Nyetwork News: Trump, Fox News, and the Authoritarian Model of the Media (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Election Campaigns: Advertising, Propaganda, and Media

Abstract

While propaganda scholars have tended to focus on historical or foreign examples, the Trump administration provides a way to deploy classic understanding of propaganda within the current American media system. This study analyses the effect of former President Donald Trump and his allies on undermining journalistic objectivity through an analysis of the powerful Fox News network, notably by measuring how ideological aims may have trumped traditional news values. We consider the behavior of U.S. news outlets through the lens of the authoritarian model of the media, in which the news is expected to serve the interests of the oligarchic elites. Does Fox News come closer to the authoritarian model of the media rather than the traditional libertarian role of the news that we generally expect in the United States?

This study compares the framing of the 2020 U.S. election results, in which Trump falsely claimed widespread election fraud, on Fox News with other mainstream U.S. broadcasters such as CNN. The way in which Trump seeded the propaganda narrative prior to the election and deployed it when he lost parallels how authoritarian systems such as Russia manipulate the information space. In particular, a comparison of the main Russian news channel (Pervyi Kanal) and Fox News illuminates key parallels between the two. In particular, this highlights the way that authoritarian outlets broadcast ‘objective’ news bulletins in order to create an aura of respectability for the far more extreme political talk show hosts and guests that espouse authoritarian views. Methodologically, we will define key frames and narratives by Trump in his “Stop the Steal” campaigning to analyze how closely Fox mirrored his messaging and compare that measure of closeness on CNN and other outlets.

This research seeks to challenge key conceptions about news, Trump, and objectivity in the United States. While the conversation has tended to divide news outlets into those who lean Right or Left, this is a misleading dichotomy. Rather, content analysis shows that material on Fox is distinctive from material on other major news networks. Despite a veneer of objective news reporting on Fox, content analysis demonstrates that Fox closely echoed Trump’s narrative and gave far greater voice to his propaganda (i.e. that the election results were illegitimate). Thus, assertions that Fox can ‘balance’ Left-leaning media are irrelevant in that Fox is not pursuing traditional journalism. More worryingly, Fox claims to be a journalistic outlet, although this evidence will demonstrate that Fox is far closer to the model followed by Pervyi Kanal in Russia than by traditional media outlets in a democracy. As such, it would appear that the news landscape in the United States has fractured into two distinct spheres that are far different from two sides of a political spectrum. Instead, we have a U.S. media system in which professional journalistic norms continue to function for many outlets, but ideological purity drives coverage on Fox and others on the Right.

This paper contributes to the theoretical discussion of media models, particularly as defined by Siebert et al. (1956) and later modified by scholars such as Hallin and Mancini (2003). By using the lens of media models, we are able to more accurately assess the effect on U.S. journalism of the Trump administration. This usefully augments current research into disinformation and media literacy by highlighting the importance of structural definitions of the function of media in a democracy. In this way, we can better understand how propaganda can ‘hide in plain sight’ in a media system in a democracy.

References:

Hallin, Daniel C. and Paolo Mancini. 2004. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Siebert, Fred S., Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm. 1956. Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Authors

• Sarah A. Oates, University of Maryland

• Gordon Ramsay, University of Akureyri