31 December 12
uffering an election hangover after having been told by Fox News that Mitt Romney's victory was a sure thing (a "landslide"
predicted by Dick Morris), some Republicans have promised to break
their addiction to the right-wing news channel in the coming year.
Vowing to venture beyond the comforts of the Fox News bubble, strategists insist it's crucial that the party address its "choir-preaching problem."
Good luck.
This grand experiment
of marrying a political movement around a cable TV channel was a grand
failure in 2012. But there's little indication that enough Republicans
will have the courage, or even the desire, to break free from Fox's firm
grip on branding the party.
For Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the network's
slash-and-burn formula worked wonders in terms of catering a hardcore,
hard-right audience of several million viewers. (Fox News is poised to post
$1 billion in profits this year.) But in terms of supporting a national
campaign and hosting a nationwide conversation about the country's
future, Fox's work this year was a marked failure.
And that failure helped sink any hopes the GOP had of winning the White House.
From the farcical, underwhelming GOP primary
that Fox News sponsored, through the general election campaign, it
seemed that at every juncture where Romney suffered a major misstep, Fox
misinformation hovered nearby. Again and again, Romney damaged his
presidential hopes when he embraced the Fox News rhetoric; when he ran
as the Fox News Candidate. READ MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment