‘You say rich, I say job creator’: how Fox News framed the Great Recession through the moral discourse of producerism

Abstract

In this article, I conduct a textual analysis of Fox News’s leading opinion programs during the Great Recession. I deconstruct the rhetorical strategies these programs deployed to advance the network’s free market interpretation of the economic crisis. Key to Fox’s interpretive strategy was a claim to represent ‘the Forgotten man’ of the downturn. However, in my analysis I show how this claim was established less by advocating policies that directly support working-class material interests and more by presenting Fox News pundits as the protectors and advocates of traditional moral-economic principles. Fox News pundits drew these principles from a long-standing strain of the American populist tradition called ‘producerism.’ My analysis illustrates how – in framing the wealthy and the business class as ‘job creators’ – Fox News programs reworked this tradition in order to include corporate managers in the moral community of producers, alongside members of the working class. This strategy was successful, I argue, because this earlier American political discourse still informs, often in unrecognized ways, the underlying normative assumptions that are expressed in modern debates about class, work, and wealth distribution.