![The final stretch of the US election race could spark some volatility in markets.](/web/20161101151000im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/b/u/e/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs49jd.png/1477813470968.jpg)
NICK The hotel room I secure to watch 17 straight hours of Fox News is just outside of Orlando, which is in Florida, a state that Donald Trump has to win in order to take the White House. The county jail is next door and, opposite the hotel, a bail bonds outfit offers bonds for no collateral. All the surfaces in the place are dull and the fabrics are frayed. The room smells of antique cigarette smoke.
Last night was the second presidential debate. The Wi-Fi cut out just as it began, so I ended up watching in the lobby, where the receptionist, a black woman in her 30s, gave me the use of the communal computer. Throughout the debate she greeted kids who lived in the hotel by name as they raced in and out to raid the vending machines, and she peppered Trump's comments with her own. "Uh-unh, you can't say that," she'd say from time to time. "You can't say that!"
![Bill O'Reilly.](/web/20161101151000im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/b/u/l/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs49jd.png/1477749341530.jpg)
Northern Florida is demographically Trumpland. The poorest part of the state, it is the south of "the south". But having based his candidacy on exciting racial anxiety and traducing the first black president, Trump has won few African-American fans. (The most recent CBS poll put Trump's support among black voters at just 7 per cent.)
Waking up on Monday to watch the breakfast show Fox & Friends is a deep dive into a different reality. Though America's media ecosystem has fragmented in recent years, cable TV remains the single most important source of information about the election to most people. According to a recent study by Pew Research, a quarter of Americans consider it their most importance source of news, trailed by local TV and social media, on 14 per cent each.
Among the cable networks, Fox remains dominant. Progressives in the US absorb their information from four major sources, MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and National Public Radio, according to Pew. Conservatives, by contrast, turn overwhelmingly to Fox, and it consistently leads the overall ratings. In this country, you select your party, then your news outlet, and then you can enjoy your comforting echo chamber. (Yet more Pew analysis found that in the lead up to the 2012 election, 46 per cent of Barack Obama's coverage on Fox was negative, while just 6 per cent was positive in tone. MSNBC was even more jaundiced in its coverage of the Republicans, with 71 per cent of 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's coverage negative, versus 3 per cent positive.)
In the final, contentious days of an unusually ugly election campaign, Josephine Tovey, a Fairfax journalist based in New York, and I are spending one full day locked in each echo chamber to see how the world looks with one eye open.
The Fox look is all bright colours – red, white and blue – and constant movement. Its ideological outlook is equally bold and certain. The Republican Party represents the truth and the light, the Democratic Party, moral equivalence and perfidy.
This murky election has been particularly hard on the Fox network. Its gut – and many of its brightest stars – have gone with Trump, but as his campaign veers into the uncharted territory of grubbiness and paranoia, the certainty of Fox has begun to look less steady. That isn't apparent at 6am on Fox & Friends, however.
![Megyn Kelly.](/web/20161101151000im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/b/u/l/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs49jd.png/1477749341530.jpg)
Normally, the three hosts are seated on a couch in the studio. Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade wear sober business suits and sit either side of Ainsley Earhardt, who wears the uniform of Fox women – a bright, tight, short dress. But this morning, Doocy is broadcasting from the muddy grounds of Washington University in St Louis, where the debate was held the previous night.
Perhaps that is the reason the banter between the hosts is a little stilted by breakfast TV standards. Or it could be because Earhardt only recently took over from the previous host, Gretchen Carlson, who sued Fox News creator and former chief executive, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment, which in turn led to him being dynamited out of his throne by Lachlan and James Murdoch.
![Rachel Maddow.](/web/20161101151000im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/b/u/k/v/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs49jd.png/1477749341530.jpg)
Carlson's lawsuit, which was settled for $US20 million, had also accused Doocy of harassing behaviour, including a pattern of "mocking her during commercial breaks, shunning her off-air, refusing to engage with her on-air … and generally attempting to put her in her place". To further complicate the conservative media ecosystem, Ailes is now advising Trump on messaging and debate prep.
