[FoRK] Schadenfauxde
Stephen Williams
sdw at lig.net
Thu Apr 18 17:59:42 PDT 2013
Fair and balanced:
> Standing at the epicenter of the networkband any new Republican Party
> groundswellbis Ailes. A former political operative of President Richard
> Nixon, Ailes has inextricably intertwined his professional and political
> pursuits since founding Fox News in 1996. Indeed, the network chief
> functions as a kind of proxy kingmaker within the party, frequently
> meeting with Republican politicians to offer strategic advice.
> there is an undeniable actuarial reality at workbor as Bartlett bluntly
> puts it, "Their viewership is quite literally dying." The most lucrative
> advertising dollars flow to TV shows that attract viewers "in the demo,"
> short for "demographic"bindustry parlance for people ages 25 to 54. By
> contrast, Fox News's prime-time commercial breaks are blanketed with
> pitches for cheap medical devices and insurance companies aimed at
> retirees and the elderly.
>
> Though the network did retain its status as the top-rated cable news
> network in 2012bits eleventh consecutive year at number onebthe steep
> drop in ratings that its shows have experienced since Election Day has
> raised eyebrows, precisely because corresponding shows on MSNBC and CNN
> have not experienced the same precipitous decline.
>
> Just how much of a drop are we talking about? According to Nielsen data,
> Fox News's prime-time monthly audience fell to its lowest level in
> twelve years in January among the 25-to-54 demographic. Daytime Fox News
> programming likewise saw its lowest monthly ratings in this age cohort
> since June 2008. Even the network's two biggest stars, O'Reilly and
> Hannity, have not been immune from viewer desertion: Hannity lost close
> to 50 percent of his pre-election audience in the final weeks of 2012,
> and O'Reilly more than a quarter. The slide hasn't stopped in 2013,
> either. Compared with a year ago, O'Reilly's February prime-time ratings
> dropped b(26 percent in the coveted 25-to-54 demographic, his worst
> performance since July 2008. Hannity's sank even further, to the lowest
> point in his show's history.
>
> Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson
> University who specializes in studying partisan psychology. Last May,
> Cassino conducted a survey that found Fox News's viewers were less
> informed about current political issues than those who watched no news
> at all. In response, the network's public relations team mocked FDU's
> college ranking in Forbes and belittled its student body as
> "ill-informed." This kind of ad hominem attack symbolizes the
> over-the-top, pugilistic messaging style of Ailes, whose no-holds-barred
> political instincts have dictated the network's direction since day one.
>
> Ailes's foundational idea for Fox News, explains Washington Post media
> critic Erik Wemple, was to package this bias under the guise of "fair
> and balanced" news. "It is indeed the artifice of neutrality that makes
> so much of what they do objectionable, or not just objectionable but
> noteworthy," Wemple says. And it is effective, he adds: at a recent
> Value Voters conference, rock-ribbed conservatives almost involuntarily
> spouted the network's motto back at him when he asked them about Fox's
> coverage. It's a maddeningly clever bit of misdirectionbthe network
> whose branding is most identified with objectivity and accuracy is, in
> fact, anything but.
>
> "Fox viewers are the most misled...especially in areas of political
> controversy," Chris Mooney writes in The Republican Brain, his 2012 book
> about the psychology of right-wing myths. The network's singularly
> corrosive impact on its viewers' understanding of reality, confirmed by
> numerous studies Mooney highlights in his book, is amplified by this
> "fair and balanced" motto, he says. It delegitimizes all other news
> media to create a vicious feedback loop within the right wing.
>
> "This is perfect grist for the sort of stuff Fox loves to do: 'Let's
> have a debate between somebody on the right and somebody on the far
> right,'" Bartlett explains. "That suits their agenda just fine."
> John Stuart Mill, in his famous treatise On Liberty, understood that a
> "healthy state of political life" must necessarily include "a party of
> order or stability, and a party of progress or reform." So where exactly
> the conservative movement goes from here becomes a critical issue, since
> the Republican Party isn't about to spiral into electoral irrelevance
> anytime soon. Therefore, the degree to which it is grounded in reality
> and willing to collaborate reasonably in governance should matter a
> great deal to liberals, specifically, and to our democracy in general.
