Survival in the Gig Economy
Freedom from the nine-to-five or another form of exploitation? The gig economy is both!
Book gives you the truth about about what to expect and helps you make a plan when nothing is predictable.
Freedom from the nine-to-five or another form of exploitation? The gig economy is both!
Book gives you the truth about about what to expect and helps you make a plan when nothing is predictable.
Brian Stelter has spent his professional life as a career journalist who covers issues related to journalism and the media. Before becoming the chief media correspondent for CNN and host of Reliable Source, Brian Stelter had been a media reporter for The New York Times as well as the editor of TVNewser. As a journalist himself who is deeply embedded in the networks of national journalism as well as steeped in the culture, Stelter is in a uniquely advantageous position to report on what is happening to journalism as a profession. And the news is not good.
Stelter’s story is primarily a case study of what he characterizes as the “downfall” of Fox News. Like many Fox employees (and former employees) who served as Stelter’s sources, Stelter believes that there is a place for conservative or right-leaning media. However, there are fundamental journalistic standards that require published information to be grounded in actual reality and truth. Although Fox’s editorial “opinion” hosts were always given more latitude to spew right-wing conspiracy theories, Stelter argues that it’s “news” programs generally adhered to journalist standards. That is, until the station became embroiled in an incestuous relationship with former President Donald Trump, when it devolved into a source of pro-Trump propaganda and outright lies.
Many of us in the non-journalist public might view the competition between news networks as a hostile war, but the journalists themselves for the most part remain on friendly terms. Not only does the camaraderie allow them a 360-degree view of what is going on (no one can get all of the “scoops”), you never know when a connection somewhere might be useful. Thus, Hoax was not intended to be a bashing of Fox News by a rival network, but rather the sounding of alarms about threats to journalism generally. These threats involve the corporate focus on ratings and advertising revenue, which often drive decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.
While writing Hoax, Stelter interviewed 140 Fox employees, 180 former employees, and others with “ties to the network.” He says that many people spoke to him (even those that requested anonymity) because—as true journalists—they “wanted the truth to come out.” These folks were serious journalists who joined Fox because they wanted to be part of a robust right-leaning conservative voice. And in the beginning, Stelter alleges that Fox News (under the direction of Roger Ailes) did promote a culture of journalistic standards and ethics. While its opinion hosts were given more latitude to spew and spout right wing propaganda, the “news” anchors were expected to present truthful stories confirmed by reliable sources. However, Stelter admits that even the “news” wing of Fox began to shift toward “macho talk and in-your-face patriotism” after September 11th.
Fox is the extreme version of what (on some level) is happening to corporate media everywhere. While individual reporters may continue to adhere to journalistic standards, the bosses are driven by ratings and advertising revenue. In the old days, the saying was “if it bleeds, it leads,” (that is, ratings were better if the story covered some local disaster or tragedy rather than the more mundane actions of City Hall). Now the idiom is, “if it enrages, it engages.” Thus, a story might have some kernel of truth, but be presented in a way designed to enrage its audience, who then becomes addicted to primitive amygdala-produced hormones triggered by fear and rage. As the “base” becomes more and more addicted to its own rage and grievances, the stories have to become ever more incredulous and enraging. Eventually, the truth is completely cast aside in pursuit of the almighty ratings.
Thanks to a journalist network that included internal contacts at Fox, Stelter had a “front row seat to the Trumpification of Fox and the Foxification of America.” During the Trump years, many of Fox’s own employees complained to Stelter that Fox had “gone off the rails” and had become “dangerous to democracy.” Stelter attributes Fox’s abandonment of journalist principles to (1) basic greed—there was money to be made in pushing conspiracies and outrage, (2) ego—all of the hosts wanted their own show and to have the best ratings, and (3) an overwhelming need to please the Fox viewer “base.” It was hard to determine if or when Fox was radicalizing the “base,” or the opposite—and Fox was merely responding in its own business interest.
