Posted on 05/26/2015 1:30:05 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Annd it came to pass that the earth turned and another campaign season spun into view and the liberal commentariat rose from its siesta to begin its usual moping about the perverse political powers wielded by the Fox News Channel.
This time, the sentinel waking the commentariat to the alleged Fox menace is not a liberal but a self-described conservative, Bruce Bartlett. Bartlett, a prolific writer on politics and economics who has worked for congressional Republicans (Ron Paul and Jack Kemp), Republican presidents, (Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) and conservative and libertarian policy shops, broke with his party a decade ago when he leveled President George W. Bush as an opportunistic pork-barreller in his book Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Bartlett recently added a media component to his critique in a paper titled “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics,” which has heated the blood of liberals to the boiling point, including the Atlantic’s James Fallows and Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post and other outriders of liberalism.
Fox News isn’t just bad for America, which is the usual liberal complaint. It’s also bad for the Republican Party, the still-conservative Bartlett holds, because it has stunted the GOP’s growth with a news agenda that ships “misinformation” to the party’s far-right base. This is the so-called Fox “echo chamber” effect you’ve read so much about in ThinkProgress, the New Republic, Slate, The Week, Nicholas Kristof’s column and the Atlantic. According to chamber theorists, Fox “breeds extremism” within the Republican Party by (1) convincing viewers to reject other news feeds as biased and (2) to partake only of Fox content and like-minded conservative radio fodder. The echo chamber, so the theory goes, has deluded the party into thinking that support for its radical-right views is greater than it really is. This, in turn, has convinced the party to run radical candidates who aren’t as electable as they seem to be. And all this extremism prevents the GOP’s presidential candidates from reaching centrist voters, who are essential for victory.
Fallows condenses the Bartlett message thusly: “When will Republicans who care about winning national elections, or actually governing, stop thinking of Fox as a help and start viewing it as a hindrance, and what will happen when they do?”
But Fox in its current incarnation is neither a help nor a hindrance. Fox News—and its Svengali Roger Ailes—aren’t the Republican kingmakers they’re made out to be. I explored this point last month, noting that the network is better at employing presidential candidates than electing them. Whatever ambitions Ailes and Fox chief Rupert Murdoch may have to elect a president—in 2012, Ailes had his heart broken by Chris Christie and David Petraeus, both of whom declined his invitation to run—their first priority has always been to make money, which Fox News does, clearing a reported $1.2 billion a year. If you think of Fox News as a news-entertainment hybrid designed to make money, its combative programming style begins to make more sense.
Like many Fox critics, Bartlett inflates the network’s power. Fox’s most popular program, The O’Reilly Factor, pulls in about 3.3 million viewers on its best nights. In a country whose voting-age population exceeds 234 million, 3.3 million ain’t squat. What’s more, the O’Reilly/Fox audiences aren’t even uniformly Republican! According to a Pew survey from 2012, 45 percent of O’Reilly viewers (and 55 percent of Fox viewers) self-identify as independent or Democrat, which means many of the eyes and ears absorbing the Fox message are only tangentially connected to Republican politics. It’s comic to think of Democratic and independent Fox viewers pushing the Republican Party further to the right.
The Republican Party had been fielding “Foxy” presidential candidates for decades before the network’s 1996 launch, such as Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 (Ailes, by the way, was his media consultant), which suggests that the network isn’t leading the right-wing parade but has only positioned itself at the front of the procession. Another Foxy candidate on the 1968 general election ballot was George Wallace, who collected 13.5 percent of the presidential vote as a third-party candidate. Wallace traversed the sort of outré political frontiers that have become Fox territory. His politics make the Tea Party’s look like a very weak brew. To suggest that Fox alone pushed the GOP in the direction of radicalism is to ignore the political history that followed: After wounding Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential campaign, Reagan completed the reset of the GOP as an ideologically driven conservative party in 1980, and there it has largely remained. (Also unexplored by Bartlett is that the Republican Party, allegedly radicalized by Fox to the point that it can’t attract centrists, has built majorities in both the House and Senate. If this is failure, the Republicans probably don’t covet success.)
One thing Bartlett gets absolutely right in his critique is how Fox seized on the repeal of government censorship of the airwaves (also known as the Fairness Doctrine and the equal-time rule) to create a news outlet that would cater to the country’s underserved conservative audience. You don’t have to be a Fox fan to credit the network with reintroducing ideological competition to the news business, which began to fade at the midpoint of the 20th century.
