In this article, I conduct a textual analysis of Fox News’s leading opinion programs during the Great Recession. I deconstruct the rhetorical strategies these programs deployed to advance the network’s free market interpretation of the economic crisis. Key to Fox’s interpretive strategy was a claim to represent ‘the Forgotten man’ of the downturn. However, in my analysis I show how this claim was established less by advocating policies that directly support working-class material interests and more by presenting Fox News pundits as the protectors and advocates of traditional moral-economic principles. Fox News pundits drew these principles from a long-standing strain of the American populist tradition called ‘producerism.’ My analysis illustrates how – in framing the wealthy and the business class as ‘job creators’ – Fox News programs reworked this tradition in order to include corporate managers in the moral community of producers, alongside members of the working class. This strategy was successful, I argue, because this earlier American political discourse still informs, often in unrecognized ways, the underlying normative assumptions that are expressed in modern debates about class, work, and wealth distribution.

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This article compares populist media styles on US cable news and in online video. It juxtaposes the conservative cable giant Fox News with the progressive YouTube-based network the Young Turks (TYT). TYT stands as one of YouTube’s longest running and most successful “news and politics” channels on the platform. This progressive digital network has long embraced a populist anchoring style that resembles Fox News and the style of its conservative YouTube competitors. This study establishes the stylistic affinity between TYT and Fox News and then explains how it is driven by a similar commercial-economic logic that prizes “loyal” viewership and “intense” engagement above all else. Shifting from political economy to media activism, this article also chronicles TYT’s role in creating the Justice Democrats, the progressive PAC that recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other “Squad” members. This article seeks to complicate the commonly held association between populism and political conservatism.

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