of closer intellectual collaboration between sociologists of political media and sociologists of religion. One avenue of collaboration could involve investigating if, how, and to what effects explicitly religious actors, beliefs, and practices have contributed to these quasi-religious dynamics. Where, in other words, are the cultural “trading zones” between organized religion and political media in the United States today? Much work could be done in this vein, and recent research by Tripodi (2018) provides a compelling case in point. In Tripodi’s ethnographic research on news consumption among conservative Christians in the United States, she finds that many draw on interpretive techniques honed in Bible study to make sense of and evaluate political claims in the media. Through what Tripodi calls “scriptural inference,” some conservatives apply hermeneutic practices such as biblical literalism and anti-elitism to political media texts to assess their trustworthiness. The active ways her research subjects seek out, interpret, and evaluate a diversity of news media lead Tripodi to critique assumptions that contemporary conservatives are simply cultural dupes who passively imbibe political dis/misinformation and simply need to become more “media literate.” Rather, by using reading practices cultivated in religious settings, what counts as “fact” or “fiction” is sorted through the hermeneutics of faith. Tripodi’s research suggests that at least among some segments of the right-wing media audience, religious epistemic assumptions and interpretive techniques are being directly “imported” into the realm of political media consumption.
Moving to a more macro perspective, we encourage future research that places the ascendancy of right-wing news in the United States within the context of important demographic and secularizing trends. For instance, the purported decline of social capital (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears 2008; but see Paik and Sanchagrin 2013; Putnam 2000) and widespread religious disaffiliation (Burge 2023; Funk, Smith, and Stencel 2012; Hout and Fischer 2002, 2014) in the contemporary United States should be examined as potentially significant contributors to the emergence of political media as a location of quasi-religious community building. As opportunities for building social capital offline become less available—whether due to individual reasons, such as preferring one’s phone, or structural reasons, such as less walkable communities (Yu et al. 2017)—online social contexts, where political communities and discussions are prominent, have helped fill this void (Bail 2021). It makes sense, then, that right-wing communities, which are more often based on shared ideology and ethnic/religious identity, will enjoy greater success. Future research can make clearer the connections between the decline of social capital, right-wing politics, and search for community online. Moreover, given the well-documented decline of religious affiliation in the United States, scholars of religion could examine whether and how individuals seeking community have turned from traditional religious contexts to the quasi-religious comfort of political media. This kind of work seems well underway among researchers studying movements such as Christian nationalism, a political movement scholars have argued is based more on drawing boundaries around White conservatives versus everyone else than the application of clear religious principles to public policy (Whitehead and Perry 2020; Whitehead, Perry, and Baker 2018).
An additional factor worthy of further empirical exploration is the shifting age demographics of news audiences. Munger (2022), for instance, argues that “boomer ballast”—the enduring cultural influence of baby boomers who remain a large audience for cultural goods and continue to occupy culturally influential positions—is largely responsible for the nature of contemporary political culture. This perspective suggests right-wing quasi-religious political media may be serving an aging and increasingly lonely population who are seeking community, nostalgia, and evidence of their cultural and political vitality. These factors suggest the need for research (and interventions) aimed less at addressing information integrity and dissemination (e.g., fact-checking) and focused more on the structural circumstances that have led to right-wing media spaces being major sites of meaningful collective identity formation and community maintenance.
Finally, the features of quasi-religious right-wing media elaborated here are well suited for application to cross-national contexts. Countries, and therefore researchers around the world, are grappling with the rise of far-right parties, media, and attitudes. Common among these studies—whether focused on Western Europe, Latin America, or elsewhere—are findings testifying to far-right movements’ emphases on shared ethnic and cultural identities, their rejection of the outcomes of globalization (e.g., immigration and diversity), their focus on reimagining national history and memory in accordance with their ideology, and their dependence on political media systems that can distribute their often unpopular messaging (Couperus, Tortola, and Rensmann 2023; Ellinas 2010; Feischmidt and Hervik 2015; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2011, 2013)—features that align nicely with our theory of quasi-religious political media. Currently, the dominant frames for discussing political division, including political polarization, are being stretched to attend to such cross-national trends and used to explain affective division almost exclusively (Bantel 2023; Dekeyser and Roose 2022; Kekkonen and Ylä-Anttila 2021; Renström, Bäck, and Carroll 2021; Van Erkel and Turkenburg 2022; Wagner 2021). We believe the framework we offer here is more suitable in important respects for conducting comparative international research on political media.
However, although particular sociohistorical dynamics have made it such that right-wing media is more religious and mainstream media more journalistic, in the contemporary United States, it is important to keep in mind that such relationships between political positionality and media ecosystems are not preordained. There is no a priori reason to assume that quasi-religious media are always and forever the niche of the political right and journalistic systems the niche of the political center. The ethno-religious nationalism of many of today’s right-wing movements exhibit the clear moral boundaries, strong collective identities, and axiomatic belief structures through which quasi-religious media ecosystems flourish, but leftist political ideologies and movements can exhibit similar features (e.g., currently in Latin America; De La Torre 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2011, 2013; Sandel 2018; Seligson 2007; Stavrakakis et al. 2016). Future research can explore the social, cultural, and historical contingencies inherent in the relationships between political movements/orientations and religious versus journalistic media forms.
Further inquiry is certainly needed into the origins, functions, and overlaps of mainstream and right-wing media, but we hope we have convincingly demonstrated the significance of the quasi-religious characteristics of contemporary U.S. right-wing media and the failure of the polarization paradigm to account for this difference. Most importantly, we believe conceptualizing right-wing news as quasi-religious is a useful step toward an appreciation of right-wing news media not as simple disseminators of partisan knowledge but, rather, as increasingly powerful sites of modern meaning-making, belief, and belonging.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
The authors contributed equally to the development of this article.
