About

I am an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center, where I teach courses in journalism, political communication, and popular culture. My general research interest lies in populist political rhetoric, tabloid journalism, and the cultural politics of class. My current research agenda centers on populist online media, from both the left and the right.

My first monograph, Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. The amount of popular writing about Fox News is endless. Yet, this high level of popular interest has not been matched in academic publishing. Fox Populism still stands as one of the only in-depth academic studies solely devoted to the Fox News Channel, a news network that not only spearheaded the conservative media revolution of the last three decades but that, at a deeper level, transformed how news is presented and marketed in the U.S.

The history section of the book engages the question of why Fox succeeded when past conservative media had failed and challenges the prevailing explanation — that the network simply catered to an underserved market of conservative ideologues. I argue instead that Fox’s success was rooted less in its conservative editorial slant and more in its working-class cultural style. The book traces the historical development of Fox’s counter-elite news brand and reveals how its iconoclastic news brand was crafted by fusing two class-based traditions of American public culture: one native to the politics in populism and one native to the news field in tabloid journalism.

Using the network’s coverage of the late-2000s economic crisis as the book’s principal case study, I show how Fox’s style is deployed as a political tool to frame news events. A close analysis of top-rated programs reveals how Fox hailed its audience as ‘the real Americans’ and successfully represented narrow, conservative political demands as popular and universal.

My intellectual interests in class and partisanship reflects my own blue-collar upbringing in the LDS state of Utah. Witnessing the Bush administration weaponize country music in support of the 2003 Iraq Invasion had a profound impact on me as I was coming of age politically during the 9/11 era. When I entered a doctoral program at UC San Diego in 2005, I still harbored this vexing preoccupation about the evidently powerful relationship between style and ideology, between class-taste and partisanship. This moment marked the kernel of the political cultural approach that I would eventually develop to study Fox News and political media more broadly.

The release of Fox Populism has resulted in invitations to speak at universities across the country and around the globe. The book has garnered attention beyond the academy as well, attracting television and podcast interviews and interviews with prominent US newspapers such as CNN, New York Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes, and with major outlets abroad such as Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, the United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph, and France’s AFP. In 2022, I appeared in Vice TV’s Dark Side of the 90s series to discuss Rupert Murdoch’s impact on American journalism.

In addition to publishing articles in academic journals such as Television & New Media (2025; 2023), Journalism (2017), and Media, Culture & Society (2014) and in edited volumes such as News on the Right (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism (2021) and The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism (2024), I’ve written popular pieces for outlets such as Jacobin, The Hill, TV Guide, Influence, Zócalo Public Square, and Resolute Square. Finally, I was asked by the Congressional Investigatory Committee on January 6 to submit a written testimony on Fox News’s role in fomenting the Capitol riot.

My new book project, A Time of Monsters: How the Right Conquered Podcasting and Online Video in the Early Trump Era, chronicles how the independent content creators of YouTube’s “news and politics” sector helped create an ideological spectrum during the Trump years that would seem uncanny to analysts just five years prior. This study centers on content analyses of three of the most prolific YouTube political programs during the early Trump era (2016–2021): Alex Jones’ right-wing, conspiracy-driven program InfoWars, comedian Joe Rogan’s ideologically heterodox podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), and Cenk Uygur’s progressive network the Young Turks (TYT). In addition to pioneering an “over-the-top,” subscription-based revenue model that is now commonplace in the age of television streaming, these independent media outlets asserted their voice during the tumultuous presidential election of 2016, mobilized their massive audiences to support the “outsider” campaigns of right-wing nationalist Donald Trump and left-wing populist Bernie Sanders, and, in the end, reshaped the national political culture in the mold of YouTube’s political subculture.