In other words, Megyn Kelly won the battle but lost the war:
As of mid-February, the perception of Fox News Channel among conservatives was at a three-year low, YouGov BrandIndex reports.
The slide among Republican adults age eighteen and older, coincided with the first GOP presidential debate hosted by Fox News in early August, when front-runner Donald Trump clashed with moderator Megyn Kelly....
The scale used by the firm, called a Buzz score, allows people to give scores ranging from 100 to -100, with zero being a neutral perception. Respondents are asked, "If you've heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?
On January 1st, 2013, Fox News' Buzz score with Republican adults was 49. It had dropped to 38 by the first GOP debate last year.
The fall accelerated this year, dropping to 36 on January 18th, and to 14 on February 12th.
The reason why Fox News has always been embraced by the Right is not because they were the "conservative news network" - because, historically, they haven't been - but rather that Fox was, as their tagline says, "fair and balanced". They had and have liberal commentators, but there were conservative commentators and programs. There wasn't just a token rightie on the panel once a week that was single-handedly trying to take on an army of libs; conservatives got a fair shake and a legitimate chance to get their message out.
Fox was fair and balanced.
Donald Trump has changed all that. With the exception of Megyn Kelly and intermittently with Bill O'Reilly, every other Fox host, show, and commentator is completely in the tank for Trump. For - and now there's a reason to use this term that I heretofore passionately disdained - True conservatives, tuning in FNC is as disorientating and vertigo-inducing as the rest of Trumpmania. It's like Job losing his wealth and his entire family (except his wife, which would correspond metaphorically with Megyn Kelly) in a single afternoon. The Right has won elections and lost elections, lost ground and gained ground, but we have never in the three and a half decades I've followed American politics lost our identity, our collective soul.
Donald Trump is not a conservative or a Republican, he's a liberal Democrat, and perhaps even a Dixiecrat. He represents everything the Right has ever opposed and existed to stamp out, politically and culturally. And yet he's become the Republican Obama, and is taking over our party and almost every cultural beachhead we've ever managed to attain, right before our very eyes. Bill Clinton never managed that. Even Barack Obama never pulled that off. Trump is the ultimate enemy within, the terminal, inoperable stage-4 cancer that the Republican Party cannot survive and will keep the Old American Republic moldering in its grave, with no more vehicle by and with which to resurrect it.
And Fox, aside from Megyn Kelly, is his mouthpiece - and the only one he's going to have after March 15th at the latest. Which will make FNC even more unwatchable than it's become already, The Kelly File alone excepted.
Fox News is no longer fair and balanced. And that, of course, is their choice.
They simply have....
1 comment:
I didn't fully realize it until reading your blog, but I've been doing more channel surfing to other cable news networks lately, especially when Fox starts covering Trump. If other conservatives that automatically tuned to Fox News in the past are doing same thing I am they may discover something they like in CNN and even (gasp!) MSNBC that they wouldn't have ever noticed had Fox not alienated them so much.
Perhaps it's just my luck when tuning in, or it's a strategy, but I could swear MSNBC is becoming softening it's liberalism and being more friendly to conservatives in their coverage.
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