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The Fox Juggernaut: Why It's No. 1
 Those who like to bury their heads in the sand won't want to read this. Some of us, on the other hand, enjoy it... This is about Fox News and its march over the nation's news media, knocking off and steam-rolling other news channels while cementing its stranglehold at the top. A lib attempts to understand what's incomprehensible to libs... Most of us who live in the blessedly enlightened Washington-New York-Boston corridor like to brush off Fox News as the home of the intellectually challenged. Error number one: dismiss your opponent as a dumbass. That way you'll be surprised when he/she/it makes some pretty intelligent moves... We mock its slogan, "First, Fair and Balanced," and laugh off its rabble-rousing commentators as neanderthal, bigoted, biased right-wingers. It's terrible when they don't tell you what you want to hear. More important, when you present news you should be predictive: what you're describing should conform to what's actually happening. If you say, for instance, that the world's getting hotter and hotter until we're all gonna melt, we shouldn't be seeing a hard winter... Fox's millions of viewers -- those little people in nowhere towns and backwater cities
Most of us can count, if only on our fingers. We don't read a lot of trendy books, but we're pretty good with manuals. And Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin seem to sell a lot of books to somebody, don't they?
I can remember when it was only libs and commies and anarchists who took to the streets.
They have a better quality product?... Naw. That can't be it. Stack its lineup of stars -- Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity -- against the liberal MSNBC's lineup of Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, and you've got a pretty good picture of why Fox comes out on top. Matthews is a political hack. Olbermann's demented. Maddow's barely coherent. It's simple. Beck, O'Reilly and Hannity -- as disagreeable as they might be to someone with my political leanings -- seem in varying degrees more in touch with centrist-to-conservative America, which is, like it or not, the heart of the country. They speak the language -- simple, straightforward. Who can't understand O'Reilly's pinheads and patriots? Who can resist Glenn Beck's boyish persona and oversimplified view of the world? And how about Sean Hannity, who proudly wears his biases on his sleeve? O'Reilly's more of a libertarian than a conservative. Beck's presentation makes me expect him to be a nut, but what he presents as facts turn out to be verifiable, which suggests his conclusions are valid. Hannity used to be paired with Colmes in a right-left "fair and balanced" show. Colmes is such an unimaginative dullard you ended up feeling sorry for him. Controversy is their bread and butter. They stoke the fires and stir the ashes and hold court with the low and the high. They don't dine and party with insiders. They are anti-establishment. They are suburbanites (none lives in Washington or Manhattan). They are outliers. Unlike the trendy folk like the writer... And now they've got Sarah Palin, the Wasilla beauty queen. And former governor of Alaska...
People were curious as to whether she could actually produce and defend ideas up close and personal or if she was only good at giving speeches. She did pretty well, I thought. But then, I actually watched it, unlike the writer... At the same time, MSNBC, which employs brand-name anchors such as Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews, has wrapped itself in the liberal flag. It goes back to the 2008 campaign. Who can forget Matthews' revelation on national TV that he felt a tingling up his leg upon hearing Barack Obama speak? O'Reilly actually had candidate Obama on his show, and was quite polite to him. I thought he got pretty gentle handling. He also had Hillary on and he was actually gallant to her. During the campaign, MSNBC discovered what Fox News had discovered years ago -- politically biased reporting and analysis are a winning combination. But Matthews and Maddow, with their overwrought liberalism, and Olbermann, with his professorial sarcasm,
That's the area that's seen its jobs go, that can see its standard of living going with them... "The public is not only shifting from left to right," the liberals' favorite conservative columnist, David Brooks, wrote recently. "Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year." He went on: "A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the Tea Party brigades have all the intensity." It's that predictive thing I was talking about. It doesn't take an awful lot of brain power to see that despite being told how great it would be if labor was unionized those industries that were most heavily unionized are now in the gutter -- railroads, steel, automobiles, and airlines all used to represent good jobs as well as strong industries. If you tell me that we can spend our way out of debt we don't have to think too long on the subject to come to the conclusion that either you're lying or you're insane. We can form that sort of conclusion regardless of whether we've read anything Oprah's recommended. While most of us were ignoring the Tea Party crowds as fringe, right-wing crazies, Fox News was there. They started from the assumption that the Tea Party movement represented valid concerns. The lefties started out calling them "tea baggers" -- Bob Beckel used the term on Fox just the day before Brown beat Some might say that Fox actually promoted and gave life to the Tea Party movement. That's reaching too far. What Fox did is what Fox does with such success. It found the beginning of a populist wave and now it's riding its crest. The libs are still snickering like 8-year-olds, visions of sex acts dancing in their heads, having moved well beyond the point where they can make any sort of peace with the movement. The best they can do is send some SEIU goons around to thump some heads.
If you don't listen to your opponent you'll be surprised every time. I think that's basic Sun Tzu, isn't it? Posted by: Fred 2010-01-22 |
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