The Gospel According to Fox: How America Sold Its Brain, Bought a Flag, and Learned to Hate Its Neighbors

By the Pope of Love

How conservative media transformed American politics, turned outrage into an industry, and helped create an information landscape vulnerable to foreign manipulation.

There was a time when Americans could disagree about politics without necessarily disagreeing about reality itself. Republicans and Democrats argued over taxes, government spending, foreign policy, and the proper role of the federal government. The arguments could be fierce, the politicians dishonest, and the journalism imperfect, but much of the country still shared a relatively common collection of facts. Walter Cronkite could tell millions of Americans what had happened in the world, and people could spend the following morning arguing over what it meant.

Today, two neighbors can witness the same event and walk away believing entirely different things happened. One sees a threat to democracy; the other sees democracy being rescued. One sees a scientific discovery; the other sees a sinister conspiracy. Both are convinced that the other has been brainwashed, and both can find a television network, podcast, or social media personality willing to reassure them that they're absolutely right.

Welcome to the American information age, where everybody has access to more knowledge than any civilization in history, yet millions of people seem increasingly uncertain about what is actually true.

Somewhere along the way, the news stopped simply reporting what happened and became extraordinarily good at telling Americans whom to blame, whom to fear, and whom to hate. The resulting transformation has been one of the most consequential developments in modern American political history. It has enriched media corporations, intensified political polarization, weakened public trust, and created opportunities for foreign governments to manipulate American political discourse.

And while the story didn't begin with Fox News, the network played an enormously influential role in demonstrating just how profitable political outrage could become.

The most remarkable part is that millions of Americans have enthusiastically paid for the privilege of being divided.

The Birth of the Outrage Machine

Political propaganda is nothing new in America. The country's earliest newspapers were often openly partisan, and publishers have spent centuries using fear, resentment, patriotism, and sensationalism to attract readers. Yellow journalism existed long before television, and political radio was stirring up public passions decades before cable news.

But the late twentieth century introduced a particularly powerful combination of commercial incentives, media technology, political strategy, and declining trust in traditional institutions.

In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission effectively eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, which had required broadcast licensees to present contrasting perspectives on controversial public issues. The doctrine never applied to cable networks such as Fox News, and its repeal did not single-handedly create modern partisan media. Nevertheless, it represented one element of a changing broadcasting environment in which explicitly ideological programming became increasingly commercially attractive.

Conservative talk radio flourished, with Rush Limbaugh emerging as one of its most influential personalities. His success demonstrated that political grievance could become a tremendously profitable form of entertainment. Listeners weren't simply tuning in to learn about legislation. They were joining a community united by shared frustrations, cultural anxieties, and a sense that powerful liberal institutions were conspiring against them.

Then, in 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News with Roger Ailes, a former Republican political strategist, overseeing the operation.

Murdoch and Ailes understood something important about American audiences: people don't necessarily want information that challenges their beliefs. Very often, they want information that confirms those beliefs, validates their grievances, and reassures them that their side is righteous.

Fox News built a powerful business around serving an audience that felt ignored or misrepresented by established news organizations. It combined conventional journalism with politically charged commentary, emotionally compelling narratives, and personalities who spoke directly to viewers' identities and fears.

The distinction between news reporting and opinion programming often became difficult for audiences to maintain, even though that distinction remained essential.

The formula was commercially brilliant. Identify an anxiety, assign responsibility to a recognizable political or cultural enemy, reinforce the audience's existing worldview, and repeat the process until viewers begin to regard the network not merely as an information source but as a trusted defender of their identity.

Fear makes people attentive. Anger makes them engaged. Resentment makes them loyal.

And loyalty, as every advertiser knows, is worth money.

Fox didn't invent these psychological mechanisms, but it became one of their most successful practitioners.

The network helped demonstrate that political identity could be packaged, branded, marketed, and sold like any other consumer product. News became entertainment, entertainment became political belonging, and political belonging became a powerful commercial asset.

The television was no longer simply a window into the world. It was increasingly a mirror reflecting the audience's anxieties back at them.

A very expensive mirror, owned by a billionaire.

When the Television Begins Changing the Voter

It would be convenient to dismiss the influence of partisan television as exaggerated, but academic research suggests that its political effects are real.

Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan examined the introduction of Fox News into American cable markets during the late 1990s. Their research found that the availability of Fox News increased the Republican presidential vote share by approximately 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns they studied, compared with otherwise similar towns without access to the network.

That may not sound dramatic, but presidential elections are often decided by very narrow margins. A relatively small change in voting behavior can alter the outcome of an election, particularly in closely contested states.