We get an inside view of Fox on the night of the 2016 election. Shepard “Shep” Smith was already lamenting the vitriol of the campaign, as well as remarking about “false claims of voter fraud.” Stelter describes a scene reported by Chris Wallace, where the Fox producers gathered around a long table, Rupert Murdoch at the head, and planned to call the election for Clinton between eleven and eleven thirty pm. However, when the polls closed, Chris Wallace came on at 9:00 pm and said he was “open to the possibility” that Trump could win. At 2:41 am, Fox was the first to declare Trump the President-elect.
Stelter gives us a lot of inside gossip about the goings-on at Fox—including the insider scoop about Megan Kelly and the ousting of Roger Ailes when allegations of sexual harassment were made public. Kelly left Fox, and her spot was subsequently filled by weekend host Tucker Carlson. We also get an insider journalist’s view of Fox’s coverage of Russian interference in the 2020 election, the Mueller report, and the Ukraine impeachment. Stelter describes in detail the differences between what his journalist colleagues at Fox were telling him and what Fox was feeding its base.
As toxic as Ailes was, he at least insisted on a modicum of journalistic standards. Once Ailes was gone, there seemed to be no impetus to challenge Trump’s lies, or even do anything other than promoting Trump’s interests. As Fox descended ever further into lies and conspiracies, some Fox staffers actually began to lament the loss of Roger Ailes. One Fox staffer told Stelter, “I don’t even recognize the place anymore.” Another complained that Fox was “losing its compass.…The Ailes compass was crooked, but at least it existed.” Two years after Ailes died, folks at Fox would still ask rhetorically, “What would Roger do?,” although there was disagreement about whether or not Ailes would have stood up to Trump or bent to Trump’s will for the sake of business.
Stelter suggests that a major source of Fox’s “dangerousness” was the incestuous relationship between Fox’s Sean Hannity, its morning show Fox & Friends, and the White House. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether the tail was wagging the dog. Rather than serving in the media’s time-honored role as a watchdog on power—or simply reporting the truth—Fox became not only the Trump administration’s biggest cheerleader, but a major advisor and hiring hall for White House personnel.
The purpose of journalism/media is to insure accountability of those in positions of power. When the media serves as an uncritical cheerleader for elected officials, it abandons its public purpose and segues into a form of propaganda machine we are more likely to see in autocratic dictatorships. In the case of Fox News and the Trump White House, Stelter suggests it was difficult to determine whether Trump was telling Fox what to say or Fox was directing Trump. Indeed, it seems like it was a little of both.
“I’m writing this book as a citizen; as an advocate for factual journalism; and as a new dad who thinks about what kind of world my children are going to inherit. This story is about a rot at the core of our politics. It’s about an ongoing attack on the very idea of a free and fair press. It’s about the difference between news and propaganda.”
One major subtheme of Hoax is the overly cozy relationship between Fox opinion host Sean Hannity and the former President. According to Stelter’s sources at Fox, Sean Hannity served as Trump’s consigliere, often creating the same news stories he was reporting on as a purported “neutral.”
Hannity, who is originally from New York, attended UC Santa Barbara but never graduated. He found his “voice” at KCSB, where he began a career of spouting controversial conspiracy theories—in this case it was about AIDS and homosexuality. The station was shut down in 1989, but Hannity found work at a small right-wing station in Huntsville, Alabama. Here, he copied the Limbaugh style of yelling and outrage, and caught the attention of Roger Ailes. Hannity is the only Fox prime time host who has been there since the beginning, when he was co-host of Hannity & Colmes.
Hannity was “free to indulge Trump’s looniest ideas” and allowed to say or do almost anything because he had the almighty access to the President. One source told Stelter, “people think [Trump] is calling up Fox & Friends and telling us what to say. Hell no, It’s the opposite. We tell him what to say.” There is also evidence of a symbiotic, almost incestuous relationship between Trump and the morning hosts of Fox & Friends. The Fox hosts were amused and exploitative with their new-found power: Stelter tells a story about an incident when Fox hosts asked Trump (the program was live on-air) to blink his lights on and off if he was watching, while a camera trained on the White House caught a flickering of lights in an upstairs bedroom.
