"Stop Beating a Dead Fox"

Frank Rich has written an interesting piece in New York Magazine that concludes that Fox News is basically in a death spiral of its own making.  Moreover, he believes that progressives would be well served by embracing Fox News for its ability to keep a certain section of the right ill informed about the world and thus incapable of mounting a serious challenge within that world as a result.  Also, because more and more of the base of the right feels the same disdain for Fox News as does the liberal left, the left would be better off focusing on countering this other branch of conservative politics.  As Rich concludes:

Without Ailes and his Fox News to kick around anymore, the left may feel a bit disoriented—much as the right most certainly will once its unifying bête noire (literal and figurative), Obama, is gone from the White House. But while the right remains obsessed with fighting its unending war against a nearly lame-duck president, it behooves liberals to move on and start transitioning out of their Fox fixation. Paradoxically enough, the most powerful right-wing movement in the country, the insurgency in the Republican grassroots, loathes the Boehner-Christie-Rove-centric Fox News nearly as much as the left does. The more liberals keep fighting the last war against the more and more irrelevant Ailes, the less prepared they’ll be for the political war to come.

It is worth the read.

27 January 2014