One thing I've noticed in the last few months of intentionally monitoring it - the headlines on the homepage of Fox News are always focused on specific people and characters. They're obsessed with AOC/Mamdani/Sanders and anyone else they can paint as a Radical Leftist.

There's never a story that's framed in the Vox/Atlantic way: “here's what's going on with this abstract problem”, let alone anything longform or curious.

There's also usually one scam-adjacent story about some new remedy for the elderly (in the same way that the NYT always has a story about some yuppies buying a million dollar apartment).

A randomly picked example, if you dare

As I understand it, Fox News is the primary (if not exclusive) legacy news source for a majority of Republican voters and it's just crazy to me how intentionally out of touch it keeps them when it comes to the important things that actually affect their readers' lives.

Is it intentional though? I try to remind myself there's a difference between deliberately deceiving your audience and optimizing for engagement in ways that produce ignorance as a byproduct.

As Orwellian as I find their conduct, to humanize the Fox News editorial team, I doubt they're Evil. They disagree with my progressive diagnosis of the world's ills, and also believe that if they don't exploit their readers this way, someone else will. Maybe they publish the day's stories ruefully, wishing they could talk about solar power positively for once.

“If I don't do it, someone else will” is that terrible rationalization of the complicit, but it probably is true. Breitbart and OAN and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are all vying for share in the competitive right wing media market. Maybe we should instead ask why is there so much demand for mean, negative-sum presentations of the world.

In any case, a lot of this is beyond their control at this point. TV, newspapers, even websites are declining in viewer share. Now anyone with a phone can tell us that's the way it is.

Everyone's got their bugbear and god knows democratic backsliding's not monocausal, but if there's any system in the world I could fix with a magic wand, it would be this: no two-minute hates allowed on TV. No ragebaiting anonymous twitter accounts spreading misinformation. No demonizing people you disagree with. A citizenry that factchecks every fifth claim they read.

How do we actually get there without violating the very liberal principles I'm trying to protect? I really don't know. We are so far away from any sort of consensus as to what the problem is.

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