In the past, Trump was known for contacting the media pretending to be an inside source, often using the pseudonym John Miller or John Barron, although some reporters say they were able to recognize Trump’s voice. Trump would later either confirm or deny the story, depending on what suited his purpose at the moment (kind of like the fictional character Frank Underwood in House of Cards). Now, Hannity became the mouthpiece, dutifully reporting whatever information Trump wanted to “launder” and attributing it to “unnamed sources.”
Fox (and Hannity more specifically) treated the Ukraine impeachment proceedings with the same fact-denying blame-the-media-and-the-democrats that characterized everything else it did. “The House impeachment inquiry unfolded in two totally different worlds. Weeks of damning testimony were met by weeks of insults directed at the witnesses.” When Republicans in the Senate acquitted Trump of both the abuse of power and obstruction counts, one Democratic Senator told Stelter he could see the fear in the eyes of his Republican colleagues—fear of Fox, fear of the president, and fear of talk radio.
Hannity/Fox was also complicit in pushing a Moscow-driven conspiracy theory involving the death of Seth Rich. Rich, an employee of the Democratic National Committee, was murdered in his Washington, D.C. neighborhood a little after 4:00 am in July of 2016. According to the police, the murder resulted from an attempted robbery which “went bad.” The Moscow disinformation machine (which is always enthusiastically parroted by Fox) planted a false story that Rich was a whistleblower who had pilfered the DNC emails that were strategically dumped by Wikileaks to help the Trump campaign. Stelter traces links between Russian-funded election interference and “far-right wing Trump fans who wanted to get their guy off the Putin hook.” The false narrative involving Seth Rich found its way onto Fox & Friends, and the station even received pressure from a big-money Republican donor to push it. Fox eventually ended up settling a lawsuit over the false stories about the murder of Seth Rich.
Hannity’s “advisory” relationship with Trump even had Fox executives worried about whether Hannity’s phone and other communications were being targeted by foreign governments. Some Fox staffers told Stelter that Hannity was exhibiting signs of stress from serving as one of Trump’s de facto primary advisors. Stelter’s sources at Fox also reported that Hannity even picked up some of Trump’s paranoia, keeping his divorce a secret from his Fox colleagues.
Fox News also became a regular source of staff for high-level positions in the Trump administration. Although there is a certain amount of cronyism involved in such selections, most Presidents (who take the task of governing seriously) consult their networks for persons with some level of expertise and experience related to the position. The narcissistic Trump used Fox as his personal hiring hall, seeking persons whose only qualifications were made-for-TV good looks. Trump recruited Heather Nauert to represent the United States in the United Nations, but Nauert’s nomination was never submitted for Senate confirmation. Even Republican Senators didn’t think she had a chance of being confirmed.
Names of persons who cycled through the revolving door between Fox News and the Trump White House include the better-known Hope Hicks and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but also Mercedes Schlapp (Director of Strategic Communications), Scott Brown (former US Senator appointed as US Ambassador to New Zealand), Richard Grenell (US Ambassador to Germany), Georgette Mosbacher (US Ambassador to Poland), Tony Seyegh (Treasury Dept.), Lea Gabrielle (State Department Global Engagement Center), and John McEntee (fired after DHS raised concerns about his gambling habits). Although Heather Nauert did not become an ambassador, she did get a job in the Pompeo State Department. It is no surprise that the United States experienced a decline in its global reputation during Trump’s Foxified State Department.
Weekend host Anthony Scaramucci was one to the first at Fox to jump ship. Scaramucci served as White House Director of Communications for all of 10 days in July 2017, Apparently, Trump wanted someone as comms director who could “fix all the leaks.” A reporter tweeted about a dinner meeting attended by Trump, Scaramucci, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, Bill Shine and Kimberly Guilfoyle. Scaramucci called the reporter, demanding to know the source. Scaramucci was convinced the leaker was Reince Priebus, who resigned a couple of days later. But the new Chief of Staff, John Kelly, fired Scaramucci on day eleven. Meanwhile, back at Fox, there was speculation about which of them would become Trump’s new comms director. Calling Trumpism a “cult,” Scaramucci told Stelter that Trump was a “demagogic leader trying to split the country into two or three tribes” and accused his former employer of propping it up. Yet, the “Mooch” and Hannity are still on friendly terms.
