Abstract
Wherever in the world you are, it will matter to you what most Americans watch on cable news. This may sound like an overstatement, but as Reece Peck shows in this timely book, cable news plays a crucial role in shaping political information, opinion, and worldview to the US audience. Thus, ultimately, the most popular cable news station has an overwhelming say in both US politics and international politics.
Fox News was launched in 1996, and since 2002, the news network has towered over all other cable networks in terms of viewer figures. In fact, the conservative network, which Donald Trump often hails as his favorite TV channel, consistently has higher ratings than both the more liberal competitors, CNN and MSNBC combined. The effects of Fox News reaches much further than living room TV sets however, as its content has the ability to capture the national ‘mindshare’ due to, for instance, journalists using Fox News content to shape local and national news and social media platforms (see McDermott, 2010). With this dominant role in mind, it is vital that researchers, journalists, and viewers alike reflect on how Fox News works (see also Yglesias, 2018). Indeed, today, there is a crucial need of academic studies into politically important media networks.
While some literature on Fox News exists, primarily focusing on viewer effects (see Morris, 2005) especially political effects (see DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2007; Schroeder and Stone, 2015) and framing (i.e. Mills, 2017), a scarcity of academic research concerns itself solely with Fox News. Peck’s aim differs from the core research into cable news in that he does not seek to question or explore how Fox News works, but rather he wants to reveal why it works. The book explores both the economic success and political effects of Fox News with a key focus on how the cable news platform constructs ‘partisanship as identity style’ (p. 10).
This constant focus on news constructions and presentations is inherently a Fox News-critical one. Fox is described as imagining its audience as working-class underdogs and successfully representing narrow, conservative political demands as popular and universal. As Fox News host Steve Hilton (2018) spells out in his recent book, Positive Populism, being populist is not seen as negative within the cable network, quite the opposite. Peck terms this a ‘populist-intellectual tactic’ proving that Fox News is not simply an anti-intellectual news organization but that the network’s hostility to educated elites is ‘in fact, selective and, to an extent, contrived’ (p. 185).
No doubt, most Fox News viewers simply believe what they watch is the true representation of news events, not a construction of events or a presentation of framed facts. This book by its very title then is critical of the biased way in which Fox News works. One critique of this book could be whether the approach to a study of news bias is in fact too biased. If you are a Fox News viewer, you would most likely not be reading Fox Populism in the first place, which to this reader seems a shame. Although it appears clear that Peck has a critical stance toward the ideology and political slant of Fox News, his thorough research is very convincing.
Peck makes a compelling case for the importance of context in studies of contemporary news work. His study makes use of literary-critical textual methods analyzing over 800 Fox News broadcast transcripts as well as interviews and various sites of ethnographic studies at journalism conferences, workshops, and what Peck describes as ‘sites of conservative discourse’ – such as Tea Party political events. This method, coupled with a wealth of research data on Fox news policy and history, makes for a convincing argument and a riveting read.
As this review is being written, a media investigation into the relationship between The White House and Fox News appears to have begun (see Mayer, 2019). Perhaps, Peck’s book will contribute to not only an academic but also a journalistic and nationwide reflection on how and why Fox News works in today’s USA. For both journalism scholars and students of media and politics, or those with an interest in populist politics, Fox Populism is recommended reading, giving a much-needed multifaceted insight into the workings of Fox News today.