It is only 16 days until 2020 is over and my chance to read the 25 books I promised to read for Goodreads has passed. But in the meantime I am still 'cramming in' more books. Aside from listening to Alien Oceans to the very end, I also finished listening to the audiobook recording of Brian Stelter's Hoax.
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Trembling on the verge of the passing of the Trump presidency as we are, any non-fiction book centred on the 45th President runs the risk of anachronism. But I think that Hoax bypasses the risk.
Brian Stelter begins with the President but ends up largely discussing Fox News, and the President is only an especially noisy watcher.
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| "Rupert Murdoch - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2007." Copyright World Economic Forum (CC-BY-SA-2.0) |
It makes sense anyway that the book's focus would be on television rather than governance: Stelter once ran the website TVNewser and now commentates the American press on CNN's show Reliable Sources. He is a media reporter through and through, and says of himself that he has tracked Fox News for 16 years.
But also, to borrow a phrase from the comedian Stephen Colbert and his former show Colbert Report, often American politics are more 'Videri quam esse' — seeming than being.
The 45th President took this motto more to heart than most: he was, as others have said, a television president.
He set aside 'executive time' in which he watched Fox and Friends and other political television when he should have been doing presidential tasks. If people wanted to influence him or to be hired by him, they would angle to appear on Fox rather than meet him in person. Long before he ran for office, he would feed stories to journalists and be credited as a 'source close to Trump.' He was altogether obsessed with ratings and with fans, rather than with sound policy and consensus. Stelter doesn't mention it directly as far as I recall; but it was quite sick that Trump reportedly used to track how popular his coronavirus briefings were, as if they were a television soap opera. ("Trump, Citing TV Ratings, Says Daily Coronavirus Briefings Will Resume" [New York Magazine])
It appeared that he had never grown out of his reality show, The Apprentice.
And, of course, the real estate magnate-turned-politician also took to heart the idea of 'seeming rather than being' when he fudged 'facts.'
Stelter recapitulates more trivial controversies that showed Trump's mendacious tendencies, like the 'crowd size' debate at the presidential inauguration in 2017.
But the main controversy that clearly weighs most on Stelter's mind is the Administration's and Fox's poor approach to the coronavirus pandemic. Even as the first doses of a vaccine are being distributed there, beginning yesterday, it is worth keeping in mind that as of December 13th, 2020, the US suffered 16,062,299 confirmed cases, with 297,818 residents dying with Covid-19, according to Wikipedia.
The Trump administration and Fox News, amongst all of the other terrible advice they gave, frivolously used the term 'hoax' in a way that convinced American citizens that they need not take the coronavirus seriously. This pooh-poohing extended to other serious problems like white supremacism.
And Stelter is irate that a few Fox stars were pish-toshing the importance of the virus even as their TV sets were being fitted out with hygienic precautions and some of the hosts chose to broadcast from their homes altogether.
Of course, as Stelter points out, employees inside Fox become irate about these very same things too. These are the ones to whom he gives a voice in Hoax.
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Fox News, like President Trump, is also concerned with ratings.
In their case, it is because Fox wants advertising money. Stelter explains how this leads to an ethical battle within the network: everyone from the owner Murdochs to the TV hosts must recognize that opinion shows like former talk show radio host Sean Hannity's show have drawn far greater crowds than ex-Fox host Shep Smith's sober reporting in the news wing of the channel. As a result, the news wing has been so underfunded that, for example, Fox only has three international bureaus: London, Rome and Jerusalem.
Aside from the financial side, Fox feels the effects if it forfeits the goodwill of its audience. And its audience is fiercest and most engaged on behalf of personalities like President Trump. Critical hosts like Neil Cavuto are bombarded with angry tweets and emails if they criticize the president. They face consequences not unlike those of personalities and journalists in other networks.
(The consequences to journalists in other networks have been many. CNN reporters have been given security guards when they attend Trump rallies, to protect them against violence. Stelter clarifies that he has never felt threatened, however, and that although he has 'felt like a penguin at the zoo,' Trump fans often just take selfies in front of the press. But it is also demoralizing that Fox opinion show hosts would at times agree with the President that journalists were 'fake news' — in one Trump rally, Stelter writes, Sean Hannity berated the press corps at the back of the rally, either not caring or not noticing that amongst them were some of his own Fox colleagues. And a C-SPAN caller telephoned in a rambling rant that turned into an offer to shoot Don Lemon or Stelter on sight, after watching a Sean Hannity show; Stelter points out that Hannity also receives death threats, however.)
Complaining to the CEO or to the owners of Fox whenever the opinion wing attacked the news wing was totally ineffective. Often it sounds like 'real' journalists or conscientious anchors ended up just dropping out of the network when they had enough, instead of trusting to management to keep the other 'talent' in line. Which leads us to the broader question of accountability and specifically the sexual harassment problem within Fox.
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Even as a Canadian teenager I could see that there was something unusual in the way in which women were presented on Fox: a large proportion of them were blonde, they were generally younger than the male anchors, they did not have the serious, impartially professional air of a Diane Sawyer or a Katie Couric or a Christiane Amanpour, their skirts were short and not hidden behind desks, and their make-up was forceful. And I always found this blatant sleaze a strange accompaniment to the 'family values' and purported Christian ethic of the network.
