Usurping the usable past: How Fox News remembered the Great Depression during the Great Recession

Abstract

This article examines how Fox News’ top-rated programs attempted to reshape the ‘collective memory’ of the Great Depression during the Great Recession. In their retelling of the Depression’s history, Fox News hosts proclaimed their kinship with the Depression generation and strove to present themselves as its modern standard bearers. Fox News’ rhetorical strategy involved shifting modes of analysis when treating past and present crises. On one hand, the principles of the Stimulus Act were presented as antithetical to the ‘producer ethic’ and values of the Depression generation. On the other hand, this same generation’s reliance on New Deal policies were de-politicized and turned into a technical question about the efficacy of Keynesian policy solutions. This article offers a multi-modal, textual analysis to reveal how Fox’s top shows executed this double-move to imply the recipients of stimulus aid in the Obama era are fundamentally different from ‘the Greatest Generation’.

Keywords

Cable news collective memory Fox News Great Depression Great Recession New Deal partisan journalism producer populism race welfare

The day after Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory, the cover of Time played with the iconic photo of Franklin Roosevelt with a cigarette in his mouth by replacing his face with a photo of Obama’s. The caption read, ‘The New New Deal’. This Time feature was one of countless editorials drawing parallels between Obama and Roosevelt. With Democrats in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, analysts speculated that the Obama administration would pass a policy program as bold as President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Obama made these historical comparisons in his own campaign rhetoric. In his 4 November 2008 victory speech, Obama said the Great Depression was conquered, ‘with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can!’ And as the late-2000s economic downturn worsened in early 2009, he again turned to the memory of Great Depression to contextualize the contemporary crisis for the American public. On 7 February 2009, the Labor Department released numbers showing January to be the greatest 1-month job loss in 34 years. That day Obama called the Recession ‘our greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression’. This line that would become the third most frequently quoted lines in the national media during 2009 (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009).

The Depression’s history has long validated progressive arguments for expanding government programs, increasing taxes on the rich, and regulating business and finance. Obama and other liberals assumed invoking the Depression of the 1930s would build public support for the progressive economic reforms and countercyclical spending measures Democrats were proposing to recuperate the economy. Yet, the conservative opposition was undeterred by the prevailing left-leaning history of the Depression and boldly strove to repurpose it as an interpretive device that could advance their own economic agenda. Conservatives mobilized the intellectual work of key figures from free market think tanks and research networks. Amity Shlaes’ (2007) The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression argued the New Deal prolonged rather than shortened the Great Depression. In a highly coordinated effort, Republican politicians referenced Shlaes’ book as an ‘official’ historical account that demonstrates the folly of using government spending to lift the nation out of recession (Leuchtenburg, 2009: 299–312). Coinciding with this, Shlaes and other historians appeared on the conservative-leaning cable network Fox News, whose top-rated opinion programs produced historical documentaries on the Great Depression and devoted entire segments to conservative authors and their books.

This essay examines how Fox News attempted to reshape the collective memory of the Great Depression during the first 3 months of 2009, when the Stimulus Act – the most consequential policy response to the Great Recession – was being debated and passed. The choice to engage the Depression’s history carried inherent risks for Fox News. Invoking the Depression, especially during a time of severe and widespread economic pain, draws even greater attention to poverty and wealth inequality, issues that Democrats have politically ‘owned’ for decades (Petrocik et al., 2003). However, Fox News’ top programs overcame this interpretive challenge by presenting Obama and the Stimulus Act as a sign of generational shift and departure from traditional values.

Fox’s rhetorical strategy involved shifting modes of analysis when treating past and present crises. On one hand, the principles of the stimulus bill and Obama’s popular base were presented as antithetical to the ‘producer ethic’ of the Depression generation. On the other hand, this same generation’s historical ties to FDR and the Democratic Party and their reliance on New Deal policies were de-politicized and turned into an amoral, technical question about the efficacy of Keynesian policy solutions. This strategy also involved setting up visual-racial juxtapositions between the Depression generation and the current generation, which, in turn, assisted Fox’s portrayal of the stimulus package as welfare by another name. Taking Fox’s three highest rated programs at the time as my objects¹ – The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Glenn Beck – I offer a multi-modal, textual analysis that illustrates how Fox News executed these delicate double-moves to imply the recipients of stimulus aid in the Great Recession are fundamentally different than ‘the Greatest Generation’.