The reliably liberal Frank Rich appreciates better than most Fox’s essential harmlessness. In a piece published last year in New York, he concluded that aside from infuriating liberals, Fox flexes little political power. The median age of a Fox viewer is 68, eight years older than the MSBNC and CNN median age, and its median age is rising. “Fox is in essence a retirement community,” Rich writes, and a small one at that! “The million or so viewers who remain fiercely loyal to the network are not, for the most part, and as some liberals still imagine, naïve swing voters who stumble onto Fox News under the delusion it’s a bona fide news channel and then are brainwashed by Ailes’s talking points into becoming climate-change deniers,” he writes.
In a much quoted television interview five years ago, conservative Republican David Frum said, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” Bartlett repeats Frum's quip as his paper’s kicker. But catchy as the Frum line remains, it’s just not true. The Fox tail does not wag the Republican dog.
Yup, pretty much.
The point is that news isn’t fair or balanced. It’s just news.
Once Fox balances the news it’s not the news any more, it’s spin.
Liberals live in a fantasy world they made in their own heads—Fox lives in the real world.
A long time ago he could be described as such. No longer.
He’s not a fool, he knows darn well that they were democrats. It seems to be a recent trend where the media is basically saying he belonged to the Republicans.
“Liberals can’t wrap their pointy heads around the idea that at least half the people in America don’t want what they are selling.”
What libs can’t wrap their pointy heads around is Fox has more liberal viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. My lib friends hate when I tell them that.
I agree. In fact FOX frequently provides a soap box for Liberals to promote their views, all under the rubric “Fair and Balanced.”
The reliably liberal Frank Rich appreciates better than most Fox's essential harmlessness. In a piece published last year in New York, he concluded that aside from infuriating liberals, Fox flexes little political power.Libs always miss the point -- they watch Fox because Fox is actually reporting the news. Fox lacks that party-line Demagogic Party drumbeat that passes for news on SeeBS, NoBrainsCollectively, and AlwaysBeenConfused, and that lack is what makes them angry. My straight-ticket lib relatives had that incoherent inchoate animus toward Fox -- the entire network, all shows, not just the news -- pretty much from day one, and now they hit it for the news, because they can find out what's going on in the minimum of time.
Fallows condenses the Bartlett message thusly: “When will Republicans who care about winning national elections, or actually governing, stop thinking of Fox as a help and start viewing it as a hindrance, and what will happen when they do?”
Whenever Liberals are on the ropes, taking one shot after another in lost elections, you can always count on them to lecture us on how to win elections.
It’s almost impossible to quantify how stupid Liberalism really is.
Rupert Murdoch would be happy with Hillary as president. He gave her money during the 2008 primaries. It's part of his plan not to put all his eggs in one party basket (hence his support for Tony Blair in Britain).
That's not to say that Fox News is liberal or that it's secretly working against conservatism, just that they're far from the big bad conservative machine liberals have nightmares about and/or want people to think is so awful.
That is true...jealousy...
I think it’s pretty clear Fox News is anti-conservative.
I quit watching Fox News years ago. I’m sick of the stupid slow scrolls. Do they think everyone reads at an 8 year old level?
And everything, and I mean everything, is “breaking news”?
BOR is a tool, Megyn Kelly just too over the top and Sean never shuts up. I can’t stand Shep Smith even doing the straight news.
Brett Baire for the first 30 minutes is straight news but I hate the panels in the last half hour. Way to wishy-washy GOPe types including Brit Hume. What a disappointment he turned out to be.
IMO, Fox is a liberal news outlet. The only reason the liberals complain is because it’s a little less liberal than the other radical left liberal news channels and Fox sometimes refuses to tow the line with the daily liberal talking points.
The scribbler of this piece naturally lets his own biases intrude by comparing the very tame and many time slightly right of center FOX news pieces to George Wallace.
Sucks when people stop paying you to lie to them.
What is it reporting?
It’s not sensationalistic garbage.
Yep when I saw this line I realized they jus can’t understand why we have’t fallen in lockstep with them and deeded our brains overbthe federal gubmint:
“According to chamber theorists, Fox “breeds extremism” within the Republican Party by (1) convincing viewers to reject other news feeds as biased and (2) to partake only of Fox content and like-minded conservative radio fodder.”
In other words they don’t understand why we reject “their” news feed while at the same time they’re rejecting ours which is most likely far more accurate and unbiased than theirs. The idiots can’t even see that!
Anything to the Right of NPR is extremism.
Pray America is waking
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