On Friday afternoon, a few hours after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had overturned Roe v. Wade, thus imminently imperiling access to abortion for millions of women in the United States, Fox News anchor Trace Gallagher took time out of a busy news day to roast Barack Obama. “The former president is a constitutional law … student,” said Gallagher, in apparent reference to statements that Obama made today and last month about the Dobbs decision’s implications for many Americans’ “essential freedoms.” “He knows what he’s talking about. He knows very well that Roe was never a constitutional issue, Erin.”
“Absolutely,” said guest Erin Hawley, a former Supreme Court clerk for John Roberts. (Hawley is also married to Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri.) “As the Court’s decision lays out so eloquently, there was never a right to an abortion in the Constitution. And moreover, this decision doesn’t take rights away from women. It allows states to protect the unborn—and also to empower women.”
It is borderline delusional to claim that the Dobbs decision does not affect women’s rights, and it is insulting, on a big news day such as today, to waste broadcast time imputing bad faith to Barack Obama. But delusions, insults, and vast chunks of wasted time are hallmarks of right-wing cable news—and Friday afternoon was business as usual for channels such as Fox News and Newsmax. The two conservative news networks spent the hours after the Dobbs decision pursuing, as per usual, two strategies designed to keep their viewers feeling upset, unsettled, and under siege: rejection and deflection.
Right-wing cable news doesn’t do victory laps. As entities that rely on a constant torrent of manufactured outrage to attract and retain viewers, Fox News and Newsmax cannot simply present the news and bask in the glow of the biggest Supreme Court win for conservatives in decades. The right-wing cable news viewer must be made to feel at all times like their values and worldview are under attack by the left, even at the very moment of the conservative movement’s greatest triumph. As such, the networks parsed the Dobbs news by spotlighting and rebutting liberal reactions to the news.
Rejection is the first prong of this strategy. You cannot be reactionary without having something to react against, which is why conservative cable news outlets must always forcefully reject the mainstream interpretation of any given issue as biased, tainted, or dangerous. In the case of Dobbs, Fox News and Newsmax spent hours criticizing those on the left who understandably saw the Court’s decision as the withdrawal of an existing right. Instead, these networks claim, Dobbs marks a triumph of responsible originalist jurisprudence, a necessary corrective to decades’ worth of “liberal judicial activis[ts] who just make up policy ends that they want and implement it via judicial fiat,” as former Gorsuch clerk Mike Davis put it on Fox News.
Fox and Newsmax also spent time casually dismissing fears that, as per Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs, the court may now go on to overturn additional precedents in cases pertaining to contraception access, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage. The majority opinion in Dobbs was “a very limited opinion,” said Newsmax guest Brett Tolman, and as such the left was being disingenuous in warning that the court might not stop at overturning Roe.
[Read: The Supreme Court’s Next Target Is Marriage Equality. It Won’t Be the Last.]
After rejecting the liberal interpretation of a story, right-wing cable news then proceeds to deflect viewers’ attention toward what these networks claim is an even more urgent story. In the case of Dobbs, that “bigger story” is the prospect of violence toward conservative abortion foes and crisis pregnancy centers. “Abortion has been a sacrament of the left for over 50 years. We are taking it away from them, and they are completely unhinged,” anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson said on Newsmax. (I transcribed this as I was watching it, and did not get a chance to double-check the quotes.) “Nothing they do—they can grafitti our buildings, they can throw a Molotov cocktail in—nothing they do will stop us from protecting the lives of preborn children.”
Johnson was apparently referring to the recent spree of vandalism, and occasional fire-bombings, at crisis pregnancy centers across the United States, for which an extremist group called Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility. I know very little about Jane’s Revenge, other than that they have a very rudimentary website and that they are clearly a fringe group. Right-wing television, however, is truly expert at conflating fringe groups with the mainstream left. “I think there is a real risk of violence,” said Sen. Ted Cruz on Fox News Friday afternoon. “We’ve seen multiple Democrats—now including Maxine Waters, before that Chuck Schumer, before that the Biden White House—effectively encouraging violence. … And I gotta say, it’s really cynical to see Democrats effectively condoning violence.”
Cruz certainly knows cynicism when he sees it, and he certainly also understands the reason behind all this deflection and rejection. Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans support an ongoing right to abortion and did not actually want the court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Democrats will assuredly use this news as a way to galvanize their voters and get them to the polls for the midterm elections this November. By framing the Dobbs decision as a procedural correction rather than an epochal transformation of American life, Fox and Newsmax hope to convince their viewers that nothing big happened here, and that the left is cynically misinterpreting the story for political purposes; by focusing so intently on the prospect of violence from liberal protestors, the networks hope to deflect viewers’ attention away from the reasons for the protests.
The sorts of people who go on right-wing television to claim that Dobbs is no biggie, and that the real story here is the prospect of some windows being smashed somewhere, are professional cynics, and like all cynics they are extremely good at staying on message. But, make no mistake, today is one of the biggest days in the history of the modern conservative movement, and sometimes, in a rush of excitement and accomplishment, even professional cynics can slip up and say what they really mean. On Friday afternoon, Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, told Newsmax’s John Bachman that the next step for anti-abortion activists is to pressure state lawmakers everywhere to pass laws banning abortion.
“This is what we’re called to do: to make abortion truly unthinkable, as well as unavailable, in our nation,” said Hawkins. Amid all the rejection and deflection, sometimes the truth peeks through.
Read more of Slate’s coverage on abortion rights here.
For more on the legal fight that led to the original Roe v. Wade decision, listen to the latest episode of Slow Burn.
