Someone, likely the prolific @Cubachi, tweeted a link to a post at the LA Times blog section titled Fox News, 1, CNN, MSNBC, White House O. The author, Johanna Neuman, declares that with the latest ratings Fox News is “now king”. Even the President, who clearly despises Fox News and the megaphone that it provides to his opponents, tacitly admitted as much when he chose to be interviewed by Brett Baier in the home stretch of his relentless campaign for a government takeover of health care.
Whatever the reason, the trend is clear. Voted out of office in 2006 and 2008, Republicans are now the Party of Opposition. And their network of choice, Fox News, is now king.
After pointing out that both CNN and MSNBC have seen their ratings plunge, she contrasts that with Fox News:
Meanwhile Fox News, which broke records last year, continues to grow. Greta Van Susteren’s show was up 25%. Bill O’Reilly, whose show commands the biggest audience in prime time with 3.65 million viewers, was up 28%. And Glenn Beck, that conspiracy-fueling tinderbox for the Right? His audience was up 50% from last year.
The author quotes Bill O’Reilly repeating what I have heard him say on his program, which is that people get their regular daily news via the internet and typically look to cable news outlets more for analysis and commentary. Therefore more and more Americans tune into O’Reilly (which I rarely miss), Hannity (which I sometimes watch depending on the guests), and Glenn Beck (which I have seen only a handful of times) to hear what other assorted pundits think about the news. In a real sense those shows are analogous to the comments on an online article, where you will quite often find far more interesting data and perspectives than the original article (or news story) itself.
In her first lines Neuman hints at the larger lesson from these continuing ratings gains for Fox News Channel when she states “maybe this really is, at heart, a conservative nation”. I still remember Newsweek’s cover declaring that We Are All Socialists Now less than a month after President Obama took office. I didn’t believe it, but I also had refused to believe that America would hand the reins of power to the most radical and wholly unqualified candidate in American history, so I was not feeling too optimistic about what my country was thinking. I openly admit to disappointment in my fellow citizens when the Obama personality cult succeeded, but suffice to say that many like-minded American patriots have renewed my faith in our exceptionalism since last summer.
The emergence of the Tea Party movement has reasserted that America is a center-right country. Though we certainly have a noisy liberal minority, most Americans would fall into the independent-to-conservative band. Obviously, the Democrat Party and most of the media are a few clicks to the left of center. But has there ever been this wide a gap between the President’s philosophical agenda and the average American’s common sense and belief system? I cannot think of a time.
This reminds me of one of the few episodes of the Glenn Beck show that I have seen. He drew a horizontal line on his trusty blackboard with a small vertical line in the middle marking the political center in America. He pointed out where he believed that most Americans were, slightly right of center, with liberals to the left of that line, and finally identified Progressives and the Democrat party’s leadership as well to the left of that line. I spent a few minutes constructing something similar. You can click on the image to embiggen it.
As you can see from the cool image of America, I placed the average American a little right of center. Notice the huge separation between Joe Sixpack and the statist triad of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid who are almost rubbing shoulders with their ideological Uncle Karl. On the right, standing with average Americans, are fine patriots like Mike Pence, Jim DeMint, Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn and that firebrand from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann.
I agree that people are looking for opinion shows. But wouldn’t MSNBC’s lineup of hard-left opinion shows be doing well in the ratings if this was simply about people searching for opinion in addition to news? This dominance by Fox News simply reflects the ideological center of gravity in America, and it is nowhere near Barack Obama or Rachel Maddow. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, John Stewart.
