A prime time current affairs host who rejects the notion of objectivity, a brazen proxy for the head of state, flexible with his ideology but obsessed with conspiracies, a moralist who hides his business interests behind opaque shell companies and for whom political declamations have become inseparable from economic gain … for anyone familiar with Russian propaganda, Sean Hannity is a familiar type. Propaganda is the dirtiest art form, and just like artistic movements flourish across the world at the same time as a response to similar conditions, so propagandists reach to similar tactics to catch the zeitgeist and manipulate the masses. There’s a method to the Kremlin-Hannity approach. What is to be done about it?
The typical Hannity monologue rises in a series of rhetorical questions until it topples over the edge of sense. On March 27, 2017, for example, a 2-minute long series of questions attacked rival network CBS’s objectivity by asking whether its presenters ever questioned their criticism of George W. Bush, whether they spiked stories which made Obama look bad, whether they had investigated Obama’s ties to a former terrorist, his commitment to American-hating “black liberation theology” or recorded Obama’s economic failings (here Hannity showed a list of stats on the screen, too briefly to read fully). Had CBS, Hannity went on, listed all the laws Hilary Clinton violated when she used a private email server as Secretary of State? Exposed every one of her lies about the death of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi? Explored how media colluded with the Clinton campaign? Questioned how much time they had given to the “conspiracy theory” that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia?
The effect of such a long list, where some of the charges are serious, others spurious, many debatable, and none explored, is to leave the mind exhausted and confused. The semantic patterns reinforce Hannity’s main message: that we live in a world where there is no epistemological certainty any more. In the run-up to his anti-CBS monologue, Hannity had shown an excerpt of his own appearance on CBS’s Sunday Morning show with Ted Koppel, where Koppel had accused Hannity of being “bad for America”: polarized news channels on the Left and the Right, argued Koppel, have undermined deliberative democracy and a shared public space. Koppel was placing himself above the fray, implicitly making the case that balance and objectivity were still possible: after all, there has to be a position where you can judge partisan polarization from. Hannity argued that by attacking opinion shows, Koppel was actually just “giving his opinion.” Hannity described himself as “honest” because he admits to being an advocacy journalist, while Koppel’s façade of being “down the middle” is actually fraudulent. “Journalism is dead in America,” concluded Hannity, a common refrain in his monologues: 14 days earlier he had announced that journalism is “dead and buried with flowers on top.” All pretense at objectivity is just subjectivity.
For anyone familiar with Russian media this radical relativism is something very familiar. Both Russian language and international Kremlin broadcasters insist that Western broadcasters such as the BBC can’t be trusted as they all have hidden agendas, and that “objectivity is a myth that is proposed and imposed on us.” It’s a tactic born out of the reality of today’s media environment: in a world where even authoritarian regimes struggle to impose technical censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives that they become immune to hearing other viewpoints and stop believing there is an unbiased voice anywhere. Vasily Gatov, the pre-eminent analyst of Russian media, calls this “white-jamming,” and compares it to putting the audience in psychological headphones. The Turkish, Hungarian and other regimes are adopting the same tactic: it’s the 21st century, information-overload playbook. It’s also a sign of a world where any “objective” ideologies and promises of rational progress provable by “objective” facts have failed people.
With the possibility of “balance” and objectivity undermined, what remains is to be more powerfully subjective than the other side and turn the news into an emotionally compelling drama. Consider the Baltics, which contain ethnic Russian minorities who have radically different versions of reality broadcast to them by U.S., European, national, and Kremlin media. In focus groups, audiences explain how they become unable to decide which version of the “truth” is accurate. Many are drawn towards Kremlin media because they are more resonant, telling a tale about Russians beset by enemies on all sides. Respondents in focus groups in Latvia, for example, explained how the news on Russian TV channels “are emotionally attractive, because some news you watch as an exciting movie. You don’t trust it, but watch it gladly.”
