Keep on Hatin'

"Crazy, isn't it? It just goes to show you how low our standards are." -- End-of-the-world-preaching CNN anchor Glenn Beck, on seeing his ratings jump 84 percent this year.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the supposed "demise" of Fox News, and the return of legitimate competition to an information landscape that for many years now has been dominated by the network of Bill O'Reilly and Brit Hume.

If you look closely you will find a wealth of news analysis pieces about this very phenomenon rocketing around the Internet and in the media/entertainment sections of the various major daily newspapers. This is because media critics are using the end of the year to gloat anew about the fallout from this year's election season -- now almost universally interpreted as a catastrophe not only for the Republican Party, but for Fox's much-loathed bullies of the media world, who for years looked like a threat to eventually put every milquetoast broadcast hack east of Bob Costas out of a job.

The tone of these news analyses makes me a little nervous. I get the sense that there are a great many people in our business who would like to believe that America's media consumers are somehow "tired of hate" and are moving en masse from an invective-based news paradigm back to the supposed old standards of "objectivity" and "nonpartisan reporting." At the very least, the critics of our business are rushing to interpret the rise of now-formidable Fox competitors like Murrow-esque former ESPN wiseguy Keith Olbermann and yukster apocalypse merchant Glenn Beck as something other than a case of adaptive imitation. Some say that networks like CNN have struck back by presenting the news with "personal flair" or "attitude"; others believe that the Fox ratings dip (a 21 percent decline in total viewers compared with the last quarter of 2005) is just a reflection of viewer sentiment toward a flailing White House that is closely tied in the public imagination to Rupert Murdoch's information empire. In the latter view, the recent blow to Fox is a cautionary tale about what happens when a news network ties its economic fortunes to a political ideology; that network then becomes a prisoner to the whims and policies of individual politicians, in this case the increasingly unpopular George W. Bush.

There is obviously a tremendous moral argument to be made here -- that Fox News stepped into an ethical minefield when it scored huge ratings supporting the Iraq invasion, a decision that soon after left it under enormous pressure to vindicate White House policy by sugarcoating the spiraling Iraq disaster. This is supposedly why commercial news networks are supposed to stay out of the politics business; you back the wrong horse, you end up sharing the same bottle of glue.

That is why the recent ratings reshuffle is being celebrated so loudly in the media world. In a business where ethics stopped being an important consideration for news directors 50 years ago, the blow to Fox is being seen as an overdue expression of capitalist justice, a punishment to the network that abandoned the true mission of the news business (providing objective news to consumers) and a reward to the Lou Dobbses and Anderson Coopers of the world who at least remained in the ballpark of non-partisan truth, whatever that is.

Sadly, this is bullshit, and we all know it. What happened this year was not an abatement of the Fox phenomenon. It was a super-acceleration of the Fox era. This idea that what Fox is selling is a specific policy or ideology is a myth that is going to be furthered in every corner of the media landscape. What Fox has been selling in the last 10 years is a formula for building and retaining a mass media demographic. The formula is Blame, Hate, Coalesce: You address the widest possible political demographic, blame their problems on a numerically smaller group, and then you solidify the collective identity of the first group by feeding them a regular and addictive diet of warnings and dire threats to their existence. Every FAIR-reading media-savvy lefty knows how this works; you take aim at the religious middle class, for instance, and you plaster their evening news shows with pictures of queers in bridal gowns tongue-kissing in some reviled Leninist paradise like Massachusetts or San Francisco. Surround that news story with jazzy ads for products Joe Q. Layoff can no longer afford to buy (displayed by huge-chested models he will later see on the cover of a celebrity mag arm-in-arm with someone slimmer and richer than himself) and you have a perfectly addictive media formula, a neatly profitable little cycle of fear, titillation and self-loathing that never needs to be broken.