Fox No Longer “Trumpy” Enough
First, here’s the good news – since the election, CNN is beating Fox News in average viewers. Now the bad news – Fox and CNN both are losing to Newsmax. Why? Fox isn’t “Trumpy” enough for the red hats, but still unwatchable for normal people. Newsmax and an even worse OAN have taken over the alt-right folks who are abandoning Fox in droves as more of their anchors have acknowledged that Trump has no chance of stealing the election from Biden. If you’ve never watched Newsmax and OAN, don’t bother. By way of description, if Fox News is manure, Newsmax and OAN are nuclear waste. They have created a Superfund site of toxic and deadly conspiracy theories, gross exaggerations, and freeform lying. And Trumpists lap it up. Since the election CNN has averaged 1.73 million viewers, more than double a year ago. Fox News Channel averaged 1.56 million and MSNBC 1.53 million viewers. More important, Newsmax, a safe haven for delusional Trumpists to hide from gravity and arithmetic, Newsmax beat Fox for the first time ever. Newsmax commentators, even today, continue to peddle the lies that Trump is going to prevail over Biden.
Newsmax and OAN (as well as some remaining Fox programming) engage in prodigious lying, creating toxic propaganda that has now made it impossible for normal people to engage their viewers in any kind of productive debate. In recent days, I’ve attempted discourse with several people, and it’s like arguing with an audio recording that’s running backwards. These folks have bought in to the Dominion fairytale, the suitcases full of ballots narrative, and even the new “Office of the President-Elect” story ignoring the decades of the use of that term. Even talking to these folks is exhausting because you simply can’t make any progress.
Even though Trump will soon be hiding at Mar a Lago and fighting criminal and civil charges in New York, the damage he inflicted and made recovery of our democracy even more remote. I personally don’t see a route to recovery.
The Carroways have looked into moving as a lark, but there is just too much tying us here. If I were a casual observer this might be interesting. If Fox tumbles then who takes over giving the right marching orders? A battle between Newsmax and OAN will insue. If Trump joins forces with one of them then it could be game over for the other. Of course, he could launch his own and then really send them into a spiral.
The bind they put themselves into is that the base has made it impossible to win a primary without them. Yet, it’s difficult to win statewide elections in some states with that trail of garbage running behind you.
1I got my first computer in 1991 – when the internet was primitive and I rarely bothered with it.
Newsmax noticed anyway. It recruited me through my newly created email address. I looked in on it, iirc, for two days running then ignored it.
But Newsmax didn’t ignore me — it kept sending me come-ons for months — maybe even a year. I’m not sure how long because somewhere in there I learned how to send unwanted mail to a spam file. Who knows? It might be lurking in there to this day.
All this is to say it’s insidious. And persistent. Perhaps because it’s a purely internet animal, it has to be to get any sort of audience.
2This is one of those things parents need to warn their children about when they start surfing the net.
If we raise taxes on billionaires, they will have less disposable income to fund these vanity media outlets.
Meanwhile, we need to boycott any company advertising on these travesty channels.
3I check in on Fox every day or so. My visits are random and brief but they have yet to hit anything but election denial. The apostasy of Fox seems overwrought.
Most ex-Foxers sink without a trace: Beck, Kelly, O’Reilly. Trump would probably float a bit longer but I expect he would lose his attraction as he lost his power.
The idea that Trump will start his own network is laughable. Ailes no doubt had to work hard to get Fox up, and I have personal knowledge of how difficult it was for Robertson to establish his network.
The idea that Trump would, for the first time in his life, apply himself to work is absurd.
As for Nick’s last line, as I have said for years, Trumpism is just McCarthyism. The Old Guard Republicans managed to submerge their McCarthyists for a time. Now that wing of the party has vanished.
The rump, a svelte one, left with the Lincoln Project. The only path is for a third party, modeled on Old Guard Republicanism, to bootstrap itself and, perhaps, eventually drive the Trumpist faction into the wilderness.
I have been waiting for someone (Kasich?) to annunce a new party, but so far as I know, there has not been any effort in this direction.
I assume they think it would be easier to recapture the existing party, but there seems to be no realistic chance of that.
If Kasich is ever going to do it, he will act soon. He was shaking with rage on Cuomo Prime Time Wednesday night (the opening segment is worth looking up.)
