by Tobin Smith (Author)
From a 14-year Fox News contributor, guest anchor, and two-time New York Times
bestselling author comes an unprecedented insider's account of the Fox
News playbook––the production secrets and manipulation strategies Fox
News uses to influence viewers, divide families, weaponize the daily
discourse of news and public opinion, and addict a core audience on
right-wing rage and fear.
Fox News did not start America's
culture war––but they did have the manipulative and destructive genius
to exploit it for billions of dollars. For the first time, a Fox News
veteran exposes and diagrams the toxic strategies and tactics within the
Fox News playbook that liberal and progressive candidates will be
fighting against in 2020 and beyond. It is the very same playbook that
Fox News used to move twelve percent of Independents to vote for Donald
Trump in 2016 to produce Republican wins in the previous Democrat
strongholds of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Author Tobin
Smith takes readers behind the scenes of the actual production of the
"fair and balanced" opinion panel segments that feed a ravenous
audience. How are these productions rigged so that right-wing pundits
always win? What techniques does Fox News use in manipulating its
viewers' tribal instincts: to addict them; to activate a hatred toward
partisan enemies; and to hook them on ego-gratifying feelings of
intellectual and cultural superiority?
Foxocracy is
filled with never-revealed conversations with Fox News
executives––including the late Roger Ailes––and opinion programming
producers. It breaks down the real and often heartbreaking collateral
damage among friends and family caused by the waging of an endless
culture war. And it brings incendiary proof from an insider and on-air
talent of Fox News's predatory audience manipulation psychology and
production tactics. And perhaps even more frightening, this book reveals
how that playbook is now being insidiously upgraded for maximum
effect––white tribal-identity activation––on all forms of social media
and means of content delivery.