>
> The devil's bargain that Ailes struck between his network and his
> politics seventeen years ago, however, looks unlikely to change within
> the foreseeable future. Fox News remains an all-too-comfortable gilded
> cage for Republicansbone that showcases the party but also shelters it
> from the slings and arrows of honest intellectual debate. One can
> rigidly confine an ideology for only so long, however, before its
> beliefs begin to ossify and its policies atrophy. It's an ironic twist:
> the more the network enables conservative ideas to stray from the
> mainstream, the less appealing the network's conservative coverage
> becomes. And after years of deeming their codependent relationship an
> unalloyed good, it's time Fox News and the Republican Party face cold
> reality. For both to enjoy long-term future success, each must recognize
> that the other isn't its salvation; instead, they're both part of the
> problem.
http://www.alternet.org/fox-news-audience-literally-dying-roger-ailes-grand-experiment-propaganda-doomed
Fox News' Audience Is Literally Dying: Is Roger Ailes' Grand Experiment in Propaganda Doomed?
There are certain demographic realities that can't be ignored.
April 17, 2013 |
The following article first appeared on the Nation. For more great content, sign up for their newsletter here.
In the annals of Fox News, October 2012 will likely stand out as a shining
moment. Buoyed by a wave of Republican optimism about Mitt Romney's
presidential campaign, the network seemed tantalizingly close to realizing
one of its key ideological goals: ousting President Obama from the White
House. Renewed enthusiasm among conservatives was, in turn, triggering
record-high ratings for much of the network's programming and helping it to
beat not just rival news competitors MSNBC and CNN during prime time, but
every other TV channel on the cable dial. What's more, the prospect of an
ascendant GOP come January meant Fox News might soon return to the era of
access and prestige it enjoyed in Washington during the presidency of
George W. Bush. The future looked so bright that News Corporation CEO
Rupert Murdoch signed Fox News president Roger Ailes to a lucrative
four-year contract extension, even though the 72-year-old Ailes's existing
contract wasn't due to expire until 2013.
Then November arrived, and with it reality.
Fox News's shellshocked election night coverage, punctuated by Karl Rove's
surreal meltdown upon hearing of Obama's victory in Ohio and, thus, the
election, capped off a historic day of reckoning for the network and
conservatives alike. Chastened by defeat, Republican politicians and
right-wing pundits have subsequently been grappling with the repercussions
of the caustic tone and incendiary rhetoric their movement has adopted.
This ongoing debate about whether broadening conservatism's appeal
requires new messages or just new messaging has ignored the 800-pound
gorilla in the room, however. Noticeably absent from all the right wing's
public self-criticism is any interest in confronting the potent role played
by the Republican Party's single most important messenger, Fox News.
Standing at the epicenter of the networkband any new Republican Party
groundswellbis Ailes. A former political operative of President Richard
Nixon, Ailes has inextricably intertwined his professional and political
pursuits since founding Fox News in 1996. Indeed, the network chief
functions as a kind of proxy kingmaker within the party, frequently meeting
with Republican politicians to offer strategic advice. He is a regular
confidant of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and at various times,
he (or a network emissary of his) has counseled 2008 GOP vice presidential
candidate Sarah Palin, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Gen. David
Petraeus on their potential future. "Ailes," says former Reagan White House
economic adviser Bruce Bartlett, "is quite open about offering his free
advice to Republicans.... If you visit New York City, you go see Roger
Ailes and kiss his ring. It's like visiting the Vatican. My guess is that
there's a lot of back-and-forth between Ailes and whoever is at the
pinnacle of power in the Republican Party."