Still, Fox & Friends sticks to its formula through the off-camera turmoil. Guests come and go, interviews last a minute or two. All participants are certain that Trump won the debate, though Karl Rove, the brains behind George W. Bush, suggests he did little more than arrest a crisis. The video of Trump boasting on an Access Hollywood tape about grabbing women – released, sensationally, three days prior – is referred to only obliquely and occasionally.
MSNBC hosts make lawyerly cases against trump. i agree with much of it but the cumulative effect is deadening.
Trump's latest campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is beamed in from Trump Tower. Trump is "ebullient" after the debate, she says. Asked about the tape, she says Trump regrets the "locker room talk" but that his words are not nearly as serious as Bill Clinton's deeds. The panel nods along. This line of defence will collapse in days to come as evidence mounts of Trump's deeds.
There is general consensus that Trump won the encounter with Clinton, that his threat to have her jailed was a good laugh line, and certainly not a threat to the democratic order as it is being described on other stations. Trump's running mate Mike Pence, the hardline Christian Governor of Indiana, makes an appearance. This is an important interview because rumours began to circulate during last night's debate that he was going to quit the campaign in disgust at Trump's behaviour.
![Stephanie Ruhle.](/web/20161101151000im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/b/u/m/2/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs49jd.png/1477749341530.jpg)
"That's just absolutely untrue," he says. The real story today, he says, is that Trump has "stepped up, won the debate against all odds … shown humility, shown contrition". The three co-hosts keep straight faces as Pence is afforded another unmediated minute or so to run through his talking points. "I'm proud of my running mate," he says.
Just in case the message – that everything really is fine – is lost on anyone, Jeanine Pirro lobs in for a chat in the mud with Doocy. "Judge Jeanine" is a former judge and New York district attorney, author of the evocatively titled To Punish and Protect and Fox News law and order commentator. She serves as a sort of Greek chorus for the morning's analysis. She speaks simple words in short furious bursts.
Clinton, Pirro asserts, corrupted the Department of State, the Justice Department and the FBI. What's more, she committed perjury and destroyed evidence. Bill Clinton was a serial sex offender. "I am ashamed of what they have done. I have been in law enforcement for 30 years."
It just so happens she that has known Donald Trump for exactly that long, too. "He has always been a gentleman. I didn't meet him once or twice. I know the man." She ends with a glare down the barrel of the camera. "To those politically correct Republicans," referring to those who have abandoned Trump, "Shame on them."
JOSEPHINE "There's a wonderful line by James Baldwin," says Eddie Glaude jnr. "He says civilisations aren't ended by wicked people, they're actually ended by the spineless." Glaude, the chair of the African-American Studies department at Princeton University, is sitting on one side of the expansive glass desk in the New York studio of MSNBC's Morning Joe. There's no couch on this breakfast show, no women in tight dresses, and no loyal friends of Donald Trump.
"The spineless", in Glaude's view – the ones he says are risking civilisation – are the Republicans who, after endorsing Trump knowing full well who he is and what he represents, are only now choosing to dis-endorse him over the Access Hollywood tape.
"I was horrified," Glaude continues, pivoting to talking about the debate. "I saw the slow death of democracy by a thousand cuts of the stupid and the vile … when we talk about the state of our country and the state of our democracy, Donald Trump represents the bottom."
Not so far from their studio, I'm watching this unfold on television from my ground-floor Brooklyn apartment. I'm nursing an emotional hangover from the debate, as well as a bowl of the oatmeal I paid way too much for at yuppie health food emporium Whole Foods.
I live in a different America to Fox News, as far from Trumpland as you could get. New York City hasn't voted for a Republican president since Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s, and the state of New York is a lock for Democrats. My own neighbourhood, Clinton Hill, is racially diverse and middle-class, dotted with "Clinton Hill for Hill Clinton" posters.
