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

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