This article takes up Jill Edy’s (2014) call for media scholars to investigate how ‘partisan memories’ are formed in a ‘post-broadcast world’. However, I do not address Edy’s main concern about the social effects that partisan news has on collective memory. In addition to questioning the macro-societal consequences of partisan-driven journalism, memory scholars must take stock of the stylistic nuances within the partisan media world, particularly in the cable news field. An essential characteristic that distinguishes Fox News from its political opposite MSNBC is the conservative network’s populist rhetorical address. Fox’s attempt to reinterpret the Depression’s history during the stimulus debate provides a useful case study for understanding how populism works as a political tool for shaping memory. In the following section, I theorize connections between collective memory and populism and explain why bridging these literatures benefits both fields.

Creating partisan memories with populist rhetoric

Paul Taggart (2000) describes populism as a ‘past-directed’ discourse always attempting ‘to bring back ancient values into the contemporary world’ (p. 16). This parallels what memory studies scholars have long observed about nationalism, how it too is fundamentally built on past-directed concepts like ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’ (Kammen, 1991). However, while the connection between nationalism and collective memory has been a central preoccupation of memory studies (Olick, 2014), memory’s role in constructing populist political identities has been given less attention.

Populism and nationalism share several affinities; hence, their frequent conflation. What differentiates them, however, is the enemies they target. Unlike nationalism’s focus on foreign enemies, the primary threat in populist discourse – the elite – comes from within the body politic (Stavrakakis, 2005: 244–247) and is, thus, fixated more on social hierarchies internal to the nation. For nearly two centuries, the populist rhetorical tradition has provided American politicians and news organizations – particularly tabloid ones (Örnebring and Jönsson, 2004) – with a vernacular language for describing class tensions. But populist class critiques have historically been more normative than empirical (Kazin, 1998: 13), and this partly explains the discourse’s great malleability, why it can and has served highly divergent political agendas and economic groups. Theories of populism can enhance memory studies by providing concepts that elucidate how the past is used to legitimate political ideologies about labor, wealth, and cultural status. Conversely, memory studies scholarship – with its more thorough theorization of narrativity and visual rhetoric – can help counter the excessively linguistic focus of populist political theory and reveal how populism involves a broader range of discursive resources and media techniques.

Since its launch in 1996, Fox News has appropriated populist tropes and narratives to construct its corporate image as an anti-establishment news organization. This anti-elitist branding strategy drew from the blueprint Rupert Murdoch – owner of Fox’s parent company News Corp – used earlier in his career with the tabloid papers he owned in Australia and the United Kingdom (McKnight, 2010). Echoing its foundational corporate strategy, Fox’s programming discourse radically simplifies the political public sphere by dividing it into two dueling media systems: one for ‘the elite’ and one for ‘the people’ or ‘the folks’, as Bill O’Reilly calls his audience. These opposing publics are associated with divergent sources of knowledge. The traditional wisdom and personal experience of the everyman Fox News anchor is often pitted against the technocratic expertise of elites (Peters, 2010).

Using populism, Fox News has innovated new strategies for shaping journalistic memory. However, its effort to do so is not particular to Fox or partisan media. All news organizations, whether politically motivated or not, take part in the creation of collective memories. In fact, the journalism community’s capacity to shape memory is, Barbie Zelizer (1992) stresses, one of the key ways news organizations attain ‘cultural authority’. In determining what events are covered, the news media provides the ‘first draft of history’ and this ultimately influences the final draft, that is, the official, historical record (pp. 177–178). While collective memories are significantly constructed by news organizations, journalists, in turn, rely on historical references to explain current events for audiences (Edy, 2006). Dan Berkowitz (2011) specifically highlights how reporters covering Obama’s 2008 campaign used historical analogies to FDR and the Great Depression to frame Obama’s unlikely candidacy within a familiar narrative (pp. 208–209).

Of course, using collective memory to interpret present-day realities is seldom innocent and often involves the advancement of particular political interests. In the broadcast era, when only three networks dominated television news and journalists enjoyed something close to a captive mass audience, the idea that the news media could impose a hegemonic view of the nation’s past was easier to theorize and substantiate. However, the transition from the broadcast era to a ‘high media choice’ environment (Prior, 2007) filled with various news niches, particularly partisan ones, complicates previous models for explaining the nexus between collective memory, journalism, and political communication.

Jill Edy (2014) questions whether or not it is still feasible to assume there are collectively shared notions of the past in such a fragmented and politically polarized media landscape. As audiences increasingly select news sources that confirm their preexisting political views, Edy raises the possibility of a public sphere comprising ‘partisan memory silos’ (p. 77), a disconnected set of media enclaves propagating their own ideologically driven version of American history with little to no dialogue with each other. One may question whether Fox’s revisionist approach to the Depression’s history had any effect outside its audience and the conservative ‘echo chamber’ (Jamieson and Cappella, 2008). However, David McKnight (2013) suggests that Fox’s true influence rests not in its ability to reinforce the political predisposition of its loyal viewers but rather in its ability to sway the coverage and behavior of other news organizations (pp. 27–29), a process Manuel Castells (2009) terms ‘inter-media agenda setting’. Studies have demonstrated Fox News’ capacity to drive the national editorial agenda on issues like the Iraq War (Calabrese, 2005), the Tea Party movement (Skocpol and Williamson, 2012), and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) controversy (Dreier and Martin, 2010). If Fox could do this, maybe it has the power to shape national collective memories as well.

