In a NY Times op-ed, Tobin Smith, a former contributor to, and market analyst for, Fox News, offers a Richard Hofstadter-like assessment of the anti-intellectual rot upon which the network thrives:
In my time at Fox News, narratives were weapons of mass emotional manipulation…. There’s little in this world that has the emotional manipulative power of a good tribalized — us versus them — narrative....
The Fox News counternarrative model [such as that deployed against the original narrative of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as an honorable American] is as simple as it is cunning. The segment producer’s job is to get the answers to two questions: What is the most emotionally engaging story we have right now [that being impeachment]. The next question is, how do we construct a counternarrative that includes as many existing other believable meta-narratives as possible?
The hunt for the killer narrative starts with the "Morning Memo” to the producers. It shares the interpretation from the vice president of news of the highest-trending articles on Foxnews.com and Drudge…. The next move is to get a few Fox News contributor regulars — elected officials and paid pundits — not just to deliver the new counternarrative but also to wrap it inside an existing or new meta-narrative.
What do the ratings tell the producers are the most engaging meta-narratives for the over 80 million Fox News viewers on all digital platforms?
Conspiracy theories….
Every successful Fox News segment producer has the conspiracy script down cold. These segments work best when the "proof" of a conspiracy against a tribal leader — in this case the Republican president — makes the viewer feel under attack as well….
Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to "special knowledge" that the rest of the world is "too blind," "too dumb" or "too corrupt" to understand.
This manner of counternarrative also explains why so many Americans believe in JFK conspiracy theories: Such a seemingly nonsensical assassination simply had to be the result of a complex, organized assault on the world's most powerful man; unquestionably, vast evil forces were at work, forces which exceeded the limited regicidal abilities of a repeatedly failed loner. This delusion helped (and still helps) Americans to regain some control in understanding the world, and allowed them "access to 'special knowledge'" that only the naive would deny.
But more than that, Smith's explanation of Fox's counternarratives comports perfectly with historian Hofstadter's theory of the paranoid style — practiced mostly by the right, though the left is susceptible. too. What Smith lacked the space to include is that the counternarrative must feature what Hofstadter characterized as the "superman" — the "good's" virtually invincible opponent of infinite power and unspeakable wickedness, without whom the forces of goodness could, after all, triumph.
Today, that superman is, of course, the "deep state," furtively undermining Trump's all-American efforts at achieving national grandeur. That the once anonymous (as the right insisted) deep state has of late been overtly pounding the president utterly destroys the right's paranoid conviction that invisible forces are at work. It has had no nullifying effect on the deep-state conspiracy delusion whatsoever.
The right has its identified superman, and they cannot give him up. Otherwise, the jig would be up. Without the deep state's complex, organized, insidious assault on this innocent president, the right would be left with nothing but honorable diplomats and nonpartisan, career civil servants attesting, in unison and for no discernible reason, to the impeachable behavior of Donald J. Trump.
The magnificent Richard Hofstadter had little idea, if any, of just how sustainable his paranoid theory of right-wing politics would become.