Pursuing the Guilty, But Guilty of What?
Okay, I’ve read this one a couple times, and I still don’t quite get it. Maybe I’ve been going full-bore for more days than I should.
Republicans and Fox News are moving to purge the controversial political creatures they created.
Both were damaged badly in 2012 by loud, partisan voices that stoked the base — but that scared the hell out of many voters. Now, the GOP, with its dismal image, and Fox News, with its depressed ratings in January, are scrambling to dim those voices.
They mention Sarah Palin and Dick Morris not renewing their contracts, and then talk about the Karl Rove effort to keep “electable” republicans from getting primary challenges. Okay, whatever.
For establishment Republicans, this is all about survival, after two straight elections that saw extremely conservative candidates blow Senate races Republicans should have won. For Fox, it’s about credibility: The cable network, while still easily the top-ranked in news, has seen its ratings dip since the election, in part, conservatives tell us, because a lot of Republicans felt duped by the coverage.
I seem to recall that Republicans also ran two very moderate candidates with little backing from their supposed base in California, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. They lost, too. While a Republican losing in California shouldn’t be a shock, you can’t blame the Tea Party for that one. This isn’t Republicans losing because they’re radical. This is Republicans losing because they can’t run a campaign and don’t have the intelligence on the ground that the Democrats do.
As to the Fox news part, whatever. Fox regularly ranks with entertainment-focused networks on cable, and a small slip in the ratings when they’re already beating the other news networks doesn’t seem like a wholesale change to me. If the audience isn’t happy with a set of personalities, then they’ll move on. I’ll admit that I’ve been watching less Fox these days, but that’s more to the fact that I’ve been on the road than any conspiracy to dislike Sarah Palin (who I still like). If anything, we’re all tired of politics right now, and anyone with a strong opinion one way is going to be ignored. How come the article doesn’t mention all the changes going on at the other news networks? Oh, right, because that would ruin the narrative.
So, okay, we’ll be moving on to some new voices. I wonder if they’ll end up getting told to pick a side, rather than doing informed debate?
