At first the piece from The Raw Story seemed like a joke, “Tea Party group boycotting Fox News for becoming ‘too liberal’”. When realizing it was in fact not a joke it was necessary to find out exactly why the Tea Party thought Fox News was going Liberal. Here is what the Daily Beast reported one of the participants in the boycott had to say.
Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.
In other words they are boycotting Fox News because Fox News decided to lay off the Benghazi lies. They are boycotting Fox News because Roger Ailes is “retooling” to prevent the total irrelevance of Fox News as a news organization.
Any expectation that Fox News is Liberal or has any affinity for the President should have been dispelled by the coverage they gave to President Obama in Israel. President Obama received the highest civilian Israeli award, the Israeli Medal of Distinction, and while that was being covered they were attacking the President’s commitment to Israel and his Affordable Health Care bill.
This is yet another example of an unhinged Tea Party, a group that lives completely in an alternate state of reality. They have no new ideas to move the country forward, yet they continue to fight old battles. Michelle Bachman, another Tea Party relic lambasted the Affordable Care Act as a bill that kills just last week. It seems this is the type of reporting the Tea Party wants Fox News to continue. Was it not enough that Fox News had them all believing Mitt Romney would win in a landslide even as he lost decisively?
So what are the boycotters demanding? BuzzFeed reports that:
Among the demands the protesters have is that Fox News “be the right-wing CBS News: to break stories, to break information, and to do what news organizations have always done with such stories: break politicians,” that the network have at least one segment on Benghazi every night on two of its prime-time shows; that Fox similarly devote investigative resources to discovering the truth of Obama’s birth certificate; and that the network cease striving to be “fair and balanced.”
To them it is no longer about news. It is about the stories they want Fox News to tell. Fox News should have expected this. After all it is the game they have been playing throughout the Obama administration lest we forget “death panels”, “throwing grandma overboard”, “government takeover of healthcare”, and many other fallacies they promoted with help from Tea Party sponsoring organizations.
It is unlikely this boycott will have an effect on Fox News in the short term. The only threat to Fox News is a dilution of its base by having an alternate TV Broadcast network. Fox News has been able to dominate because it has no competition. A TV station to the left or right of Fox News would likely do that. Well it seems that is about to occur as the conservative station, One America News Network, is slated to to launch this year. For now Rush, Blade, Breitbart, & Drudge will have to do. There are still many places for them get information to remain willfully ignorant.
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What any commercial (has ads) broadcaster (MSNBC or Fox or alphabet networks) is doing with content is to 1) entertain viewers, 2) make them (viewers) emotionally upset (negatively works more strongly than positively), 3) about things they have no way of affecting or WHICH DON’T ACTUALLY EXIST or stuff about which the on-air talent is misinforming them, then, 4) show them ads for stuff that promise to make them feel good. Whether Fox or MSNBC (or whatEVAR) is left, right, libertarian, or born-again mugwump, is pretty-much irrelevant. If orders come down from the front office to reverse the network’s perceived political stance, the on-air talent sends their scripts back for re-write and carries on. Fox “News” is just the most overt and obvious about applying this template.