Reagan, Fox, MSNBC, and Simplifying the Mess of Reality

In the Industrial Economy, value was created in steel mills and assembly lines. In the Information Economy, it is often created in studios and newsrooms. The raw material is not ore or oil but culture - packaged into stories, symbols, and narratives that resonate with our emotions as much as, or more than, our rational faculties. The world is far too messy and complicated to fit neatly into a single theory, so we rely on simple narratives. Specialists wrestle with complexity; to win 51% of the vote, you need a story most people can follow. Politics in the Information Economy became a kind of cultural production.

Ronald Reagan grasped this before most. The only president to master radio, television, and movies before entering politics, he understood the power of affirming rather than informing. His speeches bypassed the fact-checker in your head and spoke directly to the emotional truth you recognized from your own memories, hopes, and sense of identity. He could make the policies he championed feel like episodes in your hero’s journey. You weren’t just living in America—you were starring in a distinctly American story, one where a government that got out of your way left you free to live it.

This was a sharp break from the media climate in which Reagan emerged. In the 1960s and early ’70s, the three major networks delivered a nightly reality check: Vietnam body counts, civil rights marchers facing police dogs and fire hoses, polluted rivers catching fire, women demanding more than secretarial roles, long-haired neo-bohemians rejecting middle-class norms. These images forced Americans to confront contradictions and complexity. They unsettled worldviews across the spectrum and left the nation wrestling, in real time, with disruptive change. (Rivers on fire might be the simplest illustration of cognitive dissonance that this unmediated reality forced on its audience.)

Reagan’s storytelling offered relief from that fatigue. He gave Americans a coherent, reassuring frame—a sense that the story of America still had a clear arc and a starring role for the individual. Where the 1960s media posed open-ended questions, Reagan delivered emotionally satisfying answers. The times were turbulent; his voice was calm.
Roger Ailes, who worked with Reagan on his 1984 campaign, would later industrialize this approach as the founding CEO of Fox News. The nightly newscast became a continuous narrative stream—curated facts and frames reinforcing a specific worldview. MSNBC followed with a similar strategy for a different audience. Both evolved into identity factories: manufacturing stories that make their viewers feel not just informed, but confirmed.
This was a profound shift. The network news of the 1960s might unsettle you; Fox and MSNBC aim to reassure you. The old model treated discomfort as the price of being informed. The new model treats discomfort as a defect in the product.

In the Information Economy, news is no longer just a public service - it’s a manufactured good. The raw material is events; the finished product is cultural identity. Reagan’s genius was offering coherence and assurance after a turbulent era. Fox and MSNBC turned that coherence into a subscription service, delivering a world where your side is always right, the other side is always wrong, and reality rarely demands any changes of you.