I had an epiphany as I watched Fox Business News while stuck in an airport lounge for a few hours last week: it works overtime to have an argument with itself. And that's why it doesn't work.
The Fox approach overall is brilliant, as it takes a strident political point of view and uses it as the lens through which it reports the news. This gives its viewers a sense of dramatic narrative where none exists; chaotic, nuanced events in the world are expressed as chapters in an ongoing battle between Republicans and Democrats, or more vaguely "The Right" vs. "The Left." That the Right is right is a forgone conclusion in its storyline, unless its practitioners aren't suitably right enough, and it allows Fox to stain any characters or media outlets that present alternative interpretations as not only similarly biased but substantively wrong. It's entertaining in a way inspiring to the faithful and maddening to disbelievers.
More importantly, Fox figured out first how to displace facts with interpretation and opinion as the basis of reporting. This approach plays into the structural divide in American politics -- we have two parties with names, nominal POVs, and even mascots -- so that Fox can allege two sides to every story even when there's only one. The war between the parties is the ultimate story it reports 24/7, and it drives solid advertising revenue.
There's no such conflict underway over economics, however. We're all capitalists. Sure, you can extrapolate ideas from politics and come up with different economic applications (or implications), but they're all based on the same absolutes and values. We share the same liturgy about The Market and celebrate the same Horatio Alger success stories. Our differences are over details, not the system itself; even the more egregious plans for income redistribution or blowing up the Fed are based on a common understanding of how things work or not.
Politic debate is whether baseball or football is the best game. Economic opinion is a battle between two teams playing the same sport.
Fox tries to pretend otherwise, and as I sat in the airport I watched innumerable segments in which it presented economic news in its Right/right vs. Left/wrong narrative. At times it felt forced, especially when its anchors teed-up expert guests to riff with references to Them or questions about the internal motivations of characters who'd been designated to play the role of unprincipled opposition in its storyline.
It doesn't work. If Fox wanted to present truly opposing views, it would need to go find some Marxists.
Interviewing Libertarians is somewhat more like it. When Congressman Ron Paul talks about returning to a gold or silver standard he's channeling William Jennings Bryan...only it's an economic theory that was rejected in America over a century ago. The rest of his thinking is less a contrast to Fox's viewpoint than it is a more pure version.
The best it can do is challenge the evil intentions of unions, and it's true that the early proponents of organized labor were true socialists, but they were all replaced by corporatist management soon after Prohibition ended. Most true communists ended up unemployed or in jail, and the Soviet Union gave the entire ideology a bad rap. Today's unions are just another interest group like those based on ethnicity or religious persuasion, so there's no real diversity of thinking there.
Fox needs to find people who can make the cogent case for a labor theory of value, or argue that financial markets are not inherently fair or constructive for society. There are reasonable and perhaps useful conversations to be had about the role of inherited wealth, the rights afforded corporations, or the fundamental basis for the relationship between citizens and their government. The folks who could make those cases would need to be anti-capitalists, not just people who wear the colors and promote the details of differing political parties that otherwise buy into the same system.
The problem is that these people don't exist anymore, and other outlets do a better job of presenting the facts without superimposing a consciously, painful, and less useful, biased veneer over them.
The debate on Fox Business News is like two opinions on what water temperature gives the best shower. The result is lukewarm, at best. Next time my plane is delayed I'm going to change the channel.
(Image credit: Fox Business News)
