A recent column in the Miami Herald wonders how the country voted for Donald Trump. It asks, simply, “What in the world is wrong with us?”

Liberals have been asking this question for months. They’ve flogged themselves for selecting a weak candidate and for being out-of-touch with normal Americans. There’s some truth in this, and it’s important to be self-reflective. But we’ve been missing the elephant in the room, an elephant that provides a much simpler answer to the problem. Fox News — not Hillary Clinton, not poor political organization, and not a disconnect with voters — is Democrats’ biggest problem. It was one of the major factors that helped Trump win the election, and any efforts to “resist” will be hobbled until we find a way to address this problem. With few exceptions (e.g., here, here, and here), there’s been surprisingly little acknowledgment that a big part of the reason Republicans control nearly all levels of government, and that bad news never seems to stick to Teflon Don, is that Republicans have Fox News.

It’s not my goal in this post to argue that Fox News is biased or that it’s propaganda. I’ll assume that you already know these things. Instead, my goal is to share the sheer influence that Fox News has on Americans.

Before looking at Fox’s television numbers, let’s take a quick look at the following video (it’s long, so only watch for a minute or two starting from 3:50):

Fox News “documentary” about Trump’s election win

The video is a recap by Fox News of the 2016 election. Starting around 3:50, it reports on the protests organized by citizens shortly after Trump’s election. Let’s make several observations about this video:

First, they’ve portrayed Trump in a spectacularly positive light. Being completely honest with yourself, you have to admit that you might actually like the guy they’ve portrayed. He’s trying to stick it to a corrupt government, he’s confident, and he’s running against a system that’s failed the country. Maybe he’s a bit rough around the edges, but that fits the outsider narrative they’ve created.

Second, any effort that we make to protest or fight against Republican or Trump policies will be distorted, as in the video above. This distortion will be used to attack us. Peacefully marching against Trump’s treatment of women? You were marching for abortion, or you were throwing a fit about losing an election. Protesting the immigration ban? You’re impeding the president’s need to protect the country. You’re not giving him a chance. You’re violent and dangerous. You’re not patriotic.

Third, even when nonpartisan and extraordinarily damaging news comes out that’s not favorable to the Republican party, Fox News will play down the news, discredit the source, or — if all else fails — simply not report it. Indeed, they have a history of reporting simply inaccurate content on their popular television shows. When confronted, they occasionally retract their stories, but this has little impact on the resulting conservative audience. See, for example, this, this, and this.

The problem, of course, is that this “reporting” has little connection to reality. The man they’ve portrayed isn’t Trump. It’s a fictional character they’ve designed in a carefully-crafted message. Again, my point isn’t to convince you that this video is biased; it’s to remind you that videos like this are being put out there by Fox News, and they can explain why people support Trump and dislike liberals. People voted for Trump not because they ignored the information that’s out there, but because they absorbed the information that was on channel 11 of their cable news lineup or on the television as they waited for their flight.

Remember: Fox News is the propaganda arm of the Republican party. We can’t simply hope that it won’t sabotage our efforts. For any heavy investment we make to fight for causes we care about, Fox News will deliberately and predictably sabotage that effort by feeding a carefully-crafted message to their viewers. We need a way to help Fox News viewers recognize that their news source is harmful to them and to the rest of us.

A bit more information about Fox News

This wouldn’t be much of a problem if Fox were some marginal television show watched by a few thousand marginal voters. But it’s not marginal. Founded in 1996, Fox has become the most-watched cable television station in the U.S. Its viewership was until recently bigger than the next two TV news stations combined. During the 2016 election, it was the most-watched network in all of cable [link]. And its shows, like the O’Reilly Factor, have continued to be popular:

Not only did The [O’Reilly] Factor have its most-watched quarter in program history, but it broke all previous records in cable news history for the highest-viewership ever for any given program in a quarter. [link]

Take a moment to let that sink in. The most popular show in America wasn’t programming that brings us together like The Simpsons or America’s Funniest Home Videos. No, the most-watched show was The O’Reilly Factor. Until Bill O’Reilly was fired for sexual harassment (which happened only after advertisers boycotted), O’Reilly was feeding his viewers propaganda. And his replacement is doing the same.

The impact of Fox News on Americans’ views

Again, this wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t take Fox News seriously. Most liberals don’t take it seriously, because it’s clear to us how biased it is. So we tend to ignore or make fun of it. We laugh at it on late night television (like here, here, and here). And then we shake our heads and push it out of our minds until the next joke about it, when we laugh again.

But we need to take it seriously because there’s a lot of evidence that Fox News is extremely harmful to the fabric of our society, as evidenced by the recent election and the polarized views in American politics.

The first bit of evidence that Fox harms our society is anecdotal. Most people watch Fox News in their homes, but what happens when Americans watch it together, in public? Customers of Planet Fitness have gotten into fights about whether their gym shows Fox News or other news sources. You can see how adamant they are about where they get their information from on a discussion board here.

Another piece of anecdotal evidence is the attention the President pays to Fox News. He amplifies its stories, offering credibility to a network and its stories even when those stories are pure propaganda rather than news.

But anecdotes don’t tell us much about the relationship between Fox News and Americans’ views. Instead, we can see the direct link between Fox News and how Americans vote with surveys like the Pew study below. Trump supporters in the 2017 election overwhelmingly got their news from a single source — Fox News — while Clinton supporters got their news from a much broader variety of sources.