This study offers no definitive conclusions about the ‘effects’ of Fox News programming. However, it does provide future quantitative studies on Fox with descriptive tools that more adequately account for the complexity and particularity of the network’s programming style. Fox’s populist methods for attaining cultural authority compel scholars of journalistic memory to consider epistemological strategies that challenge the empirical knowledge tradition and that work outside liberal theories of deliberative democracy. Fox’s antagonistic broadcasting model is very different from high-modern journalism’s unitary conception of the public sphere during the network era (Hallin, 1992). Its dualistic character also differs from the more contemporary, postmodern paradigm of journalism with its ‘montage of publics’ (Hauser, 1999). Fox’s populist imaginary of American news and politics is ideologically useful, as it serves to represent ‘sectorial’, partisan demands as majoritarian, popular demands (Laclau, 2005). Applying this to the study of collective memory, the following analysis illustrates how Fox’s populist framing of Depression’s history serves to make the network’s novel, ideological reading of the event appear to be rooted in the experiences and recollections of most Americans.

Tapping the collective memory of the Great Depression

According to Michael Schudson, collective memory should not be conceptualized as an aggregate product of millions of individual memories that coalesce like rain drops into a pool. This implies it is something that develops in an organic way without systematic direction or intention. Collective memory, he emphasizes, is produced by and located in institutions, and is handed down through a select set of symbols, through ‘particular cultural forms and [are] transmitted in particular cultural vehicles’ (Schudson, 1992: 5). These symbols (iconic photos, phrases, and historical figures), cultural forms (speeches, newscasts, and textbooks), and cultural vehicles (public education, media industries, and communication technologies) are at once ways through which we encounter a shared sense of our nation’s past and what gives collective memory a tactility, a way to handle and shape it for specific purposes and political interests.

When the Great Depression is mentioned, one thinks of grainy photos of unemployment lines, soup kitchens, and the Dust Bowl. The Depression is not just a historical referent that recalls a moment of great national hardship; it recalls a visual-centric memory of hardship (Rabinowitz, 1994). As a way to familiarize viewers with the more esoteric, free market interpretation asserted by the conservative intellectuals like Amity Shlaes, Fox’s top programs consistently projected recognizable images of the Depression on screen as hosts and guests criticized New Deal policies. In one episode of Hannity, Hannity (2009a) asserts, ‘Public Works Administration [of the New Deal] … spent over six billion dollars without significantly reducing unemployment’. As he says this, the viewer is shown 1930s newsreels of men waiting in unemployment lines (see Figure 1). A similar scene is displayed in an episode of Glenn Beck (2009a) where Depression era footage is projected while a guest historian critiques the policies of the National Recovery Administration (see Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Images of Depression era hardship on Hannity.

Figure 2.

Images of Depression era hardship on Glenn Beck.

These images stand as some of the most powerful symbols of economic hardship in American popular culture. Fox’s top programs used them to give the network’s anti-stimulus critique a class-based edge and moral sensibility. However, adopting the dominant symbols of the Depression to make sense of the present crisis potentially threatens Fox’s free market interpretive strategy. The aged, old-fashioned aesthetic of these images not only gives a feel and texture of 1930s culture, it tacitly carries a sense of the era’s radical leftist politics. The nation’s turn to the left in the 1930s has had enduring effects, influencing American public discourse long after the Depression generation. This shift did not automatically arise as a result of the economic crisis. It was significantly driven by the rapid growth and mobilization of the Popular Front, a powerful leftwing political coalition. In using this iconography, these conservative programs obviously did not intend to advocate leftist political values. Yet, by the very subjects these images focus on and by the kinds of people and social circumstances they call attention to, they convey – as subtext – the Popular Front’s political commitments, their vision of, to use historian Michael Denning’s (1998) words, a ‘new moral economy’ that places the poor at the center of public concern (p. 8).

