The Fox News Channel Has Been Horrible For Conservatism

So says John Ziegler at Mediaite:

… It is what the Fox News phenomenon has done to the dynamics of the conservative movement, in my opinion, that have been the most corrosive aspects of the network.

In short, what Fox News did was isolate conservative television “news” and opinion all in one place. This was a great business model but it eliminated the need for “mainstream” outlets to appeal to conservatives and thus liberals strengthened their grip on the majority of “news” outlets.

This not only created a dangerous bubble for conservatives, but it also facilitated a “star system” for conservative leaders which dramatically valued entertainment value over substance.

It’s an excellent point that goes hand-in-hand with what we have written about here many times. We see the polarization of this country and it’s hard to put a bead on exactly why this is the case, but to me this feels like a significant part of it.

When you are a conservative and have your own “conservative outlets,” it’s easy to fall into the trap of preferring to be showcased on those conservative outlets. But all that does is tend to make you known only to conservatives, and the “liberal outlets” become progressively less and less diverse in thought as they lose all but their leftist contributors.

Similarly, we as the consumers of the above news outlets tend to listen to what reinforces our beliefs rather than challenges them. Very few humans do otherwise.

As I mentioned above, we’ve discussed this topic before. But it’s a tough problem to fix even if you can properly diagnose it. Even if you could wave a wand to get rid of FNC, the advent of the Internet has preemptively invalidated any attempt that might be made to get everyone all onto a fewer number of outlets. Everyone can voluntarily make their own niche blog, and people can voluntarily choose to patron that one, single blog and nothing else.

Compounding the issue, that which is entertaining is often not terribly informative, and those things that are very informative are most often not very entertaining. This is why you get loud, insubstantial louts like O’Reilly on primetime, but FA Hayek would never even get a 30 minute slot, were he alive today. It’s why FNC looks like it does, rather than looking like CSPAN, for example. And we have long suspected that media outlets (not just FNC) run the segments that they do based on what will bring in ad revenue, and cater to their target demo, rather than what is actually newsworthy.

What do you guys think?