Appropriately then, I'm spending the day watching the channel considered Fox's ideological antipode, MSNBC. It's a reputation the network has earned thanks to an evening schedule packed with opinionated, popular progressives such as Rachel Maddow, the lesbian Rhodes scholar who helms its highest-rating prime-time show. MSNBC has the most consistently liberal audience of any US cable news network, according to a 2014 Pew survey, and is widely distrusted by conservative voters.
It's not as outrageously partisan as Fox: Joe Scarborough (Morning Joe himself) is actually a former Republican congressman, albeit one who vigorously denounced Trump over the Muslim ban, and there are plenty of conservatives among their regular guests. (Trump declared war on the show this year over its unfriendliness to him; he threatened to "spill the beans" on the show's hosts being a secret real-life couple.) But there is a cohesive sense of urbane, rational political insiderism: of journalists talking to other journalists, academics or professional political spinners; the kinds of people who drop James Baldwin into conversation. In other words, these are the "elites" of Trump's nightmares, the "lamestream" media embodied.
No one here is praising what Trump said last night per se, but Scarborough contends his aggressive performance was effective, and will triage his campaign.
"I know everybody in the press hates Donald Trump, he's horrible, blah blah blah … I'm just giving you the political reality," he says, acting his assigned role of Republican translator in enemy territory. "[Trump] delivered the attack on the Clinton machine that the Republican base and middle-America have been waiting for."
Donny Deutsch, an advertising executive and regular commentator on the network, contends Trump flat-out lost. "This is no longer about politics, this is a gender war." As footage of Trump lurking behind Clinton at the debate rolls, he says "the words didn't mean anything. Every woman in America who has ever been held down, oppressed, harassed … there is something in them, a nerve, that so transcends everything else. If you're not seeing that, you're missing it."
NICK Fox's audience tapers off and ages substantially during the day. Fox & Friends is followed by a couple of barely distinguishable news programs. Though there is plenty of news about, only the election breaks through. Advertisements for gold are on high rotation. (Fox's endless predictions of Big Government economic armageddon attracts gold bugs and doomsday preppers.)
I become so bored I send a tweet to the fake account of William Devane, a star of the gold ads. (He doesn't respond.) Devane is one of those actors from the '80s whose face you know in your bones. In the gold ads he is always doing something wealthy, white and independent of spirit, like flying a light plane or riding a horse on a manicured pasture.
At midday, Outnumbered comes on. It's a talk show that looks like a Roger Ailes fever dream. A different male guest each day, always described as #oneluckyguy, sits in the centre of the couch surrounded by four women hosts, all in the Ailes uniform with their legs crossed or knees pressed heroically together.
Today's guest, Fox's own Bill O'Reilly, sits as a bloke on a train might. He is here to flog a new book, Killing Reagan, part of his endless series of historical page-turners. Ailes used to hate the way O'Reilly so shamelessly flogged his merchandise on Fox, but Ailes is gone now. The afternoon bleeds on, one show barely distinguishable from the next. The commentators veer right and the footage of Trump's foul display on hot mic – which was on high rotation everywhere else before I went into my Fox sequester – is never aired. Finally, at 5pm, the pace picks up with the afternoon talk show The Five.
In his book on Fox News, The Loudest Voice in the Room, reporter Gabriel Sherman, who has led coverage on the crises that have recently wracked the station, describes how the show was created. "[Ailes] said [to a close friend], 'I wanted a Falstaff, and that's Bob Beckel. I need a leading man, and it's Eric Bolling. I need a serious lead and that's Dana Perino. I need a court jester and it's Greg [Gutfeld], and I need the leg. That's Andrea Tantaros.' "
Tantaros is now suing both Ailes and O'Reilly for harassment, and is gone from the show. Beckel – who, as the Falstaff of the ensemble, was the panel's token Democrat – has also left. (He was unceremoniously dumped in the middle of a stint in rehab.)