However, these visual representations of Depression hardship have been – like the New Deal’s policy response to the Depression itself – racially and gender selective. The Depression image of economic pain that has been reproduced across the decades has mostly been the pain of White, male workers. Female suffering was a part of Depression era iconography of course. After all, the most iconic image of the Depression is Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. Nonetheless, Depression era media mostly denied the economic identities of women. Women suffered as mothers, not as laboring-breadwinners (Hapke, 1995: 29–30). This selective view makes usable the reactionary elements of 1930s leftist politics, namely, how they reinforced patriarchy and white normativity. Because Depression era hardship was framed predominantly as white hardship, the economic misery of the Great Recession must also be white to be read as worthy of public concern. Fox News programs did not create the social exclusions of Depression era iconography, but they took advantage of them, in effect, obscuring connections between the class-based experiences of racial minorities in the current crisis and those experienced by the Depression Generation.

In early 2009, Fox News helped incite rank and file Republicans to join the Tea Party movement’s street protest against the Stimulus Act (Skocpol and Williamson, 2012: 131–134) and, interestingly, adorned this movement with Depression era references (Frank, 2012). In an episode of Glenn Beck (2009b), for example, Beck announced the launch of the 9/12 Project, a political organization tied to the Tea Party. Speaking to rallies across the nation that were linked to the broadcast and shown through live video feeds, Beck gave an impassioned political speech about victimized small business owners who, he laments, ‘nobody seems to even notice’. ‘Where is the voice of the “Forgotten Man”’, Beck asks, taking FDR’s most famous moniker for the downtrodden worker of the Depression. ‘The Forgotten Man is you’, he answers. Looking directly into camera, he ends with a call to action: ‘Will you commit yourself to really live America’s time-tested values and principles? … Will you … rise up to be America’s next Greatest Generation?’

Beck and Fox’s appropriation of the Depression generation’s legacy was considerably aided by key memory texts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 1998, network anchor Tom Brokaw coined the term ‘Greatest Generation’ with his best-selling book by the same title. Brokaw’s book, the prime-time specials based on it and the appearance of popular movies and TV series about World War II at the same moment would help cement the notion that the generation who lived through the Great Depression and fought in World War II represents the moral bar by which all subsequent generations of Americans should be measured.

The creation of the Greatest Generation concept was a foundational step in the conservative reimagining of the Depression culture and imagery. Like the filmic depiction of World War II in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), the image of ‘the white pained male body’ (Biesecker, 2002: 396) was central to Fox’s attempt to include the Depression’s history within the conservative political tradition.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Greatest Generation concept and analogies to World War II were used by the Bush administration to legitimate its ‘War on Terror’. But this nationalistic usage was different than Fox News’ populistic adaptation of the term during the stimulus debate. President Bush’s invocation of World War II empathized national unity and political consensus and did not fundamentally challenge the established story of the ‘Good War’ (Bostdorff, 2003). Fox News pundits, on the other hand, sought to upend the conventional story of the Great Depression and used its history to intensify contemporary political divisions as opposed to quail them. Differing from studies on how collective memory is cohered and sustained, this study shows how – in an effort to breed political dissensus – Fox News fashioned populist antagonisms to unravel the public’s memory of the Great Depression.

‘Who have we turned into?’: The Stimulus Act as a sign of generational transformation and moral decline

In his 1935 annual address to Congress, President Roosevelt famously condemned the free market principle of possessive individualism. ‘Americans must forswear the conception of the acquisition of wealth’, he proclaimed. During the stimulus debate, Fox pundits criticized contemporary American culture along the same greed-condemning moral lines but reversed FDR’s policy analysis. In a segment devoted to the Depression’s history, guest Mike Huckabee tells Hannity, ‘the fundamental difference between the generation of FDR and my parents and this generation … They really believed that they should make sacrifices so their kids would have a better life’. By supporting stimulus spending and raising the national debt, he concludes, ‘We’re sacrificing our kids for ourselves’ (2009a). Following Huckabee’s logic, it is government assistance that is acquisitive and self-centered. In contrast, free market policies are guided by a communitarian ethic. In another episode, Hannity (2009b) makes similar generational distinctions:

My father grew up during the Depression, literally put cardboard in his shoes, because he couldn’t afford it … They didn’t have healthcare, they didn’t have college tuition, they didn’t have a mortgage or a house guaranteed. When have we taken on this entitlement mentality?

In the months leading to the passing of the stimulus bill in early 2009, Fox News pundits made grand warnings about the growing distance between the current generation and the moral-economic principles of traditional America. In an episode of The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly questions whether or not, ‘Americans, some, not all of course, are willing to sell out the capitalistic system for Big Brother government to give [as opposed to earn] them money’ (2009a). Parroting O’Reilly, Hannity asks, ‘Has the average American maybe lost touch with our founders and our framers? Do you think most Americans have been conditioned to think that the government is going to be the answer to every problem they have?’ (2009a). Fox hosts use terms like ‘Americans’. Yet, having long addressed the conservative base as the ‘traditionalist’ bloc of the US political field, Fox hosts and the audience are implicitly part of the ‘not all’ hinted at by O’Reilly, the ones standing against the cultural trends of the moment.