Throughout his administration, Trump attempted to influence hiring and firing decisions at Fox, apparently viewing it as extension of his administration. Trump engaged in a personal vendetta against Meghan Kelly because her coverage of him wasn’t sufficiently flattering. Trump would call Roger Ailes screaming, and Ailes would attempt to mollify Trump while defending one of his own employees. Trump’s cyberbullying of Kelly was sufficiently alarming that Kelly had to hire an armed bodyguard.
Rupert Murdoch was caught between a business advantage of exclusive access to Trump and personally disliking him. In the ways of wealthy, powerful men everywhere, Murdoch found a way to curry favors from Trump while also dissing him. The hiring and firing authority also seemed to go both ways at times, and Murdoch advised Trump that he thought Steve Bannon should be fired. (Bannon left the Trump White House by mid-August of 2017, seemingly by mutual agreement and on amicable terms.) Murdoch was also known to bend Trump’s ear about his opposition to the then-pending takeover of CNN/Time Warner by AT&T. Trump did not approve the deal.
We get the distinct impression that sexual harassment—at least during certain periods of time—is rampant at Fox. Stelter gives us the inside scoop on the ouster of both Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. In 2017, information came out that Fox had paid out six settlement agreements for claims of sexual harassment against Bill O’Reilly, the largest payout being $32 million. Although Fox was aware of the complaints against O’Reilly, they had nonetheless renewed his $25 million per year contract for four years. However, as the details of the private settlement agreements came to light, advertisers threatened a boycott and federal prosecutors were requesting information about the harassment allegations. The Murdochs made the decision to let O’Reilly go.
Although Fox does have its Trump-fluffing Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro as hosts in prime-time spots, women at Fox often seemed to be cast as window-dressing rather than substantive journalists. In the Fox & Friends formula, Steve Doocy sits on one side of the couch, Brian Kilmeade on the other, while a replaceable woman sits in the middle. This formula gives comfort to Fox viewers (the red meat white men demographic) when “the woman comes and goes while the men stay the same.”
In keeping with the general sexist culture, women at Fox all had to have a certain “look.” Blonde was always better. Ailes, in particular, wanted a “certain southern beauty queen look.” Suzanne Scott, who eventually became CEO at Fox and is credited with cleaning up a lot of the Ailes-era “toxic environment,” would instruct female hires they needed “more glam, longer eyelash extensions, shorter skirts, bronzer legs.” Scott was the “enforcer” of what Fox makeup artists called the “Barbie doll look.”
A group of mental health professionals (psychiatrists, psychologists and behavioral scientists) came to the conclusion that Donald Trump was a malignant narcissist, and his occupancy of arguably the most powerful position in the world was “dangerous” for not only Americans, but everyone else as well. In the 2020 documentary Unfit, behavioral experts also make the argument that narcissism is endemic to American culture, thus an über-narcissist Trump being elected as President was not completely unexpected.
A few of Stelter’s stories corroborate these theories of Trump’s narcissism. There is an almost comical description of how the new President Trump went ballistic over headlines about the crowd size at his inauguration. It started when a couple of anchors on CNN’s Early Start compared photos of Trump’s crowd to Obama’s inaugural crowd and remarked that the Trump crowds were “much, much smaller.” One of them even attempted to justify the evidence by explaining that a lot of Trump supporters lived far from DC and probably couldn’t take time off work to attend. What for news outlets was a small “fill” piece of news was “all that mattered” to Trump, who spent the entire first full day of his presidency screaming at then-press secretary Sean Spicer–who then (at Trump’s direction) called and screamed at the CNN bureau chief. Beginning with a puff piece on a show that aired at 5:00 in the morning and going until 6:00 pm, Trump was still on the phone screaming at a CNN executive for almost half an hour.
Trump “as always, was very interested in how he looked.” Trump told Hope Hicks, “I want the O’Reilly lighting. I always look best with the O’Reilly lighting.” For those of us who never doubted the diagnosis of malignant narcissism, this is not a surprise. However, it should be disconcerting to Americans when a president is more concerned about how he looks on TV than on governing the country.
