I find myself forgetting it every time I watch particularly good cable or network television. I'll be going along, enjoying what I'm seeing, focused on it. Then at the next commercial break the banality hits me like a slap to the face. No, I have to remind myself, they aren't there simply to annoy the hell out of me; their presence is the whole point. That drivel is what I'm supposed to be watching, and I daren't look away, my potential attention is what fuels the whole works.
I won't give them any. I'll look away, their potential be damned. Or better yet I'll change the channel, as much to voice my dissatisfaction as to silence the commercials' insufferable blather. It irks me to no end to have these stupid segways in what can, sometimes, otherwise be termed great entertainment. But that's how the rig works, that's how it's rigged. That's how they pay their bills. And my displeasure and its subsequent consequences are accounted for in the algorithm. That's why occasionally I will see one which makes me laugh. They know they piss me off, and on the macro- scale viewer displeasure and inattention is everything to them.
More below the fold.
What does this have to do with Fox News? Everything.
Eyes are their fuel, just like all the others, and the more eyes who look away the more they must alter their methods of obtaining that fuel. The bottome line is; more and more eyes are looking away from the Republican Party. The polls all show it, and to those of us in the reality based community it is perfectly obvious. The party of Lincoln is gone, as is the party of T.R. and Ike, hell even the party of Nixon and Reagan is gone. What remains and still calls itself The Republican Party has completely lost it; they've gone all the way around the bend, my friend. As the rest of the world looks on with a mixture of horror, pity and wry amusement the goodship GOP has just had a nasty encounter with an iceberg, and the American public is watching the whole sickening thing happen in HD. She's going down and nothing's going to stop her. What's more, it's no secret that that ship has many friends among the faces at Fox News trying like hell to bail it out. Try as they might, they can't bail out the whole North Atlantic.
They may style their trade as "fair and balanced" news, but their politically unfair and unbalanced slant becomes clear as you read their primetime line-up. Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Sustern, repeat. One could go further and find more examples of their slant, but those three are plenty. Those people are by their own admission unapologetically right-wing, and they comprise Fox's weekday primetime spots. Fair and balanced?
As more and more people turn away from the right-wing, Fox News must do the same, and it must realize it's first order of business: fire those three Republican talking-point Xerox machines and replace them with people like Shephard Smith.
I don't know about Rupert Murdoch, I don't know about the Koch brothers, but I know what a television network does, what it's shareholders want.
$$$$$$
What brings the eyes is what is on the air. Nothing more nothing less. And eyes are turning away from the Republican Party, by the millions.
As things stand now Fox News' fuel is running out unless it switches to alternate sources. It seems to me extremely likely, given that a television network's drive for survival is scarcely less strong than its drive for profits, that following this election, and following the utter defeat of Mitt Romney and the GOP wherein it is revealed how the American public really feels about those old farts in the Republican Party, things will change a great deal as concerns Fox News' relationship to that Party.
They'll make a dramatic course change, or they'll sink with the GOP to the vast abyssal plain of history.
Maybe Cameron will make a movie.