News vs. Sports: A Tale of Two Foxes

  

You'd think there might be a certain tension between Fox News and Fox Sports.

Yes, they inhabit the same headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Near Times Square, the facade boasts a garish outdoor digital display, a giant chyron wannabe, permanently circling the building, shouting the latest headlines. It can be read for blocks.

But the same building is not the same universe.

At Fox News — still a misnomer — the universe is one of perpetual danger. Their evening lineup of propagandists provides their reprogrammable viewers with an endless succession of warnings about the perils of white replacement, open borders, and the erosion of European Christian values.

At Fox Sports, on the other hand, the universe is a showcase of diversity, a place where multiracial, multicultural, immigrant-flavored competition is a simple fact of life, worth no more notice than air.

The disconnects abound. Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters are avatars for the Great Replacement Theory, spewing racist, anti-immigrant screeds, virtually on a daily basis. The sportscasters, on the other hand, report from stadiums filled with people — both on the field and off — that ICE would happily detain. And this was even before the World Cup, which puts diversity on steroids.

Yet the two Foxes coexist. They’re both owned by the Murdochs, and they both live side-by-side, with no apparent need to reconcile the two opposed worldviews.

The common denominator is, of course, money. And this is where the Fox business model crosses over from hypocritical to cynical. The Murdochs have long known how to monetize any audience they can identify, regardless of demographic, and they’re happy to tolerate any social or political friction created in the process. When it comes to their sports audiences — the people actually watching their product — they’re the biggest tent in town, with all races, religions, genders, nationalities, and sexual preferences welcome. As long as they stick to sports.

Of course, the two audiences do overlap. The Fox News audience that Roger Ailes carved out two decades ago — middle-aged, male, white, less educated, more angry — is as likely to watch the NFL on Sunday as it is to watch Jesse Watters on weeknights. Somehow, this double-dipping audience has been taught to hold two completely contradictory sets of values at the same time, without any sense of irony, let alone hypocrisy. They are fully capable of hating Blacks, Latinos, and Muslims during the week, then rooting for them on the weekend.

The audience for Fox Sports is far larger than for Fox News, and far more diverse. A typical NFL game draws 20 million viewers, roughly ten times what Ingraham or Watters would draw on a good night. Or to put it another way, diversity is being normalized ten times more than it’s being trashed.

And just to muddy the waters further, there’s Fox Deportes, whose target audience is entirely made up of Spanish-speaking Americans. So even as Fox News continually vilifies immigration as a dire threat to the American way of life, Fox Deportes is in the business of attracting and catering to the very demographic being vilified.

When it comes to profitability, we have no idea whether sports or propaganda are the bigger money-makers. Fox Corporation, the parent company, only publishes one set of numbers for the whole company, so we can’t compare how valuable the various divisions are.

What we can see is that while Fox Sports and Fox Deportes draw huge audiences, they also pay out huge amounts for the broadcast rights to the games they carry. By contrast, while Fox News might draw a tenth of that audience, its overhead is minuscule by comparison.

There are, of course, other Fox properties — the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in particular — that, together with Fox News, we might call the “Fox Propaganda Division.” These might or might not be profitable, but the bottom line is that we can’t know the bottom line. Is Fox making more money from sports than from propaganda? Do they care?

All of Fox’s inner contradictions are on display at the World Cup. Last week, I talked about the disparity between the wide diversity of the players and the xenophobic policies of the current administration. I spoke of how sportscasters are the great normalizers of diversity, and how their matter-of-fact coverage of athletes from every imaginable background brings diversity directly into the homes of those who might otherwise resist it.

Fox Sports certainly understands this, and their usual coverage of the NFL and MLB is appropriately diverse. But they also understand that, having paid $485 million for the rights to the World Cup, their own commentators wouldn’t be enough. Which is why they’ve brought in roughly the same set of broadcasters — mostly Brits — that American soccer fans already know. Clearly Fox felt the need for more soccer “authenticity” in its lineup, which had to be a bit awkward, since it meant going, hat in hand, to their biggest competitors — especially NBC — to get the people it needed.

From NBC, they “rented” for their anchor Rebecca Lowe, the face and voice of the English Premier League for American audiences. I’m guessing NBC charged them plenty for her services. From ESPN, they rented the announcers Ian Darke, Derek Rae, and Darren Fletcher, all of whom are white with British accents, but who regularly work with commentators from many demographic backgrounds.

For studio analysts, they went full-on diverse. They rented Thierry Henry, the French legend of Black Algerian descent, who is a fixture on CBS/Paramount. I’m not sure where they rented the great Clarence Seedorf, a Black Dutchman born to Surinamese parents, or John Obi Mikel, a Black Englishman whose parents were Nigerian. But we can safely guess that Fox executives were as interested in diversity points as in footballing expertise.

Fox does all this with eyes wide open, smart enough to understand the societal ramifications, yet continuing to openly profess a worldview that is at odds with most of its customers. Any tension — let alone social conscience — within the Murdochs’ various media outlets is either well-hidden or non-existent.

But Fox is, in a way, at war with itself, and the Murdochs seem to be in no hurry to pick a winner. For now, we’ll just have to keep wondering if the fear and hate that are so core to the Fox brand will ultimately overwhelm the efforts of Fox Sports to drag Americans, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. Before the twenty-first gets away from them.