Hannity and Trump actually started the “rigged election” rhetoric during the 2016 campaign, and it never really stopped. Fox News is infamous for airing stories that not just twist the truth, but completely ignore it. Yet, the danger presented by Fox lies not solely in disinformation, but disinformation that is deliberately designed to foster rage and grievance, particularly among white men. Shep told Stelter that—at least for awhile—Fox maintained some programming where there was fact-based reporting. However, it was “cheaper and easier” to invent conflict. Fox had trained its viewers to prefer hate-filled conspiracy rants, resulting in a negative cycle of feeding the base, driving inchoate rage, and profiting from ratings.
The irony is that Fox seems to be bent on killing its own profession—journalism. From the beginning, Fox disparaged the “mainstream media,” perhaps as a competitive strategy to train its viewers not to go anywhere else. But the anti-journalism sentiment was amplified during the Trump years. Trump had been able to manipulate the media to his advantage while he was a civilian celebrity, but he could not tolerate the scrutiny of the fourth estate as President. In a free democracy, the job of journalists is to hold the powerful accountable to the people, and accountability is anathema to Trump. Trump made the “dangerous Stalinist-style statement that the media was the enemy of the people.” Disdain for the media was the cornerstone of Trump’s presidency and it became the cornerstone of Fox’s business model.
Prominent, respectable journalists who gave Fox a veneer of credibility eventually got fed up with the lies and left. Stelter gives us the inside stories from Carl Cameron (who left Fox in 2017, after 22 years of covering political campaigns) and Shepard “Shep” Smith (who left Fox in 2019). Stelter reports that other networks received lots of resumes from Fox staffers who wanted out during the Trump years. But there was not exactly a mass exodus from Fox. One reason was that Fox gigs are lucrative, not only because the pay is good, but the exposure opens the door to book deals and speaking engagements. Another reason was that Fox employees had damaged credibility: In the words of an NBC executive, “they’re all tainted, no one wants to hire them.”
When Trump left the White House, the remaining “real” journalists at Fox believed (or at least hoped) that the network would return to a more reality-based normal. Serious conservative commentators Johan Goldberg and Stephen Hayes resigned in protest after the November 2021 release of the pseudo-documentary Patriot Purge. Chris Wallace left Fox in December of 2021, at the end of a four-year contract. The 74-year-old Wallace had accepted an anchor position for CNN’s streaming service. Wallace’s departure was apparently on good terms, although Wallace often found himself rebutting misinformation being put out by the network elsewhere.
Fox’s abandonment of journalistic responsibility was especially acute during the early days of Covid. Indeed, both internal and external criticism of Fox was probably at its highest in March of 2020. One Fox viewer complained that his 94-year old mother believed the virus was being overstated “because Fox News and Hannity say so.” On Monday, March 9th, Hannity called the virus a “hoax” intended to be another “impeachment scam” directed at Trump. The ultimate in hypocrisy was Hannity downplaying the virus to appease Trump while Fox was cancelling events, rescheduling guests on Skype, gearing up the staff for telecommuting, and installing hand sanitizer stations at every door.
This dangerous charade continues today: While Fox requires its staff to be vaccinated, its “stars” are discouraging Fox viewers from doing the same for themselves. A Fox producer told Stelter that the network’s Trump-driven campaign to minimize the coronavirus and blame Democrats was “really irresponsible and hazardous to our viewers.” Stelter blames Fox and its campaign of misinformation for countless (possibly) preventable Covid deaths.
In many places, Hoax reads more like gossip than serious journalism itself. Yet, this also lets us know that Stelter truly has the “inside scoop” through access to first-hand sources willing to speak candidly. While Stelter focuses on the loss of journalistic standards, all of us lose when then truth becomes irrelevant because it is subsumed by the drive for profit and ratings. Stelter suggests (and I certainly hope some enterprising prosecutor follows up on this) that Fox misinformation may even have resulted in avoidable loss of lives. While Fox may be an extreme cultish version of what corporate media has become, it is not hard to imagine that the incessant drive for ratings and profits has negatively impacted the journalism industry as a whole. A toxic downward spiral is created when deliberately manufactured rage drives ratings, which then results in programming designed to appeal to the darkest of human impulses. We saw the outcome of this on January 6th.