If a story isn't reported by Fox News, did it really happen?
When it comes to news and politics, Americans these days inhabit parallel universes
First, consider a few news stories
Here are a few varied news items that caught my eye in recent days.
Global shipping has slowed dramatically. Container ship traffic is down 40% in May, which has led some experts to suggest we’re only weeks away from seeing emptier store shelves and rising prices. The Wall Street Journal reported today on Walmart’s “plans to raise prices this month ... when tariff-affected merchandise hits its store shelves.”
The National Weather Service has been so hollowed out by government layoffs that key weather forecasting jobs are unfilled just as the Atlantic hurricane season is about to begin.
There are also warnings that flights could be disrupted at numerous airports during the busy summer travel season because of equipment issues and staffing shortages. This after 400 FAA employees were laid off, including workers who “had direct roles in supporting safety inspectors and airport operations.”
The cumulative savings from all government layoffs will be about $150 billion, while the cost of these layoffs (from lost revenue, reduced productivity, or benefits for laid-off workers) will be about $135 billion, almost as much as the savings.
Meanwhile, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, the tax and budget bill that’s been proposed by Congressional Republicans would actually add more than $5 trillion to the national deficit.
The Trump family has apparently banked at least $1 billion in profits from its crypto businesses in just the past few months. Almost entirely from a series of deals, many from foreign nationals, that appear designed to curry favor with the president by boosting his personal fortune.
One researcher called this a level of “corruption that we’ve never seen in the American presidency.” And Don Jr. has been so brazen about cashing in on his father’s presidency that Business Insider declared: “Don Jr. Is the New Hunter Biden.”
But what news is breaking through these days?
Not too long ago, almost any one of these stories would have generated front page headlines, perhaps for days. But now, because of the way our fragmented media environment has evolved, one portion of the U.S. population is familiar with these stories, a second segment of people hears mostly about different stories (or different versions of the same stories), and yet others don’t pay attention to the news at all.
I pulled the above items from a variety of sources (liberal, conservative, and neutral), including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, Axios, Newsweek, Business Insider, Truthout.org, and the Committee for a Responsible Budget.
Then, out of curiosity and as an experiment, I went through numerous days worth of recent Fox News stories online. And I found very little there about any of the above headlines.
There were scattered mentions of the National Weather Service issue, mostly from local stations in states where hurricanes are a threat.
One instance of a Fox host asking a GOP Senator about why the party’s budget bill would increase the deficit, which the Senator dismissed as “Washington math.”
And almost nothing about potential Trump family corruption, other than framing it as Democratic complaints. I did learn, however, that according to one study, in the past three months on Bret Baier’s Fox News show there has been a single mention of the Trump family’s involvement in cryptocurrency schemes. By contrast, in one three-week period before the 2020 election, the same show aired 32 different segments on Hunter Biden.
At the same time, I found prominent headlines such as the following, which look more like they were pulled from the 19th century partisan press era:
“Trump honored at Qatar state dinner — sealing ties, striking deals, and putting America first”
“Complaints about Trump’s luxury jet gift is ‘much ado about nothing,’ author says”
“Trump weighs in on SCOTUS case that's making U.S. look like 'SUCKERS': 'The drug cartels love it!' Trump said of birthright citizenship”
So, given this divided media environment, it makes me wonder how much of what was once considered objective news (back when most Americans subscribed to a daily newspaper and watched one of three evening news broadcasts) actually breaks through now to the general population.
If a story isn’t reported by Fox News, did it really happen?
We’ve all heard the philosophical question: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
Well, I’ve lately been asking myself a similar question about American life and politics. Namely: “If a story isn’t reported by Fox News, did it really happen?”
I ask this figuratively, but it’s also something to seriously ponder because the U.S. now seems cleaved into two fairly separate media environments. There are the stories that are covered by the traditional legacy media, on the one hand, and then the stories that are covered by Fox News and the rest of the right wing media ecosystem, including Newsmax, One America News, or conservative talk radio and podcasts.
(MSNBC may occupy its own niche as a station that produces left-leaning opinion programs but with a considerably smaller audience than that of Fox and also without much of a left wing media ecosystem around to push similar messages.)
With such a polarized media environment then, it often seems as if something that isn’t covered by Fox News is also less likely to break through to the entire voting population. And many stories that do break through are nevertheless dismissed as fake news.
Consider, for instance, these two examples:
1. Are we sure Trump said what he said?
Do you remember, a few weeks ago, when Trump suggested he’d love to be able to send even U.S. citizens to foreign prisons? He mentioned it on multiple occasions, but this particular one was during an Oval Office press session with the president of El Salvador:
Sometime later, Democratic Congressman Maxwell Frost of Florida appeared on Fox News and mentioned Trump’s comment about sending U.S. citizens to a foreign prison.
In response, the Fox host expressed absolute disbelief that Trump ever said such a thing.
“Do you have anything besides your word on that?” host Will Cain demanded of Frost.
2. Trump or AI?
Also recently, as the stock market went through wild fluctuations based on the president’s on- again, off-again tariff war, Trump posted on social media, “This is a great time to buy!” His post appeared only a few hours before he announced a pause on tariffs.
Later, Trump was in the Oval Office with Charles Schwab and others. He was shown on video bragging to guests about how Schwab had taken advantage of the presidential announcement and “made two and a half billion today.”
Here is the video:
Well, a friend of mine told me she was disturbed by this bragging about making money for billionaires while average people were being tossed to and fro by the market. So she brought it up to a friend who was a big fan of Trump and the MAGA movement. She showed him the video, curious about what he thought.
His response?
“That’s a fake video. It was generated by AI to make Trump look bad.”
Two Americas, two realities
So we have a Fox News host questioning the reality of something the president said on video in the Oval Office.
And we have a MAGA supporter insisting that a video of Trump saying something else in the Oval Office was generated by AI.
Apparently, Americans are incapable of agreeing even on objective reality these days (and even when there is video evidence).
So I don’t think our problem is that Americans are divided by ideology. They should be divided by ideology, that’s what democracy is all about. Rather, the problem is that too many Americans perceive different realities. And these perceptions are driven by the media-information bubbles in which people are insulated.
In fact, in a fascinating recent study, a group of Fox viewers was paid to only watch CNN for one month instead of Fox. At the end of the month, “some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues.” And another study, in 2023, showed that people who got most of their news from the traditional legacy media gave Joe Biden a positive approval rating, while those who primarily watched Fox, Newsmax, or One America were overwhelmingly negative towards Biden (and social media users were split). There isn’t much clearer evidence of the media polarization in the U.S. today.
I wrote last fall about the challenge this poses for politics and democracy (in the second part of my series, Three Years That Broke American Politics):
In the 1960s, about 70% of Americans trusted news organizations to be fair. Today, that number still holds only among Democrats, with just 14% of Republicans now saying they trust the media …
The conservative media propagated the belief that theirs was the only truth and anything reported elsewhere was either biased or a lie. This message worked, as 40% of Republicans who watch television news now say they only trust Fox to provide the truth. So, for a fair number of voters who identify as Republicans, a statement can only be believed if it comes from the GOP, talk radio, or a conservative news program. Everything else is suspect …
This all leads to the unfortunate loss of a shared reality among Americans.
Two Americas, two realities. Sadly, it’s not a recipe for a healthy democracy. Where we go from here I do not know.
Images: Cover photo via Shutterstock