In 2000, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly told a Washington Post reporter, “We’re the only show from a working-class point of view.” Liberals and progressives found this laughable. O’Reilly’s show and Fox News constantly boosted a party inflicting deep wounds on working-class people: undermining unions, blocking more affordable health care, and starving public services through tax cuts on the rich. How could he possibly represent a working-class audience? In this presentation, communication scholar Reece Peck explains how conservative media producers learned to effectively brand political conservatism as blue-collar by appealing to working-class taste, knowledge, and morality.
Reece Peck is an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center and is the author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge, 2019. He provides commentary for outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Forbes. He was among a select group of media scholars asked to provide written testimony to the Congressional Investigatory Committee on the January 6 Capitol riot. Peck grew up in an LDS family and was a member of Utah's first McNair Scholars program for first-generation college graduates.