And Fox News’s growth has exactly corresponded to the period during which there has been an increase in partisan antipathy. Here’s the growth of Fox News Channel (FNC) over the first decade of 2000:

In the next two plots, you can see the growth of partisanship since 1994 (remember: Fox was started in 1996).

Here’s another view, showing a cross section of partisan antipathy: how much conservatives dislike liberals (left), and how much liberals dislike conservatives (right). Notice how much more Republicans dislike liberals than the other way around.

Source: Pew 2014 http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-2-growing-partisan-antipathy/

The information above isn’t a smoking gun; after all, correlation doesn’t imply causation, and it’s easy to find spurious correlations. But there have been studies to answer exactly the causal question. And the results aren’t promising.

One study comes from the Quarterly Journal of Economics; controlling for other factors, they found a significant impact by Fox News even as far back as 2000:

Towns with Fox News have a 0.4 to 0.7 percentage point higher Republican vote share in the 2000 presidential elections, compared to the 1996 elections. A vote shift of this magnitude is likely to have been decisive in the 2000 elections... We estimate that exposure to Fox News induced a substantial percentage of the non-Republican viewers to vote for the Republican party, 3 to 8 percent according to the more inclusive audience measure, and 11 to 28 percent according to the more restrictive measure.

And remember: Fox News was still fairly new in 2000; its viewership has increased sixfold since then. Another study out of Stanford, which improved on some limitations in the above study, confirms that, yes, the impact of Fox News drastically increased between 2000 and 2008. The Stanford webpage reporting their research explains:

They estimate that an initially centrist voter who watches an extra hour of Fox News per week would be up to 7% more likely to vote Republican, depending on the election.

This is an absolutely huge effect. They also found that cable news could explain the majority of the increase in polarization among the public:

Furthermore, we estimate that cable news can increase polarization and explain about two-thirds of the increase among the public in the US, and that this increase depends on both a persuasive effect of cable news and the existence of tastes for like-minded news.

The latter study also found that Fox News has continued to grow more conservative each year.

Lawmakers get their information from Fox News too.

One of the other dangers of Fox News is that it feeds a self-perpetuating cycle, in which both Republican constituents and lawmakers get their news from the channel. This means that constituents begin to believe in things that are against their own best interest. They believe that they don’t want ObamaCare, when in fact it turns out that they do want to be insured; but Republican lawmakers, convinced of these things by Fox News and pressed by their constituents (who watch Fox), forge ahead with such misinformed policies. And lawmakers who watch Fox News lose touch with how discordant their policies have become with reality, simply because the information they see is rarely critical of Republicans. And cognitive dissonance pretty much guarantees that they will avoid news networks that more honestly report the news; to do otherwise would force them to reconcile their monstrous policies with reality.

Why focus on Fox News?

It’s important to focus on propaganda because it will be impossible to win the political wars while conservative media has a direct pipe into the minds of large swaths of the population that impacts how they interpret national and world events. News that’s objectively bad for the administration, such as large, peaceful protests, are portrayed as being pro-abortion, all to enrage a base of conservative voters even more. Even conservative Republicans who are anti-Trump aren’t convinced that a series of indictments against Trump affiliates would be enough for him to be impeached, simply because the base of support is so strong.

Fox is arguably the most important target because its viewership is much larger than other sources of media like Breitbart (as of 2014, only about 3% of respondents in a Pew study got their news from Breitbart). While conservative talk radio also has large viewers, it doesn’t have quite the reputation as being a legitimate form of news.

What can we do?

It’s time for respectable Americans to publicly agree that Fox is a danger to the republic. So far there has been some recognition that Fox News is bad for the country, but that recognition is limited to observing various trespasses of Fox News against the truth.

We can—indeed, we must — do more. Concretely, here are several things we might decide to do.

Wait for Cable News to be obviated by the Internet. This is risky, as it’s not clear that networks like Fox News won’t find some other way to remain relevant on the Internet. Call for a complete boycott on anything associated with Fox News. This includes continuing pressure on companies to abandon advertising on any Fox News shows altogether and, possibly, on television shows produced by the broader Fox organization. Advertising boycotts appear to have worked for a set of shows, such as Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, but we should call for boycotts in advertising on all Fox News shows. Boycott current Fox News employees. Journalists have a high standard, of which Fox News falls far short. The news industry can play its part by making it clear that Fox News employees — including both anchors and aspiring journalists — will face a credibility gap when transitioning to other well-known news agencies. It should become unacceptable for organizations like NBC to hire anchors like Greta van Susteren and Megyn Kelly. Serious news publications can declare their intention not to hire anyone who has been affiliated with Fox News in any way, and universities’ journalism programs can actively discourage their graduates from joining Fox News. To give current employees (some of whom may be good) an opportunity to jump ship, this could take effect after a certain date, such as January 1st, 2018. Perform broad marketing efforts to associate Fox News in peoples’ minds with some of their vices: propaganda; sexual harassment (given the pervasive sexual harassment at the company, its reluctance to fire anchors and employees causing the problems, and its coverups), or lax journalistic standards (we could point to its lack of journalistic awards [peabody recipients, 2000–2009, 2010–2019] or its unwillingness to fire reporters who do little or no fact-checking). Fox News is founded by a media baron with a history of interfering in Western politics. Organize slander lawsuits aimed at Fox News and other conservative news sources. These could be crowdfunded by concerned citizens.

Whatever we do, it’s clear that we must do something. It’s become clear that Fox is more than a thorn in our side. It’s a dagger in America’s liver, and it’s jaundiced American politics.