Read the research: The Fox News Effect, National Bureau of Economic Research

Later research also identified persuasive effects from partisan cable news, reinforcing the idea that media consumption can influence political attitudes and voting decisions rather than merely reflecting preferences that already exist.

The deeper consequences, however, extend beyond election results.

When people repeatedly encounter political stories framed around threats, enemies, and betrayal, they can begin to interpret public life through those same categories. Political opponents become not merely mistaken but dangerous. Compromise becomes surrender. Independent criticism becomes proof of hidden allegiance to the other side.

Eventually, the source of information becomes inseparable from personal identity.

Question someone's favorite television personality and they may react as though you've insulted their family.

Challenge a misleading headline and you may be accused of defending the enemy.

Offer contradictory evidence and you may discover that the evidence itself is considered suspicious.

This is the danger of transforming political information into tribal belonging. Once a belief becomes central to someone's identity, abandoning it may feel less like learning something new and more like betraying their community.

And when a media business depends on maintaining that loyalty, telling the audience something it doesn't want to hear can become an expensive proposition.

The Great American Ownership Sale

While partisan media was becoming more profitable, another transformation was taking place across the American information landscape.

Media ownership was becoming increasingly concentrated.

Large corporations acquired local television stations, newspapers, radio outlets, and other communications properties. Economic pressures accelerated consolidation as advertising revenue shifted toward digital platforms and traditional news organizations struggled to maintain profitability.

Sinclair Broadcast Group became a particularly prominent example of large-scale local television ownership. Through ownership and service arrangements, Sinclair developed an extensive broadcasting footprint reaching communities across the country.

This matters because Americans generally perceive local news differently from national political commentary. A familiar local anchor reporting on a school board meeting, road closure, or neighborhood crime carries a different kind of credibility than a nationally known political pundit shouting about the collapse of Western civilization.

Local news often feels close to home, and that familiarity can create trust.

Yet corporate ownership can influence the stories local stations cover, the perspectives they emphasize, and the commentary they are directed to broadcast.

Sinclair attracted national attention for requiring anchors at multiple stations to deliver substantially identical promotional scripts warning about biased and false news. The spectacle of supposedly independent local broadcasters repeating nearly identical corporate messaging raised questions about editorial independence.

It also illustrated how concentrated ownership could allow a comparatively small number of executives to influence what audiences across many communities encountered.

To be clear, American media consolidation is not exclusively a conservative phenomenon. Major corporations with different political interests own influential media properties, and independent journalism continues to exist throughout the country.

But concentrated ownership creates structural risks regardless of the politics of the owners.

When fewer companies control more outlets, fewer decision-makers possess greater influence over the national conversation.

And when journalism must compete with the demands of corporate profitability, public service can become subordinate to audience retention, advertising revenue, and shareholder expectations.

The United States spent much of the twentieth century warning its citizens about the dangers of centralized propaganda in authoritarian societies. Americans were taught to imagine government officials controlling newspapers and radio stations, carefully determining which stories citizens were permitted to hear.

Then we developed a system in which powerful private organizations could exercise enormous influence over the information marketplace, often while presenting themselves as defenders of freedom from manipulation.

Capitalism, apparently, had discovered that propaganda could be considerably more profitable when customers subscribed voluntarily.

Convincing Working Americans to Defend the Wealthy

One of the strangest features of modern American political life is the frequency with which working-class citizens are encouraged to identify their interests with those of extremely wealthy individuals and corporations.

Consider the economic concerns that shape ordinary American lives: wages, housing costs, health insurance, prescription drug prices, retirement security, education, childcare, and the cost of simply surviving another month.

These are substantial issues. They involve complicated policy choices, legitimate ideological disagreements, and competing economic priorities.

But complicated issues rarely make entertaining television.

A detailed discussion of tax incidence, collective bargaining, healthcare financing, or corporate market concentration requires patience and context. A segment about somebody supposedly trying to cancel Christmas requires considerably less.

The commercial incentives become obvious.

Rather than encourage sustained examination of the economic systems shaping people's lives, political entertainment can redirect public attention toward cultural conflict.

The factory worker worried about declining wages is invited to become furious about immigration.

The struggling parent anxious about medical bills is encouraged to fear an ideological takeover of the schools.

The retired couple concerned about Social Security is drawn into another argument about whether American civilization is collapsing because someone used an unfamiliar pronoun.

These cultural questions can involve genuine concerns and legitimate disagreements. The problem arises when they are exaggerated, distorted, or used to displace serious discussion of other issues that materially affect people's lives.

It is possible to care about immigration and wages, education and healthcare, cultural values and corporate accountability. Citizens should not have to surrender their economic interests to participate in cultural debates.

