The Case of Fox News - Essay Example

The combination of an aging TV audience and the consistency of Fox News Network in its conservative and anti-administration agenda-setting has ensured leadership of this broadcast segment all summer long and into the first three weeks of November this year.  Such dominance over CNN, MSNBC, and even the CNN subsidiary Headline News (HLN) compared to year-ago ratings was sustained despite the fact there were no elections this time and all news networks gave equal prominence to the George Zimmermann case during the summer.  As the fall season came and went, however, the Affordable Care Act and the budget debacle in Congress fuelled interest afresh in the agenda-setting and editorial slant of Fox News and strengthened its place at the top of the cable news ratings (Bibel, 2013; Mirkinson, 2013).  The operative question then remains: Why is Fox News successful despite resisting an allegedly popular presidency and the liberal ethos of the bicoastal giants in media?  Within the constraints of this very short paper, we discuss the theory of agenda-setting and how Fox News maintains its solitary stance but leads its segment of cable news.

We discuss here the theories behind framing, agenda-setting, and priming as they impinge on political communication generally and, in particular, the ideology that stoutly characterizes coverage in the cable news channels Fox News and MSNBC.  This means we are in the realm of cognitive communication and campaign effects, i.e. framing, agenda setting, and priming.  We also touch on the audience appeal of this ideology.

Political and communications research has undergone at least three major paradigm shifts since the post-newspaper era early in the last century.  The “magic bullet” or hypodermic theory was much in vogue from the 1920s to the 1940s.  Agenda-setting came into the limelight around 1972.  Starting around 1989, the propaganda model offshoots of framing and agenda setting became even more specifically applicable to a polarized US media scene. 

The propaganda model revolves around the multiple facets of control by conglomerates that generally serve their own commercial interests. The news agenda is shaped by five filters that include: multiple ownership, advertising, liberal bias versus conservative ideology, anti-Communism, and catering to audience apprehensions.

Early in the century, to return to the seminal background of media effects, the Frankfurt School of largely Jewish theorists proposed the “Bullet” or “Hypodermic Needle Theory” as a reaction to their observations of how Hitler and Goebbels in Nazi Germany had apparently mesmerized the entire German people.  In this model, the audience had no ideas of their own and passively absorbed whatever communications were launched at them.  In essence, the theory was over-impressed by the power and pervasiveness of radio, cinema, television and advertising; mass media was regarded as having a direct, immediate and powerful effect on mass audiences.  Since audiences supposedly did not know any better, they absorbed and agreed with any messages they heard.  Empirical experience soon showed that audience and market segmentation were entirely possible because listeners and viewers did have thoughts of their own.  During the 1940 Presidential election, the Two-Step Flow Theory was conceptualized to admit the possibility that interpersonal relationships were just as powerful or persuasive as anything carried by the mass media.

As to the two other communication paradigms, Scheufele and Tewksbury (2007) maintain that priming is an offshoot of agenda setting.  Theoretical work in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that one reason agenda-setting worked to make certain issues and personalities more prominent was that mass media had primed the audience to “prioritize specific issues as benchmarks for evaluating the performance of leaders and governments” (Ibid., p. 11).  Around the same period, framing theory sprung from its underpinnings in psychology and sociology to suggest that audiences cope with the sheer complexity of real-world issues by applying interpretative schemas.  On the journalists’ side, framing is done by telling the story in “context”.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is the second largest media conglomerate in the world.  On television alone, Murdoch applies his conservative ideology and agenda-setting over FOX News Channel, FOX Business Network, FOX College Sports, Fox Movie Channel, various sports shows, FSN, FUEL TV, and various feature channels such as National Geographic.  In addition, there are the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal publications and a variety of entertainment online channels (Columbia Journalism Review, 2013).

Fox News drives conservative rhetoric and ideology via the presentation and organizational slant of its news reports.  In the name of “Fair and Balanced News,” Fox makes no pretensions to responsible and objective journalism just as the rest of the bi-coastal domestic media freely engage in agenda-setting and propaganda on behalf of the “virtuous” Obama administration (Dunaway, 2011).  In keeping with agenda-setting theory, Fox News may not tell the audience of preponderantly middle-aged, Republican and Tea Party ideologues what to think but it can shape what they think about.  An editorial policy of selection, omission and framing manifestly forces public discussion on particular issues and is so hostile to the Democratic Administration ideology Fox reporters have gotten banned from White House press briefings.

Recent history is replete with the conservative bias of Rupert Murdoch and agenda-setting in Fox News.  Murdoch never made a secret of his support for President Bush in the invasion of Iraq, for example.  Agenda-setting is accomplished either by executive memos to editors-in-chiefs on how to treat prominent news of the day or, in more enduring fashion, hiring conservative editors and awarding reporters who espouse conservative ideologies (Neil, 1996).  Since 2011, the network has striven mightily to support the drive against national debt, partly in an effort to curb more deficit spending and the Democratic propensity for social entitlements.  In 2012, Fox News gave short shrift to the impending scandal about voter-registration fraud in GOP-controlled Florida.  Agenda-setting is clearly not the work of saints but the questions bears asking: if conservative politics is so wrong and troubling, why have the states kept returning a Republican majority to the House of Representatives for at least two elections now?