Fox News may have created a monster.
Fox has undergone a Roger Ailes-mandated “course
correction,” in which its politics now more closely align with the GOP
establishment, angering the Tea Party constituency it helped create.
The infamous cable network was once so aligned with the Tea
Party that the two were
often advertised together, and was one of, if not the, primary forces
behind the movement’s metastasization. (For a lark, here’s Fox News contributor
Michelle Malkin’s blog
on the initial Tea Party protests, in which she in no way defends against
the exact charges she would later hurl at Occupy Wall Street.)
But that was during a Democratic presidency and midterm
election, the latter especially feeding on the type of local issues and
campaigning at which the Tea Party, uh, excelled.
Now that a national election is at stake, the network has somewhat dissociated
itself from the Tea Party’s preferred candidates, if not from the movement’s
actual platform of severe austerity, vicious limits on health and education
services, and wacky theories about UN
plots to control us through bike lanes.
Hints of the changes in Fox’s programming have been there
for some time, but the biggest clue was when the network essentially ditched
spinning top Glenn Beck. Beck was a ratings monster, and though his numbers
were on the decline, his was still among the most watched programs on cable
news. Instead, Fox has hired some liberal voices, colorfully characterized by
one conservative viewer as “graduates from the Jane Fonda Women’s Media
Center. Politico also notes that after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, Roger
Ailes—in addition to advising Sarah Palin to go hide in a hole, which she did not do—told the
network to tone it down.
Viewers have noticed. Politico spoke to numerous conservatives;
many involved in local political movements, who are turning away from Fox News
to more ideologically rigid websites, and, in a couple inexplicable cases, CNN.
Ron Paul supporters are especially angry, as they feel that Fox news has been
instrumental in denying Paul the coverage to stymie his electoral chances, even
going so far as to cancel anchor Andrew Napolitano for being pro-Paul. (Paul
fans: to the comments section!)
Buried on the fourth page (tl;dr) of
Politico’s article is some insightful analysis from a Fordham University media
professor Paul Levinson, who argues that both Fox and MSNBC are undergoing an
inevitable shift toward the center, having sapped their respective extremes for
all they’re worth. Levinson argues that this shift—in which MSNBC is also
centralizing after firing Keith Olbermann—counteracts rating stagnation
resulting from narrowing audiences.
This is counter to the now-accepted-as-fact narrative that
cable news will go on polarizing political discourse until we’re all sneering
at each other from behind barbed internet pods. Instead, networks will keep
their general political bent but move increasingly toward the center on the
hunt for new viewers, mirroring the movement of the national parties to which
they roughly correspond.
While it’s easy (and fun, and fulfilling) to engage in some
schadenfreude at incredulous conservatives who are shocked, just shocked, that
Fox News’ content is manipulated, the effect overall can’t help but be good for
the Republican Party and conservative movement. Ideological echo chambers—or epistemic
closure, if you’re being elite
about it—are validating, but they lead to extremities of opinions that
ultimately do a movement harm. The “birther” movement alone shows what can
happen when an idea becomes divorced from both reality and political prudence.
Fox News seems to have realized this. What remains to be
seen is how much of what they brewed can be poured back into the bottle.
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