I was trained as an interdisciplinary Communication scholar whose research spans the disciplines of cultural sociology, political science, media industry studies, and cultural studies. My area of expertise lies in television/video news, populism, partisan identification, and the cultural politics of race, class, and gender.
My research has argued for a new conceptual approach to media partisanship, one that questions the extent to which its popular conceptualization is really about political ideology. To rely only on a left-right ideological schema to define conservative outlets like Fox News is to miss how they manufacture partisanship as an identity style. To capture the critical relationship between ideology and aesthetics, my work combines a political lens with a cultural one and develops an interpretative framework that synthesizes theories of partisan identification (Iyengar), market positioning (Ries and Trout), Gramscian hegemony (Hall, Williams), class/cultural analysis (Bourdieu), and the sociology of morals (Lamont).
My research on conservative media also innovates a multi-modal, semiotic analysis for deconstructing populist media discourse, which accounts for its visual and performative elements and not just its verbal-rhetorical qualities. Informed by critical theories of race, gender, and performativity (Butler), my analysis of political media seeks to reveal how the embodied race and gendered identities of political communicators can facilitate or hinder their ability to execute populist performance strategies on air.
My early refereed publications used cultural genealogies of populist political discourse to explain the resonance of Fox News’s rhetorical framing of the Great Recession economic crisis. Building from this genealogical method, my first monograph Fox Populism (Cambridge, 2019) maps the points of convergence between US political history and the history of television news and identifies the key economic, political, and cultural trends that converged in the 1990s to create hospitable conditions for Fox’s partisan branding strategy.
I explain how this strategy relied on the development of technological infrastructures and deregulation that expanded the range of channel options, partisan polarization in the political arena, and, crucially, content production that understood how to effectively use tabloid presentational techniques to formulate a “counter-elite” news aesthetic. By marrying literatures on populism and the postwar conservative movement with television and journalism studies scholarship, Fox Populism seeks to capture the complexity of Fox’s partisan mode of address and the overdetermined nature of the network’s unlikely rise to cable news dominance.
Since Fox Populism’s release, I have contributed book chapters to several edited volumes on journalism, populism, and political theory. My chapter in A.J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler’s pathbreaking book News on the Right (Oxford, 2019) illustrates how conservative media has weaponized country music to bolster their populist communication strategies. Where this chapter explores the intersection of politics and music to further elaborate the political-cultural approach to partisan media that I developed in Fox Populism, my most recent piece in the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism (2023) addresses the book’s unfinished business. In “The Illiberalism of Fox News: Theorizing nationalism and populism through the case of conservative America’s number one news source,” I explain the discursive similarities and differences between populist and nationalist political traditions and conduct a textual analysis of Fox’s current number one show Tucker Carlson Tonight to demonstrate the network’s Trump era turn toward anti-immigration politics and ethno-nationalism.
Much of the academic research and popular media commentary today is about “mis/disinformation,” and this discussion has revolved primarily around epistemological issues. My recent work addresses this debate head-on and asserts that it should be focused on questions of culture and identity as much as questions of facticity and technological affordances. My book chapter in Silvio Waisbord and Howard Tumber’s edited volume Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism (2021) examines how — in the pivotal months of February and March 2020 — the Trump administration and Fox News downplayed the severity of the Covid-19 virus, repeatedly suggesting it was no more dangerous than the “standard flu.” I use this example to stress the perils of partisan news styles (when taken to their extreme) and to demonstrate the persuasiveness of populist moral framing and the identitarian pull of aesthetic style. I was selected for a speaking role at the “What Comes After Disinformation Studies?” ICA preconference in Paris, France in April 2022. The talk I presented that day was entitled, “The power of news style and the limits of technology: Thinking beyond the ‘infocentric’ orientation of disinformation studies,” and it will be published online this January by UNC’s open-source platform Bulletin of Information, Technology, and Public Life.
Books
Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge, 2019)
Popular writing
“The Left Needs Media that Competes — and Wins,” co-author Tony Nadler, Jacobin, March 5, 2025.
“Trump, the UFC, and the New Conservative Culture War,” The Hill, June 10, 2024
“The power of news style and the limits of technology: Thinking beyond the ‘infocentric’ orientation of disinformation studies,” Bulletin of Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), January 23, 2023.
Reece Peck on Fox News’s Blue-collar Conservatism. In M. Laruelle (Ed.), Conversations on Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 scholars (pp. 164–171). Illiberalism Studies Program, November 17, 2021.