To keep relying on a shrinking number of elderly, white and male subsets of
the public, whether to win elections or win ratings, has become a strategy
of diminishing returns, however. "I think that you can't separate the
problem at Fox [News] from the problem that the Republicans are going
through," Bartlett says. He can speak firsthand to this incestuous
relationship, as his 2006 book, Impostorbwhich broke with party orthodoxy
over the Bush administration's deficit spendingbquickly made him persona
non grata at Fox News, he says. (Fox News did not respond to questions
about his comment.) "The Republicans are trying to retool to win. That's
all they care about, and they're trying to decide, 'How can we be more
pragmatic? How can we shave off the rough edges? How can we get rid of the
whack jobs who are embarrassing us, costing us Senate seats? But at the
same time, we can't do this in such a way that it alienates our base.'" Fox
News faces a similar dilemma, Bartlett contends: "It's 'How do we
modernize? How do we attract new audiences without losing the old audience?
How do we remain relevant without abandoning our traditions?'"
These are fundamental questions, and lately Fox News's
b(fundamentalsbaudience, ratings and public trustbhave faltered. A 2010
study by Steve Sternberg found the network's viewership to be the oldest
(with an average age of 65) among an already elderly cable news audience.
(CNN's was 63 and MSNBC's was 59.) By comparison, lifestyle cable channels
Oxygen, Bravo and TLC were among the youngest, with an average viewer age
of 42. And with MSNBC's recent decision to plug 34-year-old rising star
Chris Hayes into the coveted b(8 pm slot, the average age of that network's
prime-time hosts will now be 45, while Fox News's rotation, anchored by
63-year-old Bill O'Reilly, has an average age of 57.
Having cable news's oldest average age for both prime-time hosts and
audiences represents something of a double-edged sword for Fox in the
cutthroat world of cable TV. One advantage is that older audiences are
traditionally more loyal, which is why several industry experts say that
Fox News is unlikely to be dislodged from its perch atop overall cable TV
news ratings anytime soon. This age-loyalty effect redounds to the benefit
of Fox News's best-known prime-time hosts, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly,
as roughly two-thirds of their viewers are age 50 or older, according to a
recent Pew State of the News Media survey.
But at the same time, there is an undeniable actuarial reality at workbor
as Bartlett bluntly puts it, "Their viewership is quite literally dying."
The most lucrative advertising dollars flow to TV shows that attract
viewers "in the demo," short for "demographic"bindustry parlance for people
ages 25 to 54. By contrast, Fox News's prime-time commercial breaks are
blanketed with pitches for cheap medical devices and insurance companies
aimed at retirees and the elderly. Perhaps not surprisingly, the network's
advertising rates have grown at a much more modest pace in recent years,
according to the Pew survey. Similarly, the growth of its ad revenues has
diminished every year since 2008.
Because of the relatively older age and smaller size of the cable news
audience, viewership tends to be relatively stable, says Columbia
University Journalism School professor and former NBC News president
Richard Wald. "Its [ratings] move in very small increments." To understand
why viewers come and go, he compares a TV network's audience to a target
with concentric rings. The core audiencebthose who are loyal to your
channel and watch frequently (and, for partisan media outlets, those who
are most ideologically compatible)bis the bull's-eye. Each concentric ring
outward represents a segment of the audience that is less likely to watch
because of diminished interest or less enthusiastic partisan sympathies.
Dramatic ratings shifts can occur, but they tend to be driven by external
events, like elections, rather than programming and thus affect all of the
networks simultaneously. Most ratings fluctuations are statistical noise,
Wald says, resulting from people in the outermost rings tuning in or out
based on varying interest. "I would guess that [Fox News's] numbers could
change by 5, 6, 7, 8 percent and not reflect a change in the loyalty of the
audience."
But here, too, the news does not bode well. Though the network did retain
its status as the top-rated cable news network in 2012bits eleventh
consecutive year at number onebthe steep drop in ratings that its shows
have experienced since Election Day has raised eyebrows, precisely because
corresponding shows on MSNBC and CNN have not experienced the same
precipitous decline.
Just how much of a drop are we talking about? According to Nielsen data,
Fox News's prime-time monthly audience fell to its lowest level in twelve
years in January among the 25-to-54 demographic. Daytime Fox News
programming likewise saw its lowest monthly ratings in this age cohort
since June 2008. Even the network's two biggest stars, O'Reilly and
Hannity, have not been immune from viewer desertion: Hannity lost close to
50 percent of his pre-election audience in the final weeks of 2012, and
O'Reilly more than a quarter. The slide hasn't stopped in 2013, either.