Stelter explains that this dress code wasn't only implemented by the male leadership; Suzanne Scott (later CEO) would also nudge the make-up department to gild the lily. Another telling detail is that when celebrity gossip about, say, Angelina Jolie was worked into a news broadcast on a 'slow news day,' producers would put pressure on Fox employees to search out the 'sexiest' photographs. But it was Roger Ailes who was forced out of Fox after it became clear that he had harassed women in the network, and later Bill O'Reilly.
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— What was depressing was how many partisans Ailes still had. Aside from making women's lives uncomfortable, he 'used gossip, surveillance cameras, and phone call supervision to keep employees in line.' So there were many ethical reasons why one would have thought that people would have been happy to see him leave. But even women whom he'd harassed considered him a mentor and praised good sides to his character.
Ailes is also an interesting case because in my point of view he epitomizes the impropriety of Fox News's proceedings. He was a campaign staffer for George H.W. Bush and his career was generally intertwined with Republican politics, to the degree that he bragged of 'electing three presidents' — Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Surely a news channel is not meant to be a political propaganda outlet in a democratic republic? Other figures who went through the 'revolving door' were former Speaker of the House/Fox board member Paul Ryan, White House communications director/Fox chief communications officer Hope Hicks, ...)
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Stelter has a knack for finding pithy quotations, drawing from an array of producers, executives, hosts, a fact checker, friends of hosts, White House employees, ... . I think he also gives incisive insights here and there that are enriched with a sensitivity to gender and racial issues.
For example, he spoke of the Fox commentary about the 'War on Christmas.' ('The War on Christmas' refers to any attempt to secularize Christmas or to celebrate other holidays alongside it; e.g. to say 'Season's Greetings' or 'Happy Holidays' instead of 'Merry Christmas,' and to admit the fact that e.g. Hanukkah or the Chinese New Year or other perfectly nice feasts also exist.) He said that Fox 'preyed on White Christian viewers' anxiety about multiculturalism.' I'm not sure if he coined this phrase, but it was a neat encapsulation.
He doesn't kneel into the question of the greater influence of racism than of poverty on the likelihood of voting for Trump, as Ta-Nehisi Coates once did for The Atlantic in "Donald Trump Is the first White President," but he scatters a few breadcrumbs.
I also liked the multiplicity of character traits that each of the Fox opinion hosts has in Hoax; there are a lot of good pointillist portraits that take shape over the course of the book.
Firstly, the 'villains':
Tucker Carlson was not the most attractive commentator on CNN during the Bush presidency. He has repulsively said in more recent years that 'mass immigration makes our country poorer, dirtier and more divided.' (Carlson later clarified that 'dirtier' meant the environmental impact when migrants discard trash in the desert. I take this explanation with a grain of salt, but it might be true.) And yet he intervened to prevent a military attack on Iran.
Sean Hannity might be unpleasant, but he felt exhausted by becoming an unofficial adviser to the President.
And the 'heroes': Shep Smith fought against Trumpian untruths on his show. Also, his leaving Fox and riding into the sunset to enjoy a happier, simpler life with his partner was one of the more heartwarming narrative moments of the book. But he was a big Ailes proponent and is also, apparently, a little self-absorbed and spiky.
In my view Stelter is also perfectly right to question if it makes sense for millionaires (Hannity earns some $36 million per year, Carlson earns $10 million and Kelly might have earned more than $20 million if she had not left for NBC) to inveigh on behalf of hoi polloi against a Marie Antoinette elite — which, I guess, is another parallel between Trump and Fox.
What I like about Hoax, amongst other things, is that much of the gossip is juicy without being salacious. For example, I had not remembered hearing before that Sean Hannity acted as an unpaid adviser to Trump. But even more so I had no idea that the Fox leadership was worried that Hannity's phone might be tapped by foreign governments; it was a major challenge for the television network's technological department to try to shield his privacy. (I'd never have thought I'd become indignant on Fox's behalf - but really, Trump should have paid for the phone's security.)
The workplace environment portraits of Fox are sometimes detailed enough that I felt secondhand anxiety even if there was also a feeling of 'family' at the TV network. Imagining working for such an organization, with that kind of professional and interpersonal culture, with those kinds of internal conflicts, made me shudder.
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| "2012 Democratic National Convention: Day 3" via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-2.0) |
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Altogether I did not agree with one or two aspects of the book: a trivial example was mentioning children of news anchors. Megyn Kelly proudly announces her childrens' names in her Twitter biography, and I suspect that (like her?) Stelter wants to humanize Fox hosts and show that they are real people. But pulling people into a public spotlight who have never made an informed choice to be there, if they are underage, worries me nonetheless.
On another private note, I was not sure if it was the best idea to report on the extra-marital affairs of Fox hosts.
Kimberley Guilfoyle's entanglement with Donald Trump Jr. and the speculations about her motives were frankly outright nauseating to read about. It is patently not my business, and it leads me to despair for humankind and to fear the death of romance.
But those were exceptions. The book seemed well researched and an example of the painstaking journalism that the author calls for.
Of course, as I am not a New York media insider, I am not well-informed enough to compare facts about everything. But for example Stelter got a detail right that I could verify. He says that Roger Ailes complained about Megyn Kelly's "female empowerment stuff", after Kelly asked candidate Trump in a presidential debate why Trump uses degrading words about women whom he dislikes. This matches exactly a phrase that I've heard Kelly quote in an interview herself.
Lastly, one other aspect of the book I was concerned about from the first pages was the clear conflict of interest: that a host in one TV network was criticizing another TV network. But there appears to be a kind of camaraderie amongst journalists, independent of network, that might compensate for the rivalry.
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