Yet political media frequently presents public life as an endless sequence of existential emergencies, leaving little room to examine whether the policies being promoted actually benefit the people supporting them.

The result can be an extraordinary contradiction: workers struggling economically may become passionate defenders of political arrangements that disproportionately reward people who already possess enormous wealth.

Not every conservative economic policy harms working Americans, just as not every progressive proposal produces the benefits its supporters promise. Taxation, regulation, trade, and public spending all involve real trade-offs that deserve honest examination.

But political identity should never substitute for evaluating those trade-offs.

A billionaire and a warehouse employee may share certain political beliefs while having very different economic interests.

The billionaire's definition of freedom might include fewer business restrictions and lower capital taxes. The employee's definition might involve earning a living wage, receiving affordable healthcare, or taking a sick day without risking financial disaster.

Sometimes those interests overlap. Sometimes they conflict.

The problem begins when political entertainment persuades the employee that defending the billionaire's interests is automatically an act of patriotism.

There is something almost religious about the spectacle of wealthy television personalities explaining to exhausted working people that the greatest threat to their freedom is someone even poorer than they are.

The collection plate circulates, the congregation applauds, and the preacher flies home on a private jet.

The miracle continues.

Foreign Manipulation Finds an Open Door

By the time social media became central to American political life, the country already possessed many of the characteristics that make a society vulnerable to manipulation: deep political divisions, declining institutional trust, sensationalized news coverage, and audiences increasingly separated into competing information environments.

Foreign governments did not create these conditions, but they recognized their usefulness.

During the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives conducted a coordinated interference campaign involving social media influence operations, cyberattacks, and the dissemination of stolen material.

A bipartisan investigation by the United States Senate Intelligence Committee documented the activities of Russia's Internet Research Agency, which used fake online personas, targeted messaging, and inflammatory political content to exploit existing divisions within American society.

The operation sought to undermine Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump while intensifying conflicts around race, immigration, gun rights, religion, and other contentious issues.

Read the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings on Russian election interference

The sophistication of the campaign was not simply technological. It was psychological.

Russian operators recognized that they could manipulate American political conversations by posing as Americans from opposing ideological communities.

An account pretending to represent conservative patriots could publish inflammatory material targeting liberals. Another account pretending to represent progressive activists could circulate content designed to provoke conservatives.

The objective was not necessarily to persuade everyone to adopt the same political position. It was to increase conflict, deepen suspicion, and undermine confidence in American institutions.

The more divided Americans became, the more useful the divisions were to an adversary seeking to weaken the United States.

The Russians did not need to invent American racism, religious intolerance, political resentment, or conspiracy theories. They merely needed to identify existing tensions and amplify them.

Think about the extraordinary irony.

The United States spent decades building one of the most technologically advanced militaries in human history. Aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, surveillance satellites, intelligence agencies, and weapons systems capable of reaching nearly any location on the planet.

Yet foreign influence operators discovered that American political discourse could be disrupted using fake social media accounts, inflammatory memes, and carefully targeted messages.

The country had invested enormous resources in protecting its physical borders while its information environment remained vulnerable to manipulation.

This does not establish that Fox News coordinated Russian interference or that one media company directly caused the operation. Nor does the documented interference establish that Russian activities changed the outcome of the 2016 election.

What it demonstrates is that an already polarized information environment provided opportunities for outside actors.

A country whose citizens increasingly regard one another as enemies becomes easier for foreign adversaries to destabilize.

And when domestic political media profits from the same outrage and distrust that foreign operators seek to amplify, the two forces can reinforce the same damaging conditions without any formal coordination.

The Russians didn't need to manufacture America's divisions from scratch.

They found a country already arguing with itself and brought additional gasoline.

When the Business Model Collides with Reality

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the dangers of audience-driven political information came after the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden, but claims of widespread voter fraud circulated throughout conservative media.

Fox News broadcast false allegations about Dominion Voting Systems, a company that provided voting technology used in American elections.

Dominion subsequently sued Fox for defamation.

During the litigation, internal communications became public, revealing that some prominent Fox personalities and executives privately expressed skepticism about election-fraud claims being presented to viewers.

In April 2023, Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million to settle the lawsuit. The settlement did not involve a trial verdict determining liability, but a judge had already ruled that the challenged statements about Dominion were false.

Read Associated Press reporting on the Fox-Dominion settlement

Nearly eight hundred million dollars.

That is an extraordinary amount of money to spend resolving a lawsuit over false statements aired during a political controversy.

But the most important revelation concerned the relationship between the network, its audience, and the truth.

When a media organization builds commercial success around telling its audience what it wants to hear, what happens when the audience wants to believe something false?