4Harry Eagar @ 4:
“The only path is for a third party, modeled on Old Guard Republicanism, to bootstrap itself and, perhaps, eventually drive the Trumpist faction into the wilderness.”
I fear you may be giving the former R’s too much credit.
The folks who fled the Republican party this year need only invade the Democratic party — which has an apparatus that is already up and running.
A whole lot of them were people like Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt, Michael Steele and Mitt Romney, people who were big-wigs in a well established party. They won’t be content to sit down and shut up. They will actively work to remake the Democratic party over into Republican 2.2.
And why wouldn’t they? The top Democrats have already met them halfway. My party has been moving to the right for far too long as it attempted to capture those people who were turned off by the rightward lurches their own party has been taking for decades.
It’s going to be up to the Warrens and Porters and AOC’s — and us — to go found our own party because, if we don’t, the nation will degenerate into a single-party system consisting of erstwhile Republicans, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Manchin et al.
And we all know what single-party nations devolve into.
5Rush Limbaugh said today “There cannot be a peaceful coexistence” between liberals and conservatives: “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession”
From reading this thread I’m not sure if there can be peaceful coexistence between Fox conservatives, Newsmax conservatives, and OAN conservatives. As a liberal I think I’ll just sit back and watch them fight it out.
6twocrows I call myself a New Dealer (the last one). Democrats look back longingly at FDR’s huge coalition, forgetting that about a third of it was the Solid South, which did not at all like what the national party was up to. These began seceding.
There were two broadly similar parties until Nixon went to the South and made it possible for Solid South Democrats to move to their natural home in the GOP.
The Voting Rights Act was tipping point. After that the Javits wing of the Republicans died out and the Democrats were free to become a liberal party.
Thus polarization.
But it turns out the country is not very left in sentiment, a fact obscured by attention to national politics. It is not an aberration that rightwingers have been mopping up state legislatures, school boards and sheriffs.
I do not think the Republican Party can possibly escape from its structure, which gives a small group control through voting in primaries. The democrats had largely escaped this problem but have not understood the problem of primaries.
If the party apparat falls to the squadristas, the Democrats will be as incapable of political maneuvering as the Republicans are.
I see Biden as the best available centrist but not nearly as much of a bruiser as the time calls for.
7It’s like I was saying Monday. Qanon are pushing their narrative so far into batshit crazy territories, they’re painting liberals as creatures so vile Tolkien would’ve had a hard time finding a place in Mordor’s organizational charts.
8Pushing the new middle so far to the right that Limbaugh starts looking measured, reasonable and balanced.
Not to us. But to millions who get their worldviews from Likes and retweets, it’s just more of the same. Repugnantly absurd? Absolutely.
But 2 of ’em are in Congress now.
The batshit crazy things they say on the floor of the House will be in historical records as the voices of the democraticly elected representatives of at least some of the American people. And no doubt will be rebutted in the same public records. Giving them even more attention.
Oxygen.
Let that percolate for a bit.
“There cannot be a peaceful coexistence” is false equivalency to the point of gaslighting when seen as it really is. When framed by the Stephen Miller-style social media universe, it’s thoughtful consideration.
Newsmax did come up … but the article I saw said there was a Newsmax win for a couple of hours, especially if you looked at key audience of 25 to 54 years old.
But:
“Nielsen ratings show that Fox’s overall ratings are much higher than Newsmax’s. “Among viewers of all ages, Fox averaged 1.36 million viewers around the clock on Monday, while Newsmax averaged 316,000 viewers,”
Nielsen data show Newsmax didn’t do as well in the last week of November as it did earlier in the month.”
9Harry Eagar @4:
Trump would be the figurehead, the ribbon cutter, the “name” for the organization.
Actual work of getting the network up and going would be pushed back to people who know a bit more about media … producers of The Apprentice, possibly getting some of the fired people from Fox, maybe luring one of the Trumpiest fox hosts over by making him or her an offer they couldn’t refuse and bring the team from that show along with them. Plus, Rush’s crew is going to need someone else to do sometime soon, so perhaps they can get sucked over.
I keep having the thought that Trump might be the centerpiece/attraction which would provide a rationale for a formal or informal synergy among whack media … newsmax, oann, sinclair, breitbart, enquirer, etc. Cable/broadcast tv/radio/newspapers/news aggregation … Trump could have the draw to make them overlook past feuds and competititve impulses which kept them apart.
10