Fox News Is Still the King of the Wurlitzer

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Who is primarily responsible for the wide dissemination of crazy right-wing conspiracy nonsense? Facebook? YouTube? Twitter? Nope. It’s good old Fox News:

Two of the highest quality studies [found] that sharing of “fake news” was highly concentrated in a tiny portion of the population, was largely done by conservatives, and interacted with age—primarily driven by people over 65. In other words, the problem of online dissemination seems to be driven by older conservatives—precisely the demographic of Fox News.

Another thing that made our study unusual among studies of political propaganda is that we used case studies to also connect television with online. Again, consistent with what Pew has consistently found in its surveys of voters, television matters a whole lot, and in fact, we found when we looked that when Fox News on TV pushed a topic, it would explode online much more than when the initial efforts to push propaganda were limited to online. Television is still much more important than we understand.

That’s from Yochai Benkler, a professor of Legal Studies at Harvard and co-author of the recent book Network Propaganda. The craziest stuff might roil around and get its start in social media, but it doesn’t reach very many people unless Fox News decides to pick it up—which they do with lamentable regularity. It’s only at that point that social media starts to explode.

In other words: stop worrying so much about Facebook and Google and Twitter. Worry instead about Fox News, just like we always have.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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