We have all taken great glee and delight in witnessing and remarking on the slow, but steady fall of Fox News. The scandal ridden departure of Roger Ailes, the shame faced slinking off of Bill O’Reilly to a permanent “vacation”, the surging of MSNBC to ratings superiority in the prime time viewing hours. Progressive nirvana.
But trying to unravel the reason for the prospective death spiral of Fox is harder to glimpse, after all, there can be a multitude of reasons for the rise and fall of particular programs, or even networks. After all, Megyn Kelly got beaten out in the ratings game by a rerun of “America’s Funniest Home Video’s” for her Alex Jones interview on Sunday. But what if the steady fall of Fox is due to a completely outside influence, and one beyond their control?
Jared Sexton at the Daily Beast is a traveling reporter, and in his new article he chronicles a change that he has seen in conservatives over the last two years. And that change has a name, Donald J. Trump. It appears, at least to Sexton that Hair Furor has actually supplanted Fox as pretty much the only incoming information these poor benighted souls receive. In one interaction with a Trump supporter at his local bar, the guy whipped out his smart phone and showed Sexton Trump tweet after tweet to buttress his position. And he isn't the first time Sexton has noticed this;
This interaction, with a handful of others over the course of my trip, only confirmed what I’ve been seeing more of during my reporting. In the past, when interacting with conservatives or overhearing their conversations, I’d always heard Fox News talking points, the same ones that former head Roger Ailes famously used to send out every morning in an effort to determine the country’s narrative. But in the past year something had changed: Conservatives were receiving their cues directly from Trump and his family, or else from alternative media companies like Infowars and Breitbart.
Ain’t that a kick in the ass? FOX almost singlehandly gave Trump his start, legitimizing him out of a crowded field of 17 primary candidates, and unlimited, fawning face time on demand, even over the phone when he couldn’t be bothered to go down to the studio. And what is Trump’s gratitude? To lump them into the “fake news” wallow along with the rest of the media pigs. Why not, he didn’t need them anymore, his followers were hooked on his twitter feeds instead, may as well cut out the middleman. And it has obviously had an effect, whether intended by Trump or not on FOX’s operation. At least as far as his followers are concerned, FOX is now obsolete, they get their information and marching orders directly from Trump himself or his surrogates.
Sexton bluntly compares the interaction between Trump and his followers to that of a cult. He reminds us of the time in 2015 when Trump belittled John McCain’s hero status by saying McCain was no hero, as well as the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tapes. In both cases, traditional wisdom was that this was a kill shot for his candidacy, yet both times Trump’s numbers spiked instead, and interviews with supporters had several of them directly parroting Trump’s tweets and statements by calling into account the complaining women’s ages and looks.
Sexton ends where he started, in the bar, sitting next to the Trump fan, watching the Comey testimony. At one point the man said “This is what they do”. Sexton asked him who “they” were, and what they were “doing”. Answer there came thus;
“The globalists,” he said, borrowing a derogatory phrase that’d made its rounds on the Alex Jones radio show and could be used to refer to anyone Trump’s supporters perceived as standing in the way of his agenda, including his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law, Jared, whom my stool neighbor had called “Globalist Jared” before denying reports of clandestine meetings with Russia as “phony,” one of the president’s favorite phrases. “They’re trying to take down a great man. That’s what they do. The president said it himself. They’re cowardly.”
If what Sexton has noted and deduced is true, then FOX is truly in big trouble. As far as his most ardent supporters are concerned, Trump is it. Whether he is impeached, resigns, or gets defeated in 2020, he is their Godhead. They are never coming back to FOX. For better or worse, they are no longer “Republicans” or even “Conservatives” they are now card carrying Trombies. And FOX already had a big problem with the aging demographic of their most loyal viewers. If Sexton’s case is correct, then FOX is going to have to either revamp their entire programming strategy to mainstream it, or in the next 10-20 years they will go the way of the dookie bird.