Does the organization challenge those beliefs and risk losing viewers to competitors willing to validate them?

Or does it continue presenting claims that sustain the audience's loyalty?

The internal evidence revealed in the Dominion case exposed the danger of this commercial tension.

Journalism is supposed to help citizens understand reality, including facts that may be uncomfortable or inconvenient.

Political entertainment, by contrast, can become dependent on satisfying its customers.

And once audience satisfaction becomes more important than factual accuracy, the relationship between journalism and propaganda grows dangerously unstable.

The greatest threat is not necessarily a journalist who makes an honest mistake. Mistakes can be corrected.

The greater danger is a media organization that has incentives to avoid correcting a mistake because its audience might prefer the mistake to the truth.

At that point, misinformation is no longer merely an accident.

It can become part of the business model.

The Real Cost of the Outrage Economy

The damage caused by this information environment extends far beyond the success or failure of individual political campaigns.

Democracy depends on a collection of shared institutions and public expectations. Citizens must be able to disagree about policy while maintaining some confidence in elections, courts, scientific evidence, journalism, and the possibility of good-faith debate.

None of these institutions deserves unquestioning obedience. Skepticism is essential to democratic citizenship, and powerful organizations should be held accountable.

But skepticism and reflexive distrust are not the same thing.

Healthy skepticism asks for evidence.

Reflexive distrust rejects evidence whenever it comes from an institution or person perceived as belonging to the wrong political tribe.

When every inconvenient fact can be dismissed as propaganda, every election loss as fraud, and every political opponent as an existential threat, democratic disagreement becomes increasingly difficult.

Compromise starts to resemble betrayal.

Accountability becomes tribal warfare.

And citizens become more interested in defeating one another than solving shared problems.

The effects can be especially destructive because Americans continue to face challenges that require cooperation across political boundaries.

Healthcare costs do not check party registration.

Climate change does not care which cable network someone watches.

Economic insecurity affects families regardless of the slogans printed on their bumper stickers.

A collapsing bridge does not ask whether the driver supports Democrats or Republicans before sending the vehicle into the river.

Yet public attention is repeatedly directed toward ideological conflict, often at the expense of practical problem-solving.

And the organizations profiting from the conflict have little incentive to encourage reconciliation.

A peaceful neighbor is not especially profitable.

An enraged viewer who believes civilization will collapse if they miss tonight's broadcast is considerably more valuable.

This does not mean that all political media outlets behave identically or that one ideology bears responsibility for every problem. Different organizations have different editorial practices, and their factual reliability can vary substantially.

Fox News deserves particular scrutiny because of its documented influence on conservative political attitudes, its place within a broader partisan media ecosystem, and the evidence revealed through litigation.

But the broader incentives are not confined to the political right.

Social media algorithms can reward inflammatory content regardless of ideology. Partisan commentators across the spectrum can encourage audiences to treat political opponents as enemies. Media consumers of every political persuasion can become attached to stories that reinforce their assumptions.

The problem is larger than one network.

It is an entire attention economy in which conflict often generates revenue more reliably than understanding.

The Most Dangerous Lie Is That Your Neighbor Is the Enemy

For the Pope of Love, the most disturbing consequence of this transformation is not simply that Americans have been exposed to misleading information.

It is that millions have been encouraged to see their fellow citizens as threats rather than partners in a shared society.

Consider two working Americans standing on opposite sides of a political argument.

One is a conservative mechanic. The other is a liberal schoolteacher.

They disagree about immigration, government spending, education, and perhaps nearly every national political controversy.

But both are concerned about their families.

Both want affordable housing.

Both need reliable healthcare.

Both worry about the future.

Both would prefer to live in a country where hard work provides a reasonable degree of economic security.

Their interests are not identical, and their disagreements should not be dismissed. But they also share more practical concerns than the outrage industry encourages them to recognize.

Now imagine a political information system that continuously emphasizes their differences while minimizing their common interests.

The mechanic is told that teachers are indoctrinating children.

The teacher is told that conservatives are enemies of education.

Both become increasingly suspicious of the other.

Meanwhile, the corporations controlling much of the information marketplace collect advertising revenue from the conflict.

What an extraordinary arrangement.

The people with the least power are encouraged to fight one another while the people with the greatest power profit from the spectacle.

America's political divisions are real, and they cannot all be explained by corporate manipulation. History, religion, race, geography, economic change, and sincerely held values all shape political identities.

But those differences become more dangerous when powerful institutions constantly exaggerate them for commercial or political advantage.

A nation cannot maintain its strength indefinitely if large portions of its population are persuaded that their fellow citizens are enemies.

National strength is not measured exclusively by military spending or economic output.

It also depends on social trust, functioning institutions, public knowledge, and the capacity to cooperate when circumstances demand it.

Those are precisely the foundations that an outrage-driven information environment can weaken.

And every time Americans become more suspicious of one another, foreign adversaries gain another opportunity to exploit the fractures.

The Revolution Begins Between Your Ears

So what do we do?

We certainly don't solve the problem by replacing one unquestioned authority with another.

The answer is not to trade Fox News for a different political network and assume that everything said by the new network must be true.

Nor is the solution to distrust every institution, every journalist, and every expert until nothing remains except personal opinion.

That road leads nowhere useful.

The solution begins with reclaiming responsibility for how we consume information.

We need to distinguish journalism from political commentary, investigate claims before sharing them, read beyond emotionally charged headlines, and compare reporting from sources with different perspectives and credible editorial standards.

We need to recognize when content is designed primarily to provoke a reaction.

We need to become comfortable with uncertainty and willing to change our minds when better evidence becomes available.

Above all, we need to stop confusing agreement with accuracy.

A source is not trustworthy simply because it tells us what we want to hear.

A politician is not honest simply because they criticize people we dislike.

A billionaire is not a champion of working Americans simply because they wear a baseball cap, wave a flag, or deliver an angry speech about the elites.

And a claim does not become true merely because ten million people share it.

The ability to say I might be wrong may be one of the most valuable democratic skills we can cultivate.

Those four words create room for curiosity, evidence, and understanding. They make manipulation more difficult because they prevent our beliefs from becoming permanently fused with our identities.

They also make genuine conversation possible.

And genuine conversation is exactly what a political entertainment industry built around endless conflict has little reason to encourage.

Separation of Church and Hate

America does not have to remain trapped in this cycle.

Conservative Americans are not inherently enemies of liberal Americans. Republicans are not a separate species from Democrats. Disagreement does not require dehumanization, and patriotism does not demand blind loyalty to a political movement or media corporation.

The real measure of love for one's country is not how loudly someone waves its flag or how passionately they condemn their political opponents.

It is whether they care enough about the country to defend the conditions that allow all its citizens to participate in a functioning democracy.

That means protecting truth from deliberate distortion, holding powerful institutions accountable, respecting legitimate election outcomes, and refusing to surrender independent judgment to charismatic personalities.

It means recognizing that powerful domestic interests can profit from division and that foreign adversaries can exploit the resulting distrust.

It means understanding that a nation divided against itself becomes weaker, even when every participant claims to be fighting for its survival.

And perhaps it means recognizing the fundamental absurdity of a political culture in which a struggling worker can be persuaded that the greatest threat to America is another struggling worker.

The American people have more important things to do than spend the rest of their lives fighting over grievances selected for them by wealthy media executives.

We have communities to rebuild, institutions to improve, children to educate, and a future to create.

None of that requires everyone to agree.

It requires people to remember that disagreement does not eliminate our shared humanity.

The next great American revolution may not begin in Congress, on a battlefield, or in the headquarters of a political party.

It may begin in an ordinary living room, when someone turns off the outrage machine, opens a book, checks an unfamiliar fact, and decides to talk to a neighbor instead of shouting at a television.

It may begin when Americans stop asking which political tribe a statement serves and start asking whether it is true.

It may begin when working people recognize that their interests are not automatically represented by the wealthiest voices on television.

And it may begin when we finally understand that the person across the street was never necessarily our enemy.

The enemy was the lie that convinced us to stop seeing one another as human.

So love your neighbor. Question your leaders. Investigate your information. Challenge your assumptions. And be suspicious of anyone who becomes wealthier every time Americans learn another reason to hate one another.

Because if a billionaire spends thirty years telling working people that poor people are their greatest enemies, perhaps the most patriotic thing they can do is ask why he needs them to believe it.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Fact-Checker, may your mind remain open, your compassion remain intact, and your bullshit detector never run out of batteries.

Separation of Church and Hate.

Amen.

Sources and further reading

• DellaVigna, Stefano, and Ethan Kaplan. The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting. National Bureau of Economic Research. Read the study.

• United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2. Bipartisan investigation of Russian social media influence operations. Read the committee's announcement and findings.

• Associated Press. Coverage of the $787.5 million Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems settlement, April 2023. Read the report.

• National Bureau of Economic Research. Additional scholarship on media bias, political persuasion, and the effects of media ownership on political information.

The Pope of Love believes that truth doesn't belong to a political party, compassion isn't a sign of weakness, and no human being should have to surrender their independent judgment to someone with a television contract.