Too often critics assume that Fox News pundits’ repeated references to ‘traditional values’ are always a watchword for religious, culture war issues (e.g. God, guns, and gays). However, this rhetoric is also deeply tied to the moral logic of producerism, a longstanding strain of the American populist tradition. Producerist discourse predominated debates about wealth distribution and labor in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian era of American politics. True to populist rhetorical forms, this discourse bifurcates the national political community drawing an opposition between ‘producers’ and ‘parasites’. Intellectually rooted in Lockean theories of property and the labor theory of value from classical political economy, this discourse argues a moral society rewards those who produce, thus, the economic system should favor the interest of the industrious, not the idle (Kazin, 1998: 13; Huston, 1998).

In the Depression era, the labor movement wielded producerist frames to cast corporate monopolies as vampires who siphon the value of workers’ productive labor. However, since the Great Society of the 1960s, conservatives appropriated this political discourse to demonize welfare policies and paint racial minorities as society’s chief parasites. Inheriting this legacy, the ‘new racism’ of today’s news environment is often expressed through the language of traditional values (Gilliam and Iyengar, 2000: 566). The issue of welfare is central to this rhetoric and tends to be a stronger wedge issue with the white working class than topics like abortion and school prayer (Bartels, 2008: 83–93).

From the start, Fox News’ top programs framed the stimulus bill not as a means to address the economic crisis but rather as an opportunistic political play to expand welfare. In an episode of Hannity, the brawny tradesman turned conservative media celebrity Joe the Plumber tells the host, ‘I don’t pretend to be an economic wizard here, but the stimulus package he’s [Obama] talking about sounds like a handout to me’ (Hannity, 2009c). Days later, Hannity attacked Obama advisor Robert Reich for his suggestion that the jobs programs in the stimulus bill should ensure that women and racial minorities equally benefit from the package. Hannity (2009d) framed Reich’s comments as proof that the bill was designed to favor minorities. Beck and O’Reilly’s programs followed this trend framing the stimulus bill as nothing but a ruse to increase ‘nanny state’ welfare and, at a deeper level, as something that opposes the traditional principles that underpin a work-oriented society.

As such a crucial component of Fox News’ interpretive framework for covering the stimulus debate, the racial politics of welfare and the traditionalist/non-traditionalist binary would unsurprisingly shade Fox’s engagement with the Depression’s history. By presenting government aid as exclusively for people of color and those who do not work, Fox News programs provide a racial rationale for its predominantly White audience to overlook their own reliance on these policies as well as the Depression Generation’s reliance on them in the form of the New Deal.² However, Fox programs had to tread lightly when critiquing the New Deal to avoid the implication that the Fox News viewer or their family had been welfare dependents too. For this reason, Fox News’ analysis of Depression era policies utilized a proportionally different rhetorical strategy to discredit New Deal government intervention. Fox’s New Deal critique, in contrast to the network’s treatment of the stimulus bill, conspicuously lacked a moral bite. By attacking the New Deal policies on more empirical historical grounds, Fox News could criticize the principle of government intervention underlying the New Deal without calling into question the Depression generation’s work ethic, self-reliance, and manhood.

This analytical maneuvering is evident in a segment of The O’Reilly Factor (2009b) when the Great Depression is discussed. O’Reilly’s guest Neil Cavuto, the host of another Fox program, denounces the efficacy of the New Deal with reference to the ‘empirical’ historical record, telling Bill O’Reilly matter-of-factly, ‘they [the stock market] know the history on this stuff as you know the history on this stuff. Stimulus, heavy on spending does very little to help us out of a morass’. Yet, when O’Reilly turns to the present crisis and asks Cavuto what the average American should be most ‘afraid of’ in today’s economic environment, ironically the financial analyst and ‘numbers guy’ Cavuto insists Americans should be most worried about shifting cultural norms. He warns, ‘I would be very afraid of the precedent we’re setting here, that if you can’t pay your mortgage, someone’s there to bail you out. If you’re falling on tough times, the government’s there to help you’.

The 11 and 12 February episodes of Glenn Beck are particularly illustrative examples of how analytical approaches change with the era being addressed. In both episodes, discussions about the New Deal were directly preceded by segments focusing on the town hall meeting President Barack Obama held in Fort Myers, Florida, to stress the need for the stimulus package. In the 11 February episode, Beck begins the segment by asking if the stimulus package will fix the economy. After some discussion with Stephen Moore, an economist and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Beck segues to a video clip of an exchange between Obama and an audience member. The viewer sees an older African-American woman standing in the audience with microphone (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Fort Myers Town Hall.

She pleads, ‘we need something more than vehicles and parks to go to’, indicating she is homeless. ‘We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help’. Approaching her, Obama promises, ‘we’re going to do everything we can to help you … I’ll have my staff talk to you after this town hall’. As the topic of discussion segues from the stimulus package to the video clip, the mode of analysis shifts from Moore’s economistic expertise to a moral evaluation of the woman in the clip. This individual exemplifies, Beck asserts, a ‘how do I get mine’ mentality. He continues, with a tone of disbelief, ‘She just went to the president of the United States and said, “I need a new house,” and then she got one’. Having the last word, Moore closes the segment saying, ‘you know what most Americans think of this? Get a job!’ (Glenn Beck, 2009a).

In the following day’s episode, Beck and conservative media pundit Michelle Malkin comment on three video clips from the same town hall event. The viewer is shown a clip of an African-American man who asks the President about an easier way to maintain government assistance when facing sporadic fluctuations in monthly income. The second clip replays the video of the older African-American women seeking housing. The last clip features a white Hispanic teenager who says he works at McDonald’s. This Millennial generation worker asks Obama how he would address the lack of job mobility and stagnant wages fast food employees like himself face. The camera returns to a mid-shot of Beck. He cocks his head with a grimaced look and says, ‘Michelle, hmm … who have we turned into?’ Malkin responds, ‘I’m appalled that the culture of entitlement has exploded so much that people don’t think twice when these audience members go seeking absolution and all sorts of manna from heaven from the president of the United States’. ‘My gosh’, Beck responds, ‘I couldn’t imagine asking that’. ‘Yes’, Malkin responds, ‘we’ve become a nation of moochers’.

Threading together Beck’s framing of the stimulus bill with previous framing used during Fox’s coverage of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Malkin continues, ‘we saw a very similar video clip, which has been played on Fox News a lot, of another Obama supporter’. ‘Here’, Beck says, ‘We have the clip’. The viewer is shown a video of a young, African-American woman with her daughters in the crowd at Obama’s victory speech. A reporter asks her why she was so moved by the moment. She responds, ‘Because I … won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage … if I help him, he’s going to help me’. The camera returns to Beck shaking his head in disbelief. Malkin says, with a smile on her face, ‘that’s right. Loaves and fishes multiply, pork and Kool-Aid falls from the sky!’. Without acknowledging this racist comment, Beck segues by offering a historic quote that encapsulates the central tenet of producerism, ‘Thomas Jefferson said: [a quote appears on the screen] Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who don’t’ (Glenn Beck, 2009c).

In a 9 February episode (Glenn Beck, 2009d), a segment critiques FDR’s interventionist approach using a historical comparison that contrasts the New Deal to Presidents Harding and Coolidge’s free market approach to the ‘forgotten depression’ of 1920–1921. Statistical modes of analysis, policy events, and references to the theories of conservative economist Friedrich Hayek are used to highlight the New Deal’s supposed failure and the triumph of free market policies at fixing earlier recessions. Beck’s 10 February segment on the Depression shared the statistical orientation of the previous episode but instead focused on the theme of the New Deal’s wasteful, ineffectiveness, again not the immorality of New Deal policies or the people who relied on them (Glenn Beck, 2009e).

In all these episodes, Beck’s program is careful not to describe New Deal policies using the language of idleness and dependency. In contrast, his analysis of the stimulus and Obama’s popular base predominantly focuses on questions about moral integrity and work ethic. Through the juxtaposition of these segments and through the selective use of anti-welfare discourses, these programs allow one to fault the New Deal for having the same big government mindset as the stimulus bill without faulting the Depression generation itself.

Racializing collective memory with visual rhetoric

Often, politicians and media figures are accused of racism because they were caught using overtly racist language such as when radio host Don Imus notoriously called the Rutgers women’s basketball team ‘nappy-headed hoes’. While this is the more common way of understanding racial stereotyping on television, it is also the more exceptional way in which it occurs. More typically, television news networks represent racial identities and encode them with negative cultural characteristics through coordinating particular background images that are shown on screen with verbal rhetoric (Entman and Rojecki, 2001). Through the interplay of image, text, and verbal speech, Fox News programs construct racial differences between the Depression generation and the generation of the Great Recession in a far subtler but no less intelligible way than overt racial rhetoric.

