Fox News just can't be taken too seriously anymore. It's boiled down its audience to its brand by going some extremely into the pure brand direction and it's not a growing brand, no matter circus sideshow periods when a Glenn Beck gets a few more curious eyeballs, the barker ginning up the media like Morton Downey used to while holding a cigarette. It's the brand that was vanquished in the last election from all elective branches of the Federal government. It's the loser.
Sure, losers can come back, but unless we're actually watching the burning of the Republic live on Fox with Hannity, Cavuto, Van Susteren, Beck and Riley screaming I told you so live on the scenes, most Americans are not going to start watching. Just the hardcore audience, which they seem more focused on keeping than expanding.
Here's my new take: as long as the Republican Party is shackled to Fox News as their mouthpiece of choice, they will be condemned to being a minority party. Only when they stop going on Fox the way the Dems do (I mean, c'mon, Evan Byah, who do you think you are?), when they shun the extremism that is tearing apart the Right itself.
For the length of the Bush Administration, starting with John Ellis over at FNC calling the 2000 election for his cousin George before all the other networks and arguably tipping the Electoral College, Fox News has seemed like the broadcast outlet for the Republican Party. Cheerleading for the Iraq War build-up and rarely criticising Presidents Bush (save Harriet Miers) or Cheney (not even when he shot an old man in the face). But it's changed.
Fox is no longer the voice of the Republican Party. The GOP is the voice of Fox News. These past two and a half months of the Obama Administration, it's begun seeming like the only reason the Party exists is to keep the voice of Fox News and, similarly, Rush Limbaugh alive. Not to challenge anything being said for any of these commentators on the Right or face approbation from an audience that has a greater allegiance to the TV personalities sharing their living rooms, kitchens, family rooms and dens, bedrooms and offices than they do to any currently serving Republican politician.
Ronald Reagan was a powerful brand. Eisenhower, Nixon for quite a while. Gerald Ford not so much.
Obama is now the largest and most sought-after brand on the planet. Fox News may catch a lucky break if things go from bad to worse, but with 3 1/2 years before the electorate can vote out Obama, it's a long shot that things won't feel better, especially because I think the very policies he's been putting into place are smart ways to help revivify our country.
Many Conservatives, i.e. Paleo and Libertarian, are realizing that they are prisoners of the Republican Party (with no where else to go, and I'd bet against a split into two smaller parties). The Republican Party is prisoner of Fox News. And Fox News is a prisoner of its core brand psychographic. Maybe the channel can't grow beyond a cable-sized winner, but it's a mistake to expect that it'll ever depict mainstream Liberal democratic thought with anything less than skepticism and most often contempt, because it can't afford to alienate it's core audience.
What's left is a kind of around-the-clock ideological performance art. How else can one describe Glenn Beck's program, which features him as a sort of overgrown baby, infantilized by his tantrums, fears and emotional swoons (a sense-memory master) as well as his appearance: the doughy face, virtually hairless, with those watery eyes rolling around in his head. Getting that core audience to cleave as closely to the breast of FNC-branded political entertainment as possible.
Once you rid yourself of the notion that Fox News is nothing more than reality TV, the Real Housewives or Kimora but as a live feed from their studios, it's harder to get worked up about it. They will always have their fans, and God help us that the most hardcore don't keep shooting folks like in Pittsburgh, but the acts on the channel have grown so nonsensical that they are limited from growing their audience large enough to change the fate of our government.
At least not this year.
3 comments:
"Fox News is a prisoner of its core brand psychographic."
You might have it backwards. I think FoxN's core viewers are the prisoners. Over the past generation FoxN has created an alternate universe for its viewers, one that feeds back to them a hyperreal version of their own ignorance, prejudice, and inadequacies.
It is for them, in the deepest sense, "Home."
Suppose FoxN went dark today. Imagine the new life of the average delusional wingnut, a life in the real world that now makes no sense to him -- a dark and hazy place where not every woman is out to steal his job at the filling station, not every black man wants to rape his portly wife, not every gay man plots to recruit his feckless son to a life of leather and anonymous fellatio, and not every politician wants to confiscate his cache of assault weapons.
In short, a world he can no longer comprehend.
If extremely violent, he becomes Arthur Bremer or Tim McVeigh; if not, he becomes merely the jibbering madman on the corner or the local barfly who yammers endlessly about how we would’ve won in Vietnam if only Chuck Norris had been president instead of Jane Fonda, or how FDR was secretly a Jew, or about fluoride in the drinking supply, or the Bilderburg Group in his fillings.
This poor lonely wingnut no longer has a place to go, a community of like minded delusionals, and with the high cost of hospitalization and schooling he can't acquire the education or the medical care he so desperately needs to ease his transition back into normal healthy society.
Oh, pity, pity the poor wingnut!
He has no where to go but FoxN. FoxN has created and cultivated its own truly captive viewers and has slowly sucked their brains into the TV set.
FoxN = Videodrome.
Oh "Anonymous," I love your comments. Where's YOUR blog?
In fact, I’m considering starting a blog.
Actually, it’s more of a blogathon.
It’s going to be called “Find-these Wingnuts-a-Home.com”.
Given that so many of our RW citizens are living now in abject misery, crushed under the jackboot of the neo-stalinist policies of Chairman Obama, my goal is to raise enough $$ to buy an island off the coast of Greenland upon which to create a new home for these poor folks.
In order to earn repatriation, each RW’er has to submit an essay (you know, something like “How the estate tax is destroying my shoe-shine business”) and let my readers vote on whom to accept; the more heart-rending, the better.
I see a place filled with newly happy-go-lucky Galt-goers, income tax deniers, tea-baggers, climate-change deniers, manly non-homosexuals, and recently unemployed investment bankers.
Now, some have suggested that this sounds like an animal preserve, but I don’t think so. I see it more as a sort of an RW Gilligan’s Island. My only fear is that the investment bankers will quickly turn to cannibalism. I might have to buy some anti-cannibalism insurance from AIG.
I don’t have a flag or national anthem for the place yet, but I’m open to suggestions.
(I also have a second idea…a daily blog contest: “Where’s Wingnut.” Every day I’ll post a picture of a large crowd; first responder who can find the angry-white guy wearing a tinfoil hat wins a free vasectomy.)
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