“Fox News & The Big Lie: A Tipping Point,” Resolute Square, December 29, 2022.
Co-author with A.J. Bauer. The Loudest Voice Recaps, Episodes 1-7. In TV Guide, July 1—August 12, 2019.
“How Fox Became Foxy: The American News Channel has Rebranded Political Communication, Says Reece Peck, Author of an Explosive New Book.” In Influence Magazine, May 13, 2019.
“Is Fox News the Smartest Journalism Ever?: Tabloid Television Is Great at Manipulating America’s Long History of Elitism and Class Conflict.” In Zócalo Public Square, November 5, 2014.
Journal articles
Peck & Palos. (2025). “Left Populist Media Online: A Comparative Analysis of the U.S.’s The Young Turks and Spain’s La Base.”
(2025). More than money and algorithms: The cultural roots of Trump’s alt-media strategy. Communication, Culture & Critique, 18(2), 130–133.
“Comparing populist media: from Fox News to The Young Turks, from cable to YouTube, from right to left.” Television & New Media, August 12, 2023.
“Usurping the Usable Past: How Fox News Remembered the Great Depression during the Great Recession.” Journalism,18 (6), (2017): 680–699.
“‘You Say Rich, I Say Job Creator’: How Fox News Framed the Great Recession through the Moral Discourse of Producerism.” Media, Culture & Society, 36 (4), (2014): 526–35.
Book chapters
“The Illiberalism of Fox News: Theorizing nationalism and populism through the case of conservative America’s number one news source.” In The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, December 18, 2023.
“Listen to your gut’: How Fox News’ Populist Style Transformed Journalistic Authority in the United States.” In Silvio Waisbord and Howard Tumber (eds.), Routledge Companion to Media Misinformation and Populism (Routledge, 2020).
“Containing ‘Country Music Marxism’: How Fox News Conservatized John Rich’s ‘Shuttin’ Detroit Down.’” In A.J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler (eds.), News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Congressional testimony on Jan 6
“Assessing Fox News’s connection to the January 6th Capitol riot”
Recent lectures
University of Texas (Sept 16, 2025)
Queens College (Sept 3, 2025)
Leeds University (June 16, 2025)
London School of Economics (June 12, 2025)
Goldsmiths University (June 10, 2025)
Institute of Public Knowledge (Apr 22, 2025)
Public panels
“National Populism and the Media: The Cases of Turkey, the United States & Hungary,” Jan 28, 2021.
In Fox Populism, I explored how Fox News worked to rehabilitate the conservative movement’s free market ideology when it faced an extraordinary crisis of legitimacy in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. Yet, the Fox News-dominated, cable news-centric political news environment that made such an ideological rescue possible at the beginning of the Obama administration was ultimately unsustainable. Fox owner Rupert Murdoch’s inability to play kingmaker in the 2016 Republican presidential nomination process, and begrudging support for Donald Trump, exposed the first cracks in the existing media system. This coincided with a moment when U.S. news consumers, especially younger ones, were increasingly canceling cable services and turning to alternative news sources in online video instead.
My new book, A Time of Monsters: How the Right Conquered YouTube and Podcasting in the Early Trump Years, 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 Trump era (2016-2020): Alex Jones of the right-wing, conspiracy-driven program InfoWars; comedian Joe Rogan’s ideologically heterodox podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE); and Cenk Uygur’s populist-progressive network, the Young Turks (TYT) It includes content analyses of Kyle Kulinski’s TYT-adjacent Secular Talk and InfoWars‘ Paul Joseph Watson as well. 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. The book’s final chapter offers an analysis of Fox News’s number one show during the Trump era, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and argues that the show’s success at attracting more younger Democrats than either CNN or MSNBC did was due, in part, to Carlson’s ability to emulate both the far-right/far-left, ideological mixtures that predominate YouTube’s independent news culture.
My recent journal article with Television & New Media marks the first published installment of this new book project. In “Comparing populist media: from Fox News to The Young Turks, from cable to YouTube, from right to left,” I contrast the platform and organizational differences between the progressive, YouTube-based The Young Turks (TYT) and the conservative cable giant Fox News. 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. My analysis of YouTube’s under-researched left flank seeks to illustrate how there are no inherent connections between social media technology, populism, and political conservatism.
Reece Peck, PhD
Associate Professor
City University of New York
Reece Peck, PhD 