I often disagree with Dan Hodges, nominally a Labour Party member
but inexplicable believer in London’s occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de
Pfeffel Johnson (despite the vanity bikes, buses, cable car and requests for a
new airport for Himself Personally Now), but on the run-up to, and result of,
the US Presidential Election he had it spot on, and unwaveringly so.
This was despite the usual torrent of wingnut blowback that
is de rigueur at Telegraph Blogs: to suggest that Barack Obama might win and that
Mitt Romney and his backers might as well face reality was undoubtedly rooted
in a real world analysis, but this counts for nothing with many of those who
drift around the comments sewer, particularly when the subject is an African-American.
And one particular observation I enjoyed was that “Fox
News is killing the Republican Party”, made in the immediate
aftermath of Obama being declared the winner on Tuesday night. As Hodges
rightly points out, Fox “provides a false
comfort zone for Conservative politicians and their supporters”. That false
comfort led to the Romney campaign really believing that they were going to
win.
Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) gave Republicans huge amounts of free airtime. Its hosts
relentlessly pushed the message that the polls were “oversampling Democrats”, or were otherwise skewed, but this was
just kneejerk spin: the most accurate pollsters, like PPP, were right all
along. And Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight
wasn’t a leftist agitator – he was, indeed, just “doing the math”.
And, yes, as Hodges points out, even when Fox gets hold of a
genuinely original story angle or a real exclusive, so “out there” is the channel’s reputation that other media outlets –
barring the likes of Matt Drudge and the Daily
Caller – are increasingly loath to run the story. Roger Ailes and his gang
persuaded the GOP that they were right. And then the real world begged to
differ.
But I did wonder if Dan had seen the analysis from the folks
at Media Matters, from last January,
because the headline, “How
Fox News is destroying the Republican Party”, was similar, although
Eric Boehlert’s post concentrated on the role of the channel in shaping the series
of party primaries, and that Roger Ailes had effectively become head of the RNC
(you’ve heard of Reince Priebus? You’re lucky).
Boehlert’s contention is that the old guard of the
Republican Party effectively ceded power to the likes of Fox after Obama was
inaugurated in January 2009. This was assumed to be A Very Good Thing after the
GOP took control of the House in the 2010 mid-terms. But this year has brought
a reality check, and Boehlert shows that it has been coming for several months.
Hodges has merely confirmed it.
It’s only a pity that
so many of the latter’s readers can’t, or won’t, listen to him.
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