In a segment dedicated to the New Deal, Beck begins by criticizing Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, for the idea that, ‘we are going to try things we’ve never tried before [in terms of economic policy]’. He then asks guest historian Burton Folsom Jr if the ‘spirit of the New Deal’ had a similar experimental mindset. Folsom affirms Beck’s historical comparison and then cites agencies created in the Depression that, he argues, increased unemployment. As he does this, a sequence of Depression era images appear next to the video chat windows. They show newsreel footage of Franklin Roosevelt speaking and men standing in lines for food or employment (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

New Deal era.

Beck transitions, ‘I’m a small business guy. There is no way I would invest in this atmosphere because the government is going to try things they’ve [gesturing scare quotes] “never tried before”’ (Glenn Beck, 2009e). Folsom again validates Beck by relating his comments to the business climate of the 1930s. At this moment, the viewer sees another sequence of images. This time the video footage displays scenes of contemporary economic distress: state employment offices and job fairs interspersed with images of President Obama (Figure 5). Neither Beck nor Folsom comment on this temporal shift in visual imagery and continue their discussion about New Deal policy. Like the Depression era images that preceded it, the contemporary footage focuses on unemployment lines and includes video of the current president, the figurehead of the modern state. However, in contrast to the Depression footage, the new images mainly show racial minorities and the policy response is symbolized by an African-American president.

Figure 5.

Obama era.

In this episode as well as in other Fox News programs, the Depression images almost always feature white men. Presenting FDR, the New Deal and the Depression itself as historical referents that are exclusive to a white experience allows Fox programs to identify with Depression era poverty on one hand and disidentify with people of color suffering in the current crisis on the other. The slippage between the socially nonspecific nature of Beck’s moral condemnations against contemporary ‘society’ in his verbal rhetoric and the specific focus on minorities in the program’s visual editing conceals the process by which racial identifiers are attached to the program’s principal interpretative categories: conservative/liberal, traditional/nontraditional, producer/parasite, and the Greatest Generation/Millennials.

While Depression generation’s work ethic is significantly constructed in contradistinction to nonwhite others, the link between the Depression generation and producerist values must be established in a positive manner as well. Coupling scenes of white hardship and government relief with scenes of white, productive labor turns the Depression generation’s hardship into a more resonant point of identification. White hardship alone does not warrant sympathy; it must be attached to a producer ethic to endow it with deservingness. This is evident in Beck and Malkin’s inclusion of the white McDonald’s worker in the ‘nation of moochers’. Not only is the Greatest Generation treated as sacrosanct in verbal rhetoric, the historical images Fox programs used in their segments on the Depression reinforces the work ethic and manhood of the Depression generation. In addition to images of deprivation and public aid, the Fox viewer is shown black and white photos of middle-aged, white bodies toiling on roads, in farm fields, and in factories (see Figure 6). In contrast, the viewer is given few images of labor in the Great Recession era; assistance seeking is spotlighted instead (see Figure 7).

Figure 6.

New Deal worker.

Figure 7.

Millennial worker.

The image of the producer in American political discourse, including leftist variations, has historically been a white image, but maintaining the contemporary link between the Depression generation’s whiteness and their productive-worthiness is not automatically guaranteed. It is contingent on continued attempts to reinscribe their work ethic and valor.

Why New Deal producerism helped conservative populism in a post-industrial Depression

At the very end of the 11 February 2009 episode of Glenn Beck, Beck singles out the white Hispanic teenager from the Fort Myers event, ‘the McDonald’s Guy’ as he calls him. Beck assumes the young worker lacks traditional values and doubts he ‘supports the nine principles’ of Beck’s Tea Party-affiliated 9/12 Project. The essential contrast between the younger, fast food worker in the contemporary video imagery and the workers that are displayed in the Depression era images is that New Deal workers are shown doing blue-collar work. In contrast, the McDonald’s worker is tied to the service industry, the industrial sector that employs the majority of today’s working class. This form of work, in being less masculine, is estranged from the images of productive labor that have been the most prominent in the history of American political culture, namely, artisan, agricultural, and industrial forms of manual work.

As Jefferson Cowie’s (2010) book Stayin’ Alive demonstrates, in the 1970s the Nixon administration’s ‘blue collar strategy’ effectively wedded white union workers to the Right through calculated cultural appeals. Since then, the image of the construction worker has been tied to conservative politics. This symbolic link between blue-collar labor and political conservatism gives conservative populism a deep cultural bearing. Trades in residential construction (i.e. framing, drywall, electrical, and plumbing) remain some of the few working-class jobs today that carry a resemblance to the traditional iconography of productive labor. In their verbal rhetoric, conservatives said they embraced Joe the Plumber because he represented the aspirations of small business owners. However, on visual level Joe the Plumber was a useful political symbol because he embodied the residual, manly image of the industrial working class.

