Yes, We All Know Fox Lies To Its Poorly Educated Viewers... But Do We Know Why?

"Death Of Independent Journalism" by Nancy Ohanian

Mehdi Hasan has a book coming out this week, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, and Rolling Stone ran an excerpt today dealing with Señor Trumpanzee’s unique debate style. He poses the question “how did the wholly unqualified reality TV star defeat sixteen GOP rivals— from governors to senators to CEOs— in his first race for his party’s presidential nomination back in 2016? Was it by besting them on policy? By raising more money? Or was it… by taunting and diminishing them with childish nicknames? Liddle Marco. Lyin’ Ted. Low-Energy Jeb. The pundits derided Trump for his ‘use of vitriolic, ad hominem attacks’ and dubbed him the ‘schoolyard debate champion’ for having ‘insulted his way to the top of the GOP.’”

Now, I’m not disputing that description of him, but what if I told you that Trump’s much-maligned tactics were not that different from those deployed by one of the most respected and accomplished orators and debaters in history? Back in Ancient Rome, the statesman, lawyer, and rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero was notorious for the invective he rained down upon his rivals. As the classical historian Valentina Arena has pointed out, in one famous argument, Cicero called his opponent Piso, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, a belua (“monster”), bustum rei publicae (“funeral pyre of the commonwealth”), carnifex (“butcher”), furcifer (“scoundrel”), maialis (“gelded pig”), and inhumanissimum ac foedissimum monstrum (“most foul and inhuman monster”). Cicero, Arena added, also mocked his opponent’s physical appearance, including his “hairy cheeks and discolored teeth.” (Positively Trumpian!)

…These days, though, such Ciceronian invective is seen as off-limits, a no-go area in both everyday argument and formal debate. Ad hominem arguments are viewed, almost universally, as bad, bad, bad.

…The inconvenient truth is that to win any argument, and especially to win over a skeptical or divided audience, you need to establish your own authority and expertise while challenging your opponent’s. And for that, you do sometimes need to rely on ad hominem arguments — logical fallacies and politeness be damned!

…The abusive ad hominem is all about the reputation of your opponent. It’s all about their ethos. If an opponent is not a good or honest person, if they’ve been unreliable or fallacious in the past, that should affect how an audience considers their present argument. So don’t be afraid to say that!

…The conventional wisdom–mongers are wrong. Even top philosophers say abusive, circumstantial, and tu quoque ad hominem arguments are fine, as long as they are used in the correct way: not to go after the logos of an argument, but to challenge the ethos of the arguer.

Credibility is an asset in any argument, and if your opponent’s isn’t warranted, don’t let it stand unchallenged. Don’t shy away from the ad hominem. You’re an utter fool if you do.

House Republicans have introduced legislation to repeal the $35/month cap on insulin that Democrats passed for seniors on Medicare. A new poll, released this morning, found that 79% of registered voters support keeping the $35 per month cap— including not just 82% of Democrats and 79% of Independents but even 76% of registered Republicans! The pollsters also found that 54% of voters would be less likely to vote for a candidate who wants to repeal the $35 per month cap— including 64% of Democrats, 57% of Independents, and 42% of Republicans.

So how do Republicans get around that? The same way they get around all their unpopular agenda items, a big part of which is their effective propaganda network— Hate Talk Radio, QAnon, Fox, satanic evangelical churches, etc. This morning, Luke Savage looked at the incentive Fox has to lie. The orgy of purposeful lying after Trump’s 2020 loss, wrote Savage, is “a reminder that cable news is first and foremost a for-profit business in which objective reality and even partisan considerations are ultimately subordinate to the bottom line. The ongoing panic surrounding fake news and misinformation often elides the fact that major news networks are far more complicit in promoting falsehoods than the social media platforms that are usually blamed. In this respect, Fox’s opportunistic embrace of the Trumpian election fraud narrative is a particularly good case in point: the network feared competition and was so determined to maintain relationships integral to its business interests that it actively broadcast information its anchors and editorial staff knew to be untrue.”

Much as Fox is particularly deserving of criticism, the problem of misinformation and the profit motive so often at its root are by no means confined to right-wing media. Nonconservative networks like CNN regularly torque the framing of important public issues around the interests of advertisers. The erroneous “hacking” narrative promoted by some liberal outlets in the wake of the 2016 election succeeded in convincing large numbers of Democratic voters that a foreign government had quite literally altered vote tallies to elect Donald Trump. Throughout that same year, networks that officially loathed Trump also gave him tens of millions of dollars in free advertising because it was good for their ratings.

Partisan bias in the media undoubtedly plays a significant role in undermining the truth, suppressing inconvenient facts, and spreading misinformation. But the real culprit in fake news is often nothing other than the company bottom line.