When Fox News screams the quiet part, it’s worth listening and gleaning a lesson — especially when the network lets the old “fair and balanced” veneer drop and admits its real mission.
“We are waging a twenty-first-century information warfare campaign against the Left,” said Fox’s prime-time host Jesse Watters in a televised moment of candor. “It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, [Elon] Musk retweets it, [Joe] Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”
There’s a trove of worthwhile books, documentaries, and podcast series tracing the construction of that conservative media machine. For years, conservatives have rolled their eyes, pretending it’s all just a deranged liberal conspiracy theory. But here was Watters — on Fox News’ own airwaves! — proudly admitting the conspiracy is real, while also mocking critics.
“They are using tactics from the 1990s — they are holding tiny press conferences, tiny little rallies, screaming into the ether on MSNBC,” he said of the Right’s opponents. “This is what you call top-down command and control — you get talking points from a newspaper and you put it on the broadcast network and it disappears.”
Watters was right to identify this as a fundamental “asymmetry” that explains why we’ve arrived at this historical pivot point.
As illustrated in the Lever’s investigative audio series, Master Plan, the American right has for decades constructed a vast media infrastructure outside of — and pressuring — the Republican Party to embrace conservatives’ ideological agenda.
By contrast, America’s center-left has mostly funded the Democratic Party,…
Auteur: David Sirota