Gutfeld, the jester, is still there. He gets to wear jeans and sneakers under his suit jacket and his speciality is a knowing scripted tirade against liberal scolds. This afternoon he is having a go at those who fretted over Trump's declaration that he'd have Clinton jailed. "Oh! The media freaked out about this, that Trump is really a wannabe tyrant bent on settling scores. It could be right. He might have that in him. But what he said is actually what a lot of people think about Hillary. Why is she getting away with this? How is this possible? It was a good moment for him.
"But then she just grinned as the polls widened knowing there are more shoes to drop, and each will overshadow her own retched failures as she smirks her way back to the Oval Office."
Kimberly Guilfoyle – smart, fast and cheerily hard right – is Tantaros's replacement. She sits at the end of the desk, where you can see her leg.
JOSEPHINE "Is grabbing a vagina or using your power to kiss a woman, whether she wants it or not, an act of grace?" asks Stephanie Ruhle, leaning into her anchor's desk. (Unlike her Fox colleagues, she's filmed from the waist up.) On the split screen, Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence, wearing a furrowed expression and an American flag pin, bears the indignity of the question in the way a man running with Trump simply must. It's a little after 9am and MSNBC has mercifully moved from breakfast television to the long stretch of "breaking news" that will fill my television screen from now until 5pm.
Ruhle, a ginger-haired host who could be a distant cousin of Leigh Sales in both appearance and tenacity, is hammering Pence on how a devout Christian man like himself can suggest Trump has shown appropriate contrition for the Access Hollywood comments and deserves "grace".
"Donald Trump made it clear that those were words, only words, last night," replies Pence. "That he hadn't engaged in any of that behaviour, and I believe him."
Later in the day, at a rally in North Carolina, Pence will invoke this interview as well as Ruhle, the journalist who questioned his faith. "I was on television this morning with MSNBC," he begins, and the Republican crowd breaks out in spirited booing, the very name of the network proving tasty bait.
MSNBC's daytime line-up was once sprinkled with progressives pundits, but in 2015, facing low ratings and an extraordinary impending election, the station pulled its daytime opinion shows in preference of eight hours of continuous "breaking news". What that actually means is that experienced journalists like Stephanie Ruhle helm hour after hour of election coverage.
Correspondents from PolitiFact pop up every hour or so to adjudicate on claims made at the debate the night before. Trump comes off poorly. His claim that Clinton once laughed at a child rape victim is labelled as false, as is his statement that Muslim neighbours saw bombs all over the apartment of the San Bernardino attackers (who killed 14 people in the Californian city in late 2015) but didn't come forward to prevent the terrorist atrocity. Clinton's assertion that Trump's words have been used to recruit terrorists is labelled true, but her attempt to distance herself from Barack Obama's infamous "red line" with Bashar al-Assad in Syria is debunked as mostly false.
Trump's threat the night before to throw Clinton in jail is treated with the utmost seriousness and concern throughout the day. Legal correspondent Ari Melber earnestly points out this will "not only violate the rule of law and the non-partisan approach we take to it, but might even be an impeachable offence".
Most of the news is pretty straightforward but there is the occasional reminder of just which America you're in. For one, there's the network's daily unscientific web poll, which delivers results with distinctly North Korean margins. Today's topic is whether GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan should withdraw his endorsement of Trump. A cool 94 per cent of MSNBC viewers say yes at first mention, hardening to 96 per cent an hour later.
There's virtually none of what Australians might recognise as breaking news during these eight hours. You know: scripted reports, interviews with real people, dispatches from the field. The mounting death toll in the American South from Hurricane Matthew barely rates a mention. There is, instead, only the election.
"She tried to take it high and he tried to take it low … He was so utterly unpresidential," a Clinton representative says in an interview.
"She is most likely a felon," says a Trump representative 15 minutes later.