Compared with a year ago, O'Reilly's February prime-time ratings dropped
b(26 percent in the coveted 25-to-54 demographic, his worst performance
since July 2008. Hannity's sank even further, to the lowest point in his
show's history.
As Wald points out, short-term ratings snapshots can be deceptive. But in
the weeks following Obama's 2009 inauguration, Fox News's viewership
actually surged, averaging 539,000 prime-time demo viewers versus 388,000
and 357,000 for CNN and MSNBC, respectively. This past January, however,
Fox could only muster 267,000 average nightly viewersba 50 percent drop
from that 2009 level, and not much more than MSNBC's 235,000 or CNN's
200,000.
So why are all these Fox News viewers tuning out? Some of the decline may
be due to a broader cultural trend of people deciding to avoid cable TV
news altogether. However, a recent Public Policy Polling survey of news
media trustworthiness suggests there's more going on than public apathy. In
February, PPP found a marked drop in Fox News's credibility. A
record-highb(46 percent of Americans say they put no trust in the network, a
nine-point increase over 2010. What's more, 39 percent name Fox News as
their least-trusted news source, dwarfing all other news channels. (MSNBC
came in second, at 14 percent.)
As might be expected, Fox News's credibility barely budged among liberals
and moderates (roughly three-quarters of whom still distrust the network)
and very conservative viewers (three-quarters of whom still trust it).
However, among those who identified themselves as "somewhat conservative,"
the level of trust fell by an eye-opening 27 percentage points during the
previous twelve months (from a net plusb47 percent "trust" rating in 2012
to plusb20 percent now). Only a bare majority of center-right
conservatives surveyed by PPP say that Fox News is trustworthy.
"The people who are among the moderate-rights are actually the ones tuning
out most," says Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh
Dickinson University who specializes in studying partisan psychology. Last
May, Cassino conducted a survey that found Fox News's viewers were less
informed about current political issues than those who watched no news at
all. In response, the network's public relations team mocked FDU's college
ranking in Forbes and belittled its student body as "ill-informed." This
kind of ad hominem attack symbolizes the over-the-top, pugilistic messaging
style of Ailes, whose no-holds-barred political instincts have dictated the
network's direction since day one.
Ailes's foundational idea for Fox News, explains Washington Post media
critic Erik Wemple, was to package this bias under the guise of "fair and
balanced" news. "It is indeed the artifice of neutrality that makes so much
of what they do objectionable, or not just objectionable but noteworthy,"
Wemple says. And it is effective, he adds: at a recent Value Voters
conference, rock-ribbed conservatives almost involuntarily spouted the
network's motto back at him when he asked them about Fox's coverage. It's a
maddeningly clever bit of misdirectionbthe network whose branding is most
identified with objectivity and accuracy is, in fact, anything but.
"Fox viewers are the most misled...especially in areas of political
controversy," Chris Mooney writes in The Republican Brain, his 2012 book
about the psychology of right-wing myths. The network's singularly
corrosive impact on its viewers' understanding of reality, confirmed by
numerous studies Mooney highlights in his book, is amplified by this "fair
and balanced" motto, he says. It delegitimizes all other news media to
create a vicious feedback loop within the right wing.
Thanks to its loyal conservative audience and its cozy relationship with
the GOP leadership, Fox News has long been insulated from the consequences
of its serial misinforming. "If your job is to say the most outrageous
thing you possibly can and be rewarded for it, why shouldn't you?" Cassino
points out. "As long as you get ratings, you're going to keep on doing it."
But the recent erosion in ratings and cracks in the network's reputation,
Cassino says, have created external pressure to make changes inside the
network. (Neither Ailes nor anyone else at Fox News would comment when
contacted for this story.)
Most notable among these post-election changes involved Fox News ridding
itself of contributors Sarah Palin and Dick Morris and replacing them with
former Congressman and left-wing gadfly Dennis Kucinich, former GOP Senator
Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and RedState.com editor in chief Erick
Erickson. To some, this personnel turnover confirmed that Fox News was
embracing a more intellectually honest, ideologically diverse worldview.
