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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Fox News Keeps Getting Foxier
Like right-wing politicians, they're primarily interested in catering
to the most extreme parts of their base

The Atlantic's invaluable Ron Brownstein makes the point

that in red states, including Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Iowa,
and Montana, "Republican legislators and governors have operated as if
they were programming a prime-time lineup at Fox News. They have focused
far less on the small-government, limited-spending, and anti-tax
policies that once defined the GOP" and instead are obsessed with
things like loosening gun restrictions, functionally banning abortion,
targeting transgender folks, preventing minorities and other
traditionally Democratic constituencies from voting, and attacking masks
and vaccinations. As Brownstein points out, "Very few of the [states
or right-wing districts within them] are competitive [in a general
election], so all they are worried about is being primaried." Alas,
the people likely to do that successfully are almost all even crazier,
given the fact that virtually all the energized support in the party
today is motivated by a slavish devotion to Donald Trump.

Absent (the unimaginable) reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine
,
these people are a lost cause. The death of the local news ecosphere in
many communities and the void being filled by Fox and other national
behemoths has made it impossible to hold a conversation with a common
set of facts. As Barack Obama told

Ezra Klein, when he first ran for president in 2008, he could "go to
the fish fry, or the V.F.W. hall, or all these other venues, and just
talk to people" in red states. "And they didn't have any
preconceptions about what I believed. They could just take me at face
value. If I went into those same places now-or if any Democratic
who's campaigning goes in those places now-almost all news is from
either Fox News, Sinclair news stations, talk radio, or some Facebook
page. And trying to penetrate that is really difficult."

Fox's prime-time post-pandemic ratings are down, but remain almost
equal

to those of MSNBC and CNN combined. Tucker Carlson Tonight leads the
pack in total viewers, averaging 2.94 million, and the audience is fed
comically idiotic bullshit like this
:
"You can still go see a baseball game if you want to. But be warned,
you will be sitting in your own roped off section marinating in your
shame with the other disobedient bad people. Medical Jim Crow has come
to America. If we still had water fountains, the unvaccinated would have
separate ones." As for the rest of the crew, the no less nutty Hannity
was next with 2.63 million, and The Five at 2.63 million. Rachel Maddow
snuck in with an audience of 2.52 million just before Laura Ingraham's
egregious program clocking in at 2.06 million.

Meanwhile, the (no doubt vaccinated) grand pooh-bahs at the network have
chosen this moment of maximum political and social peril to double down
on the damage they are doing to the health and sanity of the world, by
making Fox ever more Foxier. In recent weeks, they lost two relatively
sane Fox personalities: Juan Williams left The Five, and Donna Brazile
is gone from the station entirely. The network canned its politics
editor, Chris Stirewalt, at the beginning of the year, apparently in
retaliation for his correct call of Arizona going for Joe Biden, along
with Washington bureau chief Bill Sammon. White House correspondent
Kristin Fisher, who according to The New York Times

"aggressively debunked lies about election fraud advanced by Mr.
Trump's lawyers" has been shown the door as well. The (relatively)
respectable newscaster Shepard Smith has been gone since 2019. Crazy
people like Greg Gutfeld and Dan Bongino have been rewarded with new
shows.

Part of what's going on with Fox is an extension of what's been
going on with far-right politicians; they're afraid of being
primaried. With networks like One America News and Newsmax, as well as
random YouTuber conspiracy theorists, turning up the crazy to even
higher levels, Fox must keep up with the Joneses. The brutal logic of
the right has made even mild deviations from the most extreme narratives
out of bounds.

Another frequent face showing up on Fox of late is former leftist Glenn
Greenwald, who gives every impression of modeling his political hegira
on that of David Horowitz. Greenwald is under no illusion, as he told
The Daily Beast
,
that Fox isn't filled with "horrific, toxic, damaging, destructive,
and bigoted" broadcasting. Nevertheless, he has managed "at least 72
appearances on Fox since December 2017
"-40
of them on Tucker Carlson Tonight, 14 on Ingraham's show, nine on Fox
News Primetime, three more on Howard Kurtz's MediaBuzz, in addition to
one or two on at least five more Fox programs. Playing that old standby
tactic of "Even the liberal New Republic"-style faux
mystification, Greenwald is almost always introduced as a "progressive
journalist" who then goes on to attack actual progressives. (Advice to
aspiring young pundits: Apostasy sells.)

All of the above should, I think, clarify the context of recent
controversial statements by Chris Wallace, who, despite his continued
employment at Fox, insists on being treated as an authentic journalist.
In excusing himself for consistently booking Republican liars and
insurrection supporters on his program, and treating their answers as if
deserving of respect, he equated holding such people to the most basic
standards of truth-telling-as opposed to rewarding their lies with
generous amounts of airtime-as "moral posturing." Speaking to
Politico Playbook , Wallace went on
to distinguish this from what he calls "newsgathering," which,
apparently, is allowing liars to lie unimpeded about elections, public
health, or whatever Fox and its de facto chief programmer, Donald Trump,
are lying about at any given moment.

Would it be overly simplistic in a vulgar Marxist sort of way to point
out that Wallace, who is paid an estimated $7 million a year

by Rupert Murdoch and company, could not possibly condemn the practice
of inviting liars and insurrectionists on his program without condemning
the entire network he works for? How much more convenient to take one
for the team and actually defend the practice of purposely misleading
the country and driving it into the arms of the would-be fascists
waiting to destroy its electoral system at the first opportunity that
arises, like our coming elections in 2022 and 2024. This is especially
true given the fact that our punditocracy continues to treat Fox as an
actual news network, instead of the nakedly dishonest propaganda channel
it has been since it first aired 25 years ago.

The Guardian has been celebrating its 200th anniversary, and I give
thanks for the fact that it is still around almost every day. One of the
many articles it published to mark the occasion was a compendium of
great headlines
.
Because I walk around all day with song lyrics in my head, frequently,
to the dismay of whomever I am talking to, working them into
conversation, I was particularly pleased to see the 2009 classic
about John
Lennon's love of nature: "I fed the newts today, oh boy." My
all-time favorite of this genre was one that once appeared in the
"A-hed" front-page column of The Wall Street Journal that read,
"If There's a Bustle in Your Hedgerow, Don't Be Alarmed,"
beautifully mocking one of the silliest song lyrics of all time above a
story about English environmentalists trying to preserve traditional
hedgerows. I did, however, find a reference to that one in this 1998
"On Language" column

by William Safire. Searching the Journal, alas, the closest I could come
was this: "A Bustle Grows on Hedge Row: The IPO Allure
."

Last week in directing readers to what I mentioned was one of my
favorite musical performances of all time: Al Green, Teddy Pendergrass,
Ben E. King, and Chuck Jackson singing together at the Apollo Theater in
1993, I carelessly posted an inferior video reproducing it. I did some
searching and found a far better one in two parts, here
and here .
Make sure to stay to the end. And if you remain in the mood for more
such competition, well, there is always this classic
. Also there's this
bit of wonderment, which comes with a
strong Altercation recommendation as a first-dance wedding song, should
you be in the market for one.

And if you're in need of a bit more high-minded entertainment this
weekend, here is Salman Rushdie interviewing Edward Said
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
London in September 1986.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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