Philip Bump of the Washington Post says that the marketplace for fantasy is reshaping conservative media, just like it reshaped conservative politics:
With the clarity of retrospect, one can see how Fox News got into its current predicament. For the duration of President Trump’s time in office — and, of course, well before that — the network tried to find a middle ground between establishment Republican reality and the virulent right-wing rhetoric bubbling on social media and in conservative blogs. It’s a somewhat tricky dance, but it’s generally feasible. There’s usually enough gray area around reality to both cover what happened with one eyebrow raised and to allow the audience-generating “opinion” folks in the evenings to run without leashes. There’s usually a way to provide something palatable to both those who want actual news presented through a conservative lens and those who simply want politics-based soap operas offered with a veneer of authenticity.
He goes on to show how Trump made it into a loyalty test as he does with everything,
Over the past few years, Fox News has had two challengers nipping at its heels: One America News and Newsmax. The former is a pro-Trump video channel offered with a cable-news-like aesthetic. The latter is an outgrowth of a right-wing website that similarly couches fervently pro-Trump coverage within a newsy package. Each made a deliberate calculation last month: It was more useful to deny Trump’s loss than to accept it. So viewers of either channel are repeatedly told that the settled issue is not settled and that Trump’s baseless and debunked claims about fraud are substantial and awaiting a court’s verdict.
Trump noticed this and began hyping the Fox alternatives to his millions of Twitter followers. His followers listened, with Newsmax and OAN gaining viewers at Fox News’s expense, according to a recent poll. On Monday, something once unthinkable happened: Newsmax’s 7 p.m. program with anchor Greg Kelly got more viewers in the key marketing demographic than Fox News’s show in the same time slot.
Cable news ratings have been an obsession of Trump’s for years, including while he’s been president. He’s tweeted about ratings more than 140 times as president, often to hail how well Fox News was doing against CNN or MSNBC, its hated rivals. He used ratings variations as a cudgel, demanding that Fox News show more fealty to his worldview or pay the consequences.
“Don’t know why [Fox News] wants to be more like” its competitors, he tweeted last December. “They’ll all die together as other outlets take their place. Only pro Trump Fox shows do well. Rest are nothing. How’s Shep doing?” — a reference to Shepard Smith, one of Fox News’s few obviously objective anchors who eventually left the network.
At the time, this seemed like little more than an effort to cow Fox News into being even more obsequious. But there’s an obvious kernel of truth to what Trump was arguing: Fealty to Trump at the expense of objectivity and truth is, in fact, one strategy for success. It made Trump himself successful, after all, along with Fox opinion hosts who, for months on end, were dominating their rivals.
But Republicans are moving over to the rivals and suddenly CNN is winning in the ratings war. Maybe that’s how it’s going to be with Fox trying lameley to pretend it still has some credibility while the other networks just careen off into Lala land.
That’s not a certainty, of course. One can vacuum up viewers by telling them what they want to hear, clearly, but that doesn’t make a business successful. Are advertisers going to want to invest in a network that spreads conspiracy theories and debunked claims with the wantonness of OAN? Will OAN and Newsmax try to moderate their choir-preaching to expand their audiences and appeal to people beyond die-hards like My Pillow?
Trump doesn’t really care about any of this, of course. He cares about promoting his worldview and rhetoric without a filter and leveraging misinformation to his benefit. He doesn’t care if there’s a bizarre cult of people who believe that prominent people are involved in child-sex trafficking, as long as they support him personally. What matters is Trump, followed by what Trump wants, followed, as needed, by reality.
But this is a problem. It is a problem that Fox News viewers are abandoning the network for a ship unmoored to reality. It is a problem that, as a result, Fox News seems to be moving more in that direction, including by expanding the footprint of its opinion hosts like Tucker Carlson. Carlson last month told his audience that his “reporting and analysis” would soon more fully permeate the network, a prediction that seems to be coming to fruition.
It is a problem that surreality is being presented as a valid contrast to reality, including by the president of the United States. On Wednesday morning, Trump complained about news coverage of the Supreme Court declining to throw out the results of the vote in Pennsylvania.
“How can you have a presidency when a vast majority think the election was RIGGED?” Trump asked on Twitter.
It’s a good question and one that doesn’t depend on the fact that there is no credible evidence at all that the election was rigged in any substantive way. How can you have a presidency — a country — when a large part of the population (though hardly the “vast majority”) declines to accept obvious realities? When media outlets leverage the desire for nonsense by elevating more nonsense? When there are robust market forces pushing money and votes and attention away from what’s objectively happening?
I guess we’ll see.
I guess we will. And I guess we’ll also see how long Fox can hold out from going completely QAnon 24/7.
My question is just how many of these people really believe what they are saying and doing or whether it’s all an elaborate game to make money or own the libs. Or maybe just have fun. I honestly don’t know. And maybe it doesn’t matter. What’s happening is dangerous regardless of whether or not they really believe what they are doing.