From the day that Roger Ailes conceived it, to the day that Rupert Murdoch funded it, FUX News was a conservatives dream come true. It was a direct response to what conservatives nationwide felt was a liberal bias in the mainstream media. And it quickly found a home on cable news.
For quite a while, FUX pootled along as an acceptable alternative to MSNBC, and other cable outlets, basically reporting news, but with a conservative bent to it. And its audience grew.
It started to change with the rise of Billo-The Clown O’Reilly. O’Reilly quickly became the marquis star of FUX News prime time viewers. He featured a portion of his show called The No Spin Zone, which in fact held more spin that a turbine jet engine on takeoff. But then O’Reilly crossed a line. He started spouting personal opinion as fact news.
It got worse after the Tea Party Revolution of 2010. Other FUX prime time hosts, trying to capture O’Reilly’s lightening in their own bottles, started picking pet GOP far right firebrands to emulate. And like O’Reilly, they started spouting the GOP politicians talking points in monologues, when the politician wasn’t even on screen, basically making the opinion their own. And their fans loved it.
But there was a simple problem with this approach. All of these political game shows hosts, from O’Reilly to “Sue” Lou Dobbs, from Fucker Tucker Carlson to The Manatee, from Laura Ingraham to Jeanine Shapiro. They all picked a pet GOP politician, and a vause de jour. and started peddling it, even when their pet politician wasn’t on the show. In short, they made it their personal opinion, as well as a critical part of their branding with their own audience.
And this is what is killing what’s left of the GOP right now in the media. Because Trump is gone, and so are a whole ton of the Trumpian assholes that were media darlings on FUX News, such as Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, and other Trump bottom feeders. And right now, there is nothing that the GOP would love more than for those nitwits to disappear, without a trace, along with any mention of January 6th, which they hope disappears by no later than close of business on Tuesday.
But the problem is, over at FUX News, they can’t let it go that easily. Because those ego driven hosts didn’t just interview their guests, they espoused their opinions as their own in monologues. And their viewers lapped it all up like kittens with a quart of cream. These hosts are now personally invested in these views. There are beknown for their own personal views.
And they can’t back down now. Because their base viewers still want to hear this conspiratorial bullshit. And FUX News is bleeding viewers like a slit wrist since Trump turned on them.
Always remember this, these people are not legitimate news anchors at reputable news organizations, they are media personalities. And as such, they survive by the strength of their ratings. And if the ultimate decision on whether or not to air a segment comes down to what is best for the GOP, and what is best for their personal ratings, I’ll let you guess which way that goes.
The GOP welcomed FUX News into this world. They nurtured it, they fed it with GOP bullshit, and they cheered the beast to become even bigger and more powerful. And now, the beast is turning on its trainer. As Teri likes to say, Dis chit choud be some fun, choo bet!
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Media celebrities. People famous for being famous despite zero other achievements, pulled sharply into focus when an actual famous person, rightly applauded for ACTUAL achievements, dies after a life of 99 years contributing positively to the human condition.
Why does the term “Gotterdamerang” (“Twilight Of The Gods”) come to mind with this crowd?
The fact they have existed to do the damage they have, along with events never seen in this country, is a clear sign our culture has some fucked up shit woven into our fabric. Of course, hypocrisy greases our wheels of arrogance & ignorance. No one knows how to extricate racism, etc., especially as our attention span & our knowledge of history apparently dwindles daily. I fall back to Robert Redford as the Sundance kid when being pressed into a gunfight over a poker game. When aggressively confronted on the secret of his success, he solemnly replied, “prayer”.
This makes me think of an interview I listened to last year with Zephyr Teachout, where she discussed corruption. An issue with corruption is that it’s always a slide to the bottom…one misdeed incentivizes another with a bigger payoff. This is how people eventually find themselves at such egregious levels of corruption that society penalizes them.
A problem with corruption, she says (aside from the, you know, lack of ethics and sinful behavior) is that the slippery slope will always lose the person support along the way. There will always be a growing number of people who abandon the person on the downward trajectory, peeling off when the corruption becomes “too much.” So the corrupt don’t only end up totally corrupt, they end up alone.
Fox News applies here – dishonest journalism is a form of corruption. As such, over the years they’ve had to become more and more corrupt in order to pursue even bigger gains. Which has over time eroded away people who might take the, seriously, and now they are alone at the bottom of the barrel with the dregs of the most deplorables. Fox is still immensely dangerous, but the corruption puts it at risk of totally falling apart.