Fox Prime Time’s underlying “movie” tells of a rough struggle with a hostile world. In this mythical tale, the American Fox Hero has to fight off the monsters of the media, dangerous Snowflakes, crafty liberals—armed only with the weapons of sarcasm and outrage. Earlier in the Fox Prime Time evening line-up, Jesse Watters ventures out onto liberal campuses where everyone dislikes conservatives: “So again,” he smirks, “we are under attack.” By the time you get to the end of the night, you’ve reached a much wilder place: Hannity is the father who gets home late from work, mad at the world. His show’s branding features a Captain America-style shield with his name emblazoned on it. The implied takeaway of the narrative is that being surrounded by such a mean world full of dark conspiracies, we need for a superior strong hand at the wheel. How else can we deal with a world of unfathomable hostile plots? “Trump is our last chance to save America” was Hannity’s message in the lead-up to the election. Only Putin, his propaganda claims, can “raise Russia from its knees.”
The runaway success of the genre, in both Russia and the United States, suggests it’s far from trivial to counter-program. One high-minded approach focuses on improving media literacy: educating the audience to tell fake news apart from real, learning to deconstruct the media. Media literacy is noble and necessary, but it can also make publics so skeptical of any media that it erodes trust to the point of cynicism. Indeed, the likes of Hannity use the techniques of media literacy in their own approach. Hannity’s programs feature clips from CBS, NBC and other rivals, which he then deconstructs to show up biases and contradictions. By becoming the vehicle through which to interpret other channels, Hannity immediately places himself next to his audience, becomes its partner in dealing with the dizzying plurality of modern media. In a world of ever-multiplying sources of information, so multifarious they can undermine rather than add to a sense of coherent reality, one of the few things that can bring people together is the very act of watching TV. Whatever else we may be, we are all viewers. And the Fox viewer is on the couch together with Hannity, watching other channels together.
To counter the Hannities, you have to get on the couch next to the viewer and be even more relevant to them. By placing yourself next to the audience, representing their interests, and being involved in looking for solutions together with them, you can generate trust. It may well be that the sort of “objectivity” Ted Koppel yearns for is indeed increasingly impossible. If one were to build a new public service-spirited broadcaster today, it would struggle to be seen as somehow above the fray; it would be just another purveyor of “narratives” among myriads, no more or less trusted than the others. But if you can show you are the viewer’s partner, a different sort of relationship ensues.
Along with this new relationship with the viewer, one needs a mentality which can overcome the fear of a hostile world. Decades before Fox came on the scene, television news had already slipped into a recognizable pattern. Back in 1977, a study of CBS and NBC showed newscasts were so focused on the stories of victims that it “modelled helplessness” 70 percent of the time. “This study suggested that evening news was actually inducing learned helplessness to viewers,” writes Catherine Gyldensted, a Danish media professor and foreign correspondent. Gyldensted has become one of the leading proponents of “constructive news,” which combines the principles of positive psychology with rigorous journalism. As Gyldensted lays out in her book From Mirrors to Movers, “Constructive News” means approaching stories in a different way: instead of focusing purely on victim narratives, it looks for examples of how people have found ways to improve their situations. It means looking for the constructive aspects to any story or character: the same subject who seemed a purely passive victim might also have a resilient aspect. It also means asking different sorts of questions in interviews and debates with politicians, where you force them into actually proposing solutions and collaborating rather than merely mouthing off at each other in a verbal version of WWF wrestling.
At its worst “Constructive News” risks toppling into rose-tinted “happy stories,” the type of pablum dictators love, or worse, into niche stories of little relevance—investigative reports into bike lane improvements. But at its best, it can inspire and break learned helplessness. It’s also popular. In her book, Gyldenstedt quotes an analysis of the “virality” of 7,000 New York Times articles. Content with “low-arousal” emotions, such as sadness, were shared the least. Content which evoked “high-arousal,” negative emotions, such as anger or anxiety (the ones the Hannities specialize in) were widely shared—but not quite as much as those with high-arousal, positive emotions.
It’s no coincidence that the most successful independent TV project in Russia is “TV Rain,” whose catchphrase is “Optimistic Channel.” Between 2008 and 2011, the channel grew its audience rapidly (by Russian independent media standards) when it delivered a message outside the dark conspiracies and fabricated anger of Kremlin TV. TV Rain was at the heart of the mass protests against Putin in 2011 and 2012. The Kremlin crushed the protests with mass arrests, and has starved TV Rain of access to money and frequencies, so that we might never know whether the Optimistic Channel could have grown into something more significant.
U.S. broadcasters have no such excuses.