The divergent way Fox News treats Joe the Plumber and the young McDonalds worker and the divergent way Fox News represents the working class of the Great Depression era and segments of the working class of the Great Recession era shed light on the symbolic interdependency between industrial conceptions of productive labor, whiteness, and masculinity. If one piece of the triumvirate is absent, the remaining two pieces have a diminished status. The white Hispanic McDonald’s worker has less of a claim to the producer image because his labor is feminized.

While taking advantage of them, conservative media figures did not create these connotations. This chain of associations was articulated by the New Deal coalition’s leftist brand of producer populism in the 1930s. The coalition’s inability and unwillingness to incorporate the types of occupations women and people of color held into the benefit structure of the New Deal and, equally important, into the New Deal’s image of the producing class would come back to haunt the Democratic left as the post-war conservative movement would invert the political meaning of New Deal symbolism decades later (Lipsitz, 2001: 47–50).

During the 1960s and 1970s the US class structure would go through profound changes as the national economy shifted from an industrial to a post-industrial model. Women workers flooded the ranks of the growing service sector and increasingly female-headed households started to replace the traditional lunch pail, blue-collar father figure of the postwar era. Because President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society sought to accommodate – to an extent – the political demands of the Civil Rights and feminist movements, women and minorities became aligned with political liberalism. In the name of these different factions of the working class, the Democratic Party raised issues that had been traditionally associated with producerist values such as establishing fair pay for women and minority workers and, through correcting historical discrimination, creating a employment environment truly organized by hard work and merit-based advancement.

Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr (2010) attempted to frame the nonwhite workers as an underpaid bloc of the working class whose low wages afforded the high living standard of middle-class whites by giving them cheap services (p. 7). Still, conservative populists like Alabama Governor George Wallace were more effective at framing the same group of workers as coddled by government and showered by its largess, an idea that was crystallized years later by President Ronald Reagan’s mythology of Cadillac driving ‘welfare queens’. In turn, the second wave feminist movement attempted to highlight how women workers were in essence double-producers carrying an economic load as workers in the paid workforce and as workers in the unpaid sphere of the home. Yet, by questioning their commitment to motherhood and by blaming the so-called moral decay of society (a precursor term to ‘family values’) on the decline of stay at home mothers, conservatives accentuated the gender of the new bloc women workers, which, in effect, downplayed their class identity. The conservative backlash that swiftly followed the policy gains women and minorities made in the 1960s and 1970s could not be easily combated. With no countervailing leftist vision of who the producing class is, from the Great Society all the way to the Great Recession, conservatives have been able to politically position white workers against women and minorities.

Conclusion

In their retelling of the Depression’s history, Fox News’ top hosts consistently proclaimed their cultural kinship with the Greatest Generation and strove to present themselves and their audience as its modern standard bearers. Using a free market ideological framework, Fox pundits turned the moral-economic lessons of the Depression on their head and re-scripted the Depression generation’s story as a bootstrap tale of self-reliance even though this generation turned to government in unprecedented ways to achieve a middle-class life. Fox programs implied that the New Deal – despite its inefficiencies and misalignment with free market ideology – provided deserved assistance. In contrast, those seeking government aid in the Great Recession were depicted as acquisitive and immoral.

As I’ve shown, race and gender divisions were central to the interpretive strategy Fox News programs used in their revision of the Great Depression. However, what also warrants attention is how conservative outlets like Fox seem more willing to mine the political culture of its opposition for interpretive devices and resonant moral arguments. Literary theorist Kenneth Burke (1984) has said that much of politics involves ‘the stealing back and forth of symbols’ (p. 103). Since the postwar, conservatives have appropriated a great deal of symbolic property from the left and are now boldly laying claim to its crown jewel: the Depression’s history. The exchange of political symbols may be lopsided, in part, because conservatives seem to have a broader imagination of what elements of the collective memory are contestable and usable.

Conservative media populists like Glenn Beck with his on-set chalkboard and Bill O’Reilly always promoting his new best selling history book are conspicuously invested in the production of popular history. This investment makes more sense when one understands the interrelationship between populism and collective memory. Although Fox’s populist-partisan formula was, in the first instance, a means for creating a distinct brand in the saturated, post-broadcast news market, the network’s style has a political function as well, a function no more apparent than during the stimulus debate of 2009. As scholars of populism have long acknowledged, populist political discourses deeply rely on the notion of returning to the values of a bygone era. In turn, however, presentist interpretations of the past – even free market, conservative ones – can be bolstered by populism’s moral narratives of work, wealth, and class.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Reece Peck is Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His current book project, The Power of Political Style: Fox News, Conservative Populism and Tabloid Journalism, traces Fox News’ historical ascendancy and examines the network’s coverage of the Great Recession.

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