Fox News Dumps Sarah Palin!

Some have conjectured that with Rupert Murdoch's handing over the reigns of his media empire to his sons does not bode well for Roger Ailes and Fox News.  Whether that will prove accurate remains to be seen, but today Fox News took a first step towards improving the quality of its programming: it did not renew it contract with the idiot of the North, Sarah Palin.  Sadly, I suspect that Palin will still make a living hawking her ignorance and bigotry to pockets of the Republican Party base.  Nonetheless, Palin's platform will be much reduced and, if we are lucky, the mainstream media will increasingly ignore her.  A piece in Salon looks at Palin receiving her walking papers.  Here are highlights:

In 2010, Fox News announced with great fanfare that it had hired Sarah Palin as a contributor. On Wednesday morning, Politico’s Mike Allen informed his readers that her days with the network were through — and that she’d actually severed ties with Fox nearly a month ago. The former conservative superstar had found her tenure at the leading conservative news outlet quietly smothered with a pillow.

The reasons for the split are easy enough to divine. Fox News must have decided that it wasn’t worth paying Sarah Palin a very large sum of money (her first contract was worth $1 million a year) to ramble on incoherently, especially when Sarah Palin isn’t what she used to be. The network’s core viewership is ultra-loyal — the only thing that makes a stalwart Fox News viewer disappear is death — and unlikely to switch to CNN just because Palin isn’t around as much as she used to be. Any way you look at it, Fox News needs Palin far less than Palin needs Fox News.

[W]hen Palin took herself out of contention [in 2012], a large part of her attractiveness to Ailes evaporated. To make matters worse, she enraged him by breaking the news on Mark Levin’s radio show, not Fox News.

Things got so bad after that that Palin was reduced to publicly complaining when her appearances got canceled. Relations haven’t improved much since then, even after Fox News signed a new contract with Palin in 2013. Her most memorable appearance in the years since was when she went on Megyn Kelly’s show and delivered a monologue about everything and nothing, which was incomprehensible even by her paltry standards.

What’s more, the political landscape has shifted in fundamental ways since her heyday.  . . . . Even Fox News itself seems to be moving away from those days, at least superficially. Its big star now is Megyn Kelly, who is positioning herself as an independent-minded heir to Barbara Walters.

It’s all very end-of-an-era, isn’t it? You almost want to thank Fox News for allowing everyone to begin to move on completely from Sarah Palin, and hastening her consignment to the dustbin of history, where she belongs.