But there's less here than meets the eye. First of all, the impact an
individual contributor can have on the network's overall nature is minimal;
permanent hosts like O'Reilly and Hannity drive its day-to-day brand. And
in the midst of the 2012 campaign, Ailes locked up O'Reilly and Hannity as
well as news host Bret Baierbthe Fox News lineup from 7 through 10 pmball
the way to 2016. What's more, one shouldn't read too much into the
cashiering of Palin and Morris, since, by all accounts, they were terrible
at their jobs: the former was criticized internally for being uncooperative
with programming suggestions and personally disloyal to Ailes, while the
latter was guilty of humiliating the network with his ridiculous election
predictions (as well as auctioning off an unauthorized personal tour of Fox
News' studios at a GOP fund-b(raiser). "They were only interested in
promoting themselves or perhaps promoting an ideology that may not win,"
says Bartlett, who singles out Palin's lack of substance for his harshest
criticism. "Totally and professionally, she's the Lindsay Lohan of cable
news."
Indeed, Ailes's new hires are little more than new faces plugged into a
well-worn programming strategy. Kucinich fills the slot of house liberal
formerly occupied by Alan Colmes, serving as a handy foil for conservatives
to shout at or over. The telegenic Brown, a blue-state Republican, endorses
textbook anti-woman Republican policies, but does so without giving off an
overtly extremist vibe. And die-hard conservative Erickson is there to
reassure the Tea Partiers and the netrootsbsome of whom inexplicably
believe that Fox News is drifting leftbthat they still have a voice on the
network.
Erickson is an interesting case. In February, not long after being hired by
Fox, he posted a refreshingly frank essay complaining that the conservative
media functions like an "echo chamber" that "peddle[s] daily outrage."
Erickson, however, was careful not to include his new employer by name. Of
course, selective indignation is something of a running theme for him.
After accusing Supreme Court Justice David Souter of bestiality and
pederasty in 2009, it took him almost a year to apologizebwaiting until
after he took a prominent pundit gig at CNN. "Erick Erickson is obviously a
whack job by the standards of a normal person," says Bartlett. "But within
the ranks of the right-wing wacko universe, he is far closer to the center
than, say, Sarah Palin, because at the bottom, he wants to win, see, where
people like Sarah Palin don't give a fuck about winning."
Winning, famously, is what drives Ailes, and Rove as well. In the aftermath
of the election, Fox instructed Rove to lie low for several weeks. But this
benching didn't last long, and by mid-b(January the network had signed him
to a new multi-year contract. Coincidentally, Rove launched a new project
geared toward finding more electable candidates for 2014 just a few weeks
later. But if the past is prologue, many of these future candidates won't
be acceptable to fellow Fox commentator Erickson. "This is perfect grist
for the sort of stuff Fox loves to do: 'Let's have a debate between
somebody on the right and somebody on the far right,'" Bartlett explains.
"That suits their agenda just fine."
In other words, the best interests of Fox News and those of the Republican
Party, though inexorably connected, aren't always aligned. The currency of
the former is ratings and of the latter, votes. "There's always a tension
between the two," says Jonathan Ladd, political science professor at
Georgetown University and author of the 2012 book Why Americans Hate the
Media and How It Matters. But because the GOP relies so heavily on Fox News
to reach its constituents and spread its message, the network exerts its
own gravitational pull on the party. "If the Republican Party wants to make
an ideological shift, if they want to modify their vision on immigration,
say, it matters a lot if Fox commentators and management are willing to go
along with that," Ladd points out.
Fox News clearly jumped out in front of the party on the immigration issue.
