On my personal blog (The Weekly Sift) a few days ago, I wrote an article (The Doublethink Network) about the O'Reilly-Coburn flap. At the time I thought about using that incident as an example in a larger trend I think I'm seeing at Fox: They used to be a propaganda network, but recently they've been acting more like a cult.
I decided not to go there. It seemed speculative, more based on my gut instinct than any data I could point to. And besides, I self-impose a word limit on the Sift, so the longer article didn't make the cut.
That was Monday. Tuesday, Glenn Beck does his God-is-giving-me-a-plan radio show. So I gotta ask: Is Fox turning into a cult? Let me explain the difference and then take the poll.
Here's the distinction as I see it: Propaganda is about winning arguments in the larger community, while cultism is about walling yourself off from the larger community. Propaganda is designed to compete with other news sources, but cults assume a controlled environment where the world is shut out and the audience will only hear one voice.
For this reason, propagandists are careful with their lies. As a grad student, I used to practice my German by occasionally picking up the East German paper Neues Deutschland, which the university bookstore carried for some reason. I never caught them in a lie. Instead, they created their illusions through selection and omission.
Neues Deutschland's stories about the United States, for example, were all true: They wrote about serial killers, inner-city neighborhoods being destroyed by drugs, hungry children in poor rural areas, political corruption scandals, and so on. They made the U.S. sound like a hell-hole, but they did it by carefully spooning out the truth. (This is one of the most misunderstood features of the Big Lie technique. The Big Lie is not just audacious, it's conceptually big, like the idea that America is a hell-hole or that the Jews betrayed Germany in World War I. No single fact can refute it. The smaller and more observable the fact, the more truthful the propagandist needs to be. So you can get away with calling Obama a Communist, but you can't get away with calling him fat.)
Now, I doubt there was ever a period where Fox was quite that circumspect; they've always lied to a certain extent. But the main thrust of their propaganda has been selection and omission. They took quotes out of context. They emphasized stories that supported their worldview and minimized stories that didn't. They provided an uncritical platform for other people to lie. But the lies Fox told directly were usually at a higher level: Through selection and omission, they assembled baseless and fanciful stories.
A propagandist behaves that way because an observable lie creates a vulnerability. The propagandist has competition, and he'll lose to that competition if they can expose him telling clear lies.
When a propagandist does get caught in a lie, he wants the story to go away and be forgotten. So the #1 defense is just to go on: Find another bright and shiny story for your audience to jump to. If you can't get away with that, you fog the story up: Roll your eyes and imply that your critics are lying without accusing them of anything specific. ("That liberal media, what else can you expect?") Or you can exaggerate and distort the accusations made against you, expand the target, and then be outraged by the distortions you just projected onto your critics. ("How dare they compare our troops to the Nazis!") If you think you can't even get away with that, your last resort is to admit the error, but deny any bad intent. (When Sean Hannity was caught switching tapes to exaggerate the size of a health care protest rally, he said it was "an inadvertent mistake".)
What you don't do is bring the issue to a sharper point, implicitly admit that what you're accused of saying was a lie, and claim that you never said it even though it's on tape and your audience probably remembers you saying it anyway. That's the behavior I was describing last week in Bill O'Reilly. (Commenter DavidWinSF expands the point to the larger conservative movement, pointing to John McCain saying "I never considered myself a maverick.")
That's cult behavior -- a bald reality-is-what-I-say-it-is claim.
I think I've been seeing more of it than I used to. But I've been reluctant to talk about it because it's more of a gut instinct than an analysis of data. If I had to put a beginning date on it, two events stand out: Obama's election and the rise of Glenn Beck over the earlier Fox stars like O'Reilly and Hannity. I think they're related: The failure of Bush and Obama's election created the conditions for Beck to come into his own.
Pre-Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly were propagandists. They were charismatic (Hannity) and avuncular (O'Reilly) proponents of a pre-existing conservatism. There has never been a unique Hannity worldview or O'Reilly worldview. They got their talking points from elsewhere, and they ran with them.
Beck is different. What Beck offers is not conservative spin, but occult knowledge. There is a hidden order to the world, one that only Glenn Beck has been able to figure out, and he explains it to you on his blackboard. Often his reasoning sounds more like The DaVinci Code than like the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation. He interprets symbols no one else is paying attention to (Beck here, rational response here), finds a sinister conspiracy in a public alliance of labor and environmental groups to promote green jobs, and evenreads significance into random assemblages of letters. (South Park parody here.)
That's on TV. His radio show (Premiere, not Fox) is even wiggier. And that brings me to the example that convinced me to go ahead and write this. Tuesday (audio, partial transcript) Beck started talking about a caller who asked him to just put out his "plan". He says he's working on it. But then he says something more: He's not working on it, he's getting it from God.
The problem, I think, is that God is giving a plan to me that is not really a plan. ... The problem is that I think the plan that the Lord would have us follow is hard for people to understand. ... Because of my track record with you, I beg of you to help me get this message out, and I beg of you to pray for clarity on my part. The plan that He would have me articulate, I think, to you is “Get behind me.” And I don’t mean me, I mean Him. “Get behind Me. Stand behind Me.”
He goes on to talk about the Founders. Beck's impression of them is that they knew God was acting through them and so they just got out of the way and let Him work. (I wonder what Beck's supposed hero Thomas Paine -- author of the skeptical classic The Age of Reason -- would think about that.)
They just stood where they were supposed to stand and they said the things that they were supposed to say as He directed. ... But that’s what He’s asking us to do is to stand peacefully, quietly, with anger, quiet with anger, loudly with truth.
Faith is the answer. Get on your knees, don’t let it take a September 11th, get on your knees, please, I don’t care what church you go to, no church at all, I don’t care. Turn to Him.
This is the most popular guy on Fox, the one the others are starting to imitate. He is the biggest single influence on the Tea Party crowd, the biggest difference between them and Americans who are otherwise demographically identical.
And he's not a propagandist. He's a cult leader.