Foxocracy: Inside the Network's Playbook of Tribal Warfare

Summary

From a 14-year Fox News contributor, guest anchor, and two-time New York Times bestselling author comes an unprecedented insider’s account of the Fox News playbook―the production secrets and manipulation strategies Fox uses to influence viewers, divide families, weaponize the daily discourse of news and public opinion, and addict a core audience on right-wing rage and fear.

Fox News did not start America’s culture war―but they have the manipulative and destructive genius to exploit it. For the first time, a Fox News veteran―fourteen years as contributor and guest anchor―exposes and diagrams the pages within the Fox News playbook that the liberal and progressive candidates will be fighting against in 2020. This is the very same playbook that Fox News used to move 12% of Independents to vote Trump in 2016 and win previous the Democrat strongholds of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Author Tobin Smith takes readers behind the scenes of the actual production of the “Fair and Balanced” opinion pieces and panel segments that feed a ravenous right-wing audience. How are these productions rigged so that right-wing pundits always win? What techniques does Fox News use in manipulating its viewers’ tribal right-wing instincts: to addict them, to activate a hatred toward partisan enemies; and to hook them on feelings of intellectual and cultural superiority?

Filled with never revealed conversations with Fox News executives and opinion programming producers, breaking down the collateral damage among friends and family caused by the waging of an endless culture war, Foxocracy brings incendiary proof from an insider and on-air talent of audience manipulation psychology and production tactics. And perhaps even more frightening, this book reveals how that the playbook is now being used by Fox News rivals like MSNBC and CNN.