It's so tedious I can barely stand it. On my phone, flicking through Twitter, I can see there is plenty of other news around today, but a cable news devotee wouldn't know it.
I may find it stultifying, but the endless campaign has proved a ratings bonanza for MSNBC and its competitors. The heavy lifting of journalism – that is, election-influencing scoops on Trump's taxes or Clinton's use of a private email server – has come from print and digital organisations such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. But ratings on cable are way up nonetheless, with both MSNBC and Fox surpassing their own previous high ratings records in the last quarter. They may be the only ones enjoying this election.
NICK It is the evening that matters. Roger Ailes created a line-up of after-sundown talent that so dominated the competition it not only made the Murdoch empire an estimated $US1.5 billion last year, it gave him significant control over the Republican Party. David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, lamented back in 2010, "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican Party."
There are many who believe that it was bullying by Fox of moderate Republicans that drove the party so far to the right that it became vulnerable to Trump's populist takeover. Fox's chief bullies are the angry Irishmen, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. (O'Reilly's temper tantrums are glorious, and well worth a Google.) The two men have been joined in the prime-time line-up by Megyn Kelly, a lawyer turned journalist.
O'Reilly begins each show with a monologue called the "Talking Points Memo", which serves not only to introduce his themes, but to suggest that all you have heard before is fluff. Now you are in the presence of greatness. Now is the time to listen.
"As the debate wound to a close, there were two things that became apparent to fair-minded people," O'Reilly says towards the end of his monologue. "Hillary Clinton did not hurt herself and will remain the frontrunner, but Donald Trump, in a very difficult spot, was able to stand his ground … and that in itself, after all that happened over the weekend, is a major victory … he is still in it."
Next up is Megyn Kelly, who attracted the attention of even the liberal media with her performance during the last election night in 2012. Kelly was hosting a panel with Karl Rove as a guest. At 11pm, Fox's tally room called the election for Obama, and Rove, in touch with Mitt Romney's campaign on his phone, refused to accept the call. As the talent locked horns on air, producers came up with a plan. Kelly would leave the desk and walk to the station's analytics to consult the experts with cameras in tow. "This is Fox News," a source told Gabriel Sherman in a report he wrote for New York magazine, "so anytime there's a chance to show off Megyn Kelly's legs, they'll go for it."
Confronted with the facts, Rove looked like an old fool while Kelly dominated the moment. She has been a star ever since, though liberals who thought at that point she might moderate the conservative slant at Fox News have been disappointed. Her power at the station was recently affirmed when she added her voice to the chorus of those who complained about harassment by Ailes. If Kelly was on board, it seemed, Ailes must go. And that's how it panned out.
Tonight, she runs a clip from the hardline former GOP speaker Newt Gingrich, who has recorded himself looming over a webcam. Gingrich has some words of wisdom for wobbly Republicans: those who do not fight for Trump are helping install Clinton, which "would be a great disservice to the future of the country and the future of our children and grandchildren".
Kelly cheerily flicks the apocalyptic comments to former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, the Christian hardliner who Trump knocked out of the Republican nomination race early on. She suggests to Huckabee that if he doesn't get behind Trump and "fight tooth and nail", it could cause recriminations within the party for years to come.
"That's exactly right, Megyn," says Huckabee obediently. He later adds, "[Trump's] like Captain Quint in the original movie Jaws. He's vulgar, he's salty, he might even get drunk … he's the guy who's gonna save your butt and save your family. And so at the end of the day, when he kills the shark, you're happy about it.
"Now, Hillary is the shark. She's gonna eat your boat, she's gonna have open borders, immigration out the kazoo, and so the choice is, do you vote for Captain Quint, who's gonna save your family, or do you vote for the shark?"
(Huckabee doesn't know Jaws well enough. Captain Quint ends up being eaten.)
