Minority-baiting is a propaganda technique used to prey on fear that is based in otherness. Fox News accomplishes this by reaffirming the bigoted, ignorant beliefs their viewers have ingested throughout the course of their lives from TV, movies, books, advertising, political campaigns, and American foreign policy propaganda; then, they create a false narrative in which the stereotyped minority is threatening the American way of life.
In Ian Haney López’s masterwork on the language of race, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, he describes coded language as words or phrases that “trigger racial anxiety and allow plausible deniability by crafting language that lets the speaker deny that he’s even thinking about race.” One of Fox News’ most successful and despicable propaganda tactics is perpetually suggesting that people who talk about race are the real racists, while methodically weaving coded racial messages into their programming. Here are just a few examples: