Republicans Abandon Fox News

One of the problems with American society today is the fact free bubble in which much of the far right exists.  Many of the right have literally no knowledge of what is really happening in the world and the causation behind events.  One of the main purveyors of this embrace of ignorance and deliberate refusal to objective reality has heretofore been been Fox News - or Faux News on this blog.  Now, Republicans appear to be abandoning Fox News, because the network is not sufficiently un-tethered to reality.  What is frightening is that many of those walking away from Fox News will likely gravitate to even more ignorance based "news" outlet.  Perhaps these people fleeing from Fox News will opt to make Storm Front or perhaps The Crusader, the KKK's official newspaper as their preferred source of "news."  Salon looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Since January, Fox News has seen a precipitous drop in its reputation amongst its mostly conservative viewership — falling to 50th place on a list of brands most trusted by Republicans over the past two years.

In 2014, the most dominant cable news channel was the 10th best-perceived brand by Republicans, according to AdAge. But in a YouGov Brand Index survey released at the end of February 2016, the perception of Fox News among Republicans had “declined by approximately 50 percent since January of this year” — to a three-year low.

And in a just-released 2016 YouGov BrandIndex ranking, Fox News’ position plummeted to outside of the top-20 for the first time.  

Trump’s feud with Kelly tarnished the networks’ perception amongst viewers who suspected an anti-Trump bias. And while Trump still found safe refuge at “Fox & Friends” and even had Fox News host Sean Hannity appear in a campaign ad on his behalf, the blatant boosting alienated supporters of other Republican candidates.

Then one of the network’s most veteran female anchors accused former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes of sexual harassment.

After Gretchen Carlson filed a blockbuster lawsuit against the Fox News boss, the network saw its biggest shake-up with the retirement of longtime host Greta Van Susteren and the ousting of Ailes — who went on to join the Trump campaign as an adviser.

Enter Trump.TV. As Salon’s Matthew Sheffield’s explained, Trump will be ideally situated to benefit from the demise of the Fox News brand among Republicans. Reports since Ailes’ ousting indicate that Rupert Murdoch and sons Lachlan and James, who help run parent company 21st Century Fox, plan to begin shedding the network’s image as a right-wing media outfit in favor of a more serious journalistic effort.

Host Shepard Smith recently told the Huffington Post that Murdoch indicated after the Ailes scandal that he planned to make Fox News “the best news organization in the America.”

But a more mainstream news source is not what Republican viewers want. While Fox News’ reputational ranking went down, Republicans still despise both CNN and MSNBC much more. CNN and MSNBC were ranked 1,470 and 1,471, respectively.

“If you’re tired of biased, mainstream media reporting (otherwise known as Crooked Hillary’s super PAC), tune into my Facebook Live broadcast,” Trump told his supporters ahead of the third presidential debate Wednesday. According to the Financial Times, the nearly four hours of coverage had 8.9 million views by Thursday afternoon.

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.