By this point I've finished my Chinese takeaway and counting the minutes. Just Sean Hannity's 10pm slot is left – the meanest of the whole bunch. While others on Fox seem to be hedging their bets in this election – perhaps symptomatic of both the absence of Ailes and the manifest weakness of the Republican Party's candidate – Hannity is practically driving the Trump Train. Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American public intellectual, recently called Hannity a Fox News "pretty boy" and likened his adulation of Trump to a teenage girl with a crush. You can imagine how that went down.
Tonight, though, Hannity is in a good mood, thrilled by Trump's performance in the debate. Trump, he says at one point, is a "great, great man" and he has a bunch of Trump representatives lined up to agree with him, starting with Kellyanne Conway, who I'd last seen near dawn.
The two are finishing each other's sentences. "He was calm and measured," she trills. Hannity smiles and nods. "And funny! Funny!" he says. "That's the man I've known for years."
The former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is up next, declaring the debate a knockout blow by Trump and excoriating Clinton for her "vicious, nasty" attacks on him. Then Mike Pence is back, then Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. It all starts to blur.
JOSEPHINE Rebecca Traister is almost shaking with outrage. "The dynamics there, of this person [Clinton], whatever you think about her, who's in this historic role of being the first woman to get this close to the American presidency, and she's having to wrestle this troll," says Traister in the middle of a long, evocative jag on the debate. "She's working through the muck of misogyny."
Traister is a writer for New York magazine and an incisive feminist author, and tonight she's a guest on All In With Chris Hayes, one of MSNBC's flagship opinion programs. She and the bespectacled young host are in furious agreement about the appalling gender dynamics at play in last night's debate, the intimidating way Trump spoke to his opponent, lurked behind her and also his stunt of bringing Bill Clinton's accusers to the arena.
"There is a reasonable feminist conversation to be had about Bill Clinton … his sexual power abuses," says Traister. "Donald Trump does not care about that feminist conversation. He wanted to humiliate her."
It's approaching 8.30pm, I'm eating pho I ordered online and we are in the home stretch. All evening on MSNBC, progressive hosts make lawyerly cases against Trump, backed up with poll data and character witnesses such as Traister. I agree with much of it but the cumulative effect is deadening.
Hayes opens his show tonight with a damning editorial on Trump's sinking polls and the woes of the Republican Party. "Donald Trump's job last night was to attempt to wipe away the effects of that shocking video … and somehow reverse his disastrous slide in the polls," says Hayes, speaking directly to the viewer. "Trump, by nearly all accounts, failed in that mission."
The chaos in the Republican Party, and Trump's sexism, is almost entirely the same theme on The Rachel Maddow Show an hour later, with a long riff on the likelihood that more damning video evidence of Trump will come out.
"It's fair to say that everybody's just waiting for the other shoe to drop, in terms of more nuclear material like this," Maddow says, referring again to the Access Hollywood tape. She then runs through a series of Trump's sexist comments and plays a long clip of Trump on shock jock Howard Stern's show in 2005 being asked if he would stay with his wife Melania if she were disfigured in an accident. "How do the breasts look?" Trump responds.
Maddow frames this not just as offensive but a potential threat to America's standing: "Imagine how those [comments] could be used against him not just personally but against the country if he were president?"
But after 10pm, on The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell, there is something that breaks the monotony. It's another hit on Trump but at least a more creative one. Khizr Khan, the father of a slain Muslim-American soldier whose dignified denunciation of Trump stole the show at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia in July, is a guest. At the debate the night before, Trump had claimed Khizr's son Humayun would still be alive today if he were president.
"The comments from Donald Trump were so disingenuous," says Khan. "He continues to use the sacrifices of our men and women for political expediency, and I reject it," he says, on the verge of tears.
I'm struck by the fact that this is one of the few times someone who isn't a journalist, politician, academic or spinner has been on camera at all today, talking about the election in terms of their real life experience.
The obsession with bias on cable news, right or left, misses the point that people who dwell beyond the Washington DC Beltway, especially those Americans in real distress, are the invisible ones.