Only two days after Obama's re-election, Hannity, a hardline opponent of
undocumented immigrants, came out on his radio program (which is not
affiliated with Fox News) in favor of a pathway to citizenship for them. To
gun-shy Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio, who had spent 2012 opposing
just such a proposal, Hannity was sending an unmistakable signal: they
would now have some political cover on the network if they similarly
changed their public views, which Rubio quickly did. In a February article
in The New Republic, Ailes, too, made a point of striking a more moderate
tone toward Hispanics and said he dislikes the term "illegal immigrant,"
which the Fox News Latino network no longer uses. These changes of heart,
it should be noted, involve only as much courage as it takes to agree with
the owner of the company. One day after Obama's re-election and one day
before Hannity's epiphany, Rupert Murdoch had tweeted: "Must have sweeping,
generous immigration reform, make existing law-abiding Hispanics welcome."
Whether these recent, road-to-Damascus conversions are genuine or
artificial may not matter much at this point, though. Hannity and many of
his Fox News colleagues have invested so much time inciting animosity
toward "illegals" and excoriating legislative attempts at "amnesty" that
the network has acquired a reputation of harboring anti-Hispanic
tendencies. In the aforementioned PPP poll on media trustworthiness,
Hispanics ranked Fox News as their least credible news source, with a net
four-point negative rating. (Broadcast news networks all enjoyed
double-digit positive ratings.) Likewise, a National Hispanic Media
Coalition survey from last fall found that Fox News hosts were more likely
than those from any other network to negatively stereotype Latinos. It also
noted that the network's audience had the highest percentage of viewers
with negative feelings about Hispanics and undocumented immigrants.
Jim Gilmore, the former Republican governor of Virginia and current head of
the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank, warned against
just this type of demographic alienation in a January interview with
National Review. "Shrillness and extreme language are driving away the
voters who could help us build a majority," Gilmore said. When contacted
for this story, Gilmore made a point of saying that the network is "vital"
to the conservative movement and added that his critique was not an
implicit indictment of Fox News: "All I can say is that if they are doing
anything like that and polling is reflecting it, they ought to stop it,
because that would reflect badly on the Republican Party."
That Gilmore's willingness to confront the party's mistakes hasn't yet
caught up to understanding what's causing them is symbolic of the broad
dilemma confronting the conservative movement right now. The unquestioning
faith in Fox gives the network little incentive to undertake real change,
since it allows Ailes to feel confident those prodigal conservative viewers
will eventually return to the fold. While Fox still enjoys ratings
victories, albeit narrower ones, conservatives have suffered significant
losses at the ballot box in three of the past four national elections. And
they face the prospect of even more defeats if they don't lead their
movement out of the wilderness of serial misinformation and forgo the
temptation of perpetual outrage.
Arresting this descent into grand conspiracy theories and self-destructive
rancor won't be easy, though. "It makes it very difficult for guests who
are being asked about Benghazi and Solyndra to talk about concrete policy
issues," Cassino notes. Gilmore, at least, acknowledges as much. "It is our
burden to go on Fox News and give the right message," he says. "If for some
reasonbratings or whatever the reason isbthe commentators try to drag you
to a place where you ought not to be, you have to resist going there."
John Stuart Mill, in his famous treatise On Liberty, understood that a
"healthy state of political life" must necessarily include "a party of
order or stability, and a party of progress or reform." So where exactly
the conservative movement goes from here becomes a critical issue, since
the Republican Party isn't about to spiral into electoral irrelevance
anytime soon. Therefore, the degree to which it is grounded in reality and
willing to collaborate reasonably in governance should matter a great deal
to liberals, specifically, and to our democracy in general.
The devil's bargain that Ailes struck between his network and his politics
seventeen years ago, however, looks unlikely to change within the
foreseeable future. Fox News remains an all-too-comfortable gilded cage for
Republicansbone that showcases the party but also shelters it from the
slings and arrows of honest intellectual debate. One can rigidly confine an
ideology for only so long, however, before its beliefs begin to ossify and
its policies atrophy. It's an ironic twist: the more the network enables
conservative ideas to stray from the mainstream, the less appealing the
network's conservative coverage becomes. And after years of deeming their
codependent relationship an unalloyed good, it's time Fox News and the
Republican Party face cold reality. For both to enjoy long-term future
success, each must recognize that the other isn't its salvation; instead,
they're both part of the problem.
Reed Richardson most recently wrote about what political advertising means for democracy.
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