Ever since the Job Party started protesting Fox News out of support for Wisconsin, we have been unequivocally tying their bile to the war against workers.
As I told Ed Schultz, decked out in a Cheesehead and my Packers hoodie (you gotta love it), “Fox News and the Tea Party are one and the same. You don’t have the Tea Party without Fox.”
Now, via The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (gated) research article by Harvard professors Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, we have even more unequivocal proof that this is the case (ht Kevin Drum).
As Henry Farrell at the Monkey Cage analyzes, Fox News is depicted as a social movement much more than a news station. This is an easy conclusion to come to when assessing the coverage of Tea Party rallies by Fox vs a station like CNN, where CNN would give coverage of the day of the event, whereas Fox would promote them tirelessly beforehand:
FoxNews has explicitly mobilized its viewers by connecting the Tea Party to their own brand identity. … Rather than serving a journalistic, or even a propagandistic function, Fox News in effect acts as a “national social movement organization,” as described by sociologist Debra Minkoff in studies of liberal identity movements. For a scattered set of people who might feel isolated or marginalized (like gays and lesbians, in Minkoff’s original example), a resourceful national organization can help to provide “an infrastructure for collective action” by promoting “the diffusion of collective identities” and fostering “at least a minimal degree of solidarity and integration.”
Within this dynamic, Fox News is a key intermediating force between national level politics and the scattered on the ground Tea Party efforts. It is using television to connect individuals on the local level to the national level within mass movement politics.
Fox News is exhibiting the power of building this connection through broadcast media, and it is not going unnoticed. Van Jones has termed the Tea Party model a “perfect swarm”, where these localized groups are empowered by the national to take leadership on their own under this loosely based Fox News defined Tea Party “brand”.
Moreover, the Job Party recognizes the power of this connection, and it is precisely why we are here to be the progressive counter to it. The #FoxWarOnNews needs people like us to be this counter, to Fight back against Fox in fact.
What’s being broadcast out of the Fox News station is mobilizing a mass movement against workers, and it is disintegrating the means by which our democratic discourse can function.
Yet as much as we can marvel at the power of the movement building model they are enacting, we have to realize just what is at stake, and we have to counter their media activism before it is too late.
