While we haven’t seen the final episode of Bones, we did see their little half hour “thank you to the fans!” hosted by the lead writers, producer (I think), and primary cast. When they brought up their association with Fox, it suddenly brought into sharp focus how this arm of Fox, which is Fox Broadcasting Company, and Fox News, its sister group within the Fox Entertainment Group, have differed so much.
Long time readers of this blog are aware of the recent work of Bruce Bartlett and his certification and promotion of the research showing that the knowledge-base of the audience of Fox News (his paper is here, my initial mention is here), cossetted and insular as it is, is sharply inferior to that of most other news sources. In a word, Fox News has ill-served its audience, burdening them with half-truths, and pushing them down a path full of potholes of bad context, occasional brazen lies, and, when forced to apologize, to insert such apologies at inopportune moments. As Roger Ailes was the motivating force and founder of Fox News, we may lay these deliberate failures at his feet, all in pursuit of profit and a conservative ideology which he evidently feared could not stand up to more liberal ideologies in a free market of ideas.
But Fox Broadcasting Company (FBC) is a different entity. Without claiming to have any scholarship behind me, I note Fox’s association with Bones, with 12 seasons of excellence; The Simpsons, now at 28 seasons; I see from the Wikipedia page that 21 Jump Street, Family Guy, and many other shows familiar to general discourse began on Fox. I have no interest in conducting research into the content of these shows, some of which I’ve never watched and have no interest in seeing; I simply note that many have been considered excellent, by the common audience and the specialized reviewer.
Why?
Why is the entertainment company good and its sister company so awful?
Let’s examine FBC, the success story. It’s a mistake to suggest that it’s a success because of profit or loss, but rather based on its audience and its ratings, because that’s what denotes success. While ratings are used to decide winners & losers, they are also used as a feedback mechanism. The careful show creator – and this was even noted in the Bones “thank you!” show – will keep an eye on ratings and other research to adjust how a show is presented, how characters are portrayed, and through this, optimize the show’s performance to better gain the audience’s interest and sympathy. Profit and loss are decided by these ratings.
And that feedback is fast. Some shows only last three or four episodes before they’re shit-canned by nervous network executives, eyes always on the bottom line.
But what about Fox News? News organizations have typically been rated on more complex metrics: ratings, yes, but also geographical coverage, excellence in reporting, accuracy – and in those rare times when someone in the news organization deliberately violated standards, expulsion and public shaming.
But these are hard standards to measure, unlike simple ratings, and, again unlike ratings, the results are not widely distributed and celebrated or mourned. And when they are, Fox News attacks them. They’ve done so right from the beginning. It begins with their slogan, Fair & Balanced – in retrospect, nothing more than Pravda-like propaganda, meant to lure trusting conservatives, already hearing what they want to hear, into tuning into Fox and only Fox for their news.
But we can snip that feedback loop into shreds, because that competitive measure threatens the propaganda load that Fox carries.
But here’s the thing. The feedback loop that helped FBC to excel, and shows Fox News to be desperately broken trying to escape measurement, has had a real-world effect. We’re seeing it right now: the grand incompetence of the Republican Party. For example, the incompetency of President Trump will be a thing of awe and wonder in years to come. Simply survey how he’s been unable to even nominate folks to positions; the names DeVos, Carson, Price, Flynn, Bannon, and Miller are just some of those who are the subject of derision both within and outside of the United States. And then consider how pitiful are the GOP members of the Senate who have actually approved many of these names in order to keep (or advance) their positions.
Just last week we saw the “legendary wonk,” Speaker Paul Ryan, jettison his self-written replacement for the so-called “disastrous ACA” because it was awful and cruel, and yet so middle of the road that he could not bring his caucus to support it whole-heartedly. And in the midst of this dark-of-the-night process, he exhibited an amazing lack of knowledge about insurance. The man does not appear to be a wonk, but merely another extremist with a very nice manner.
The rise of Fox News has paralleled the rise of the second-, third-, and fourth-raters in the GOP. Think this is overstating? Can we name the equivalent of a Senator Lugar in today’s crowd, a conservative dedicated to protecting the nation through knowledge and work? No. Possibly Senator Graham, but he is a lonely figure and often lapses into his own mistakes.
And, in an interesting dovetail to fiction’s devotion to the idea that evil does tend to eat itself, the failure of Ryan’s bill may be attributed to Fox News. No, not to any particular effort to derail the bill, but rather to a lesson it has attempted to inculcate in its viewers:
No compromises!
While that rubric was aimed at liberal agendas, gradually it was taken up as a cause unto itself by the more single-minded members, those who cling more to their own rightness rather than be humble and admit to doubt. From across the spectrum, if our own replacement bill does not please us in every way, then strike it wholesale from the agenda, because only we can be right!
And, thus, the death of that bill.
And think about this: if the GOP had had flexibility of mind, the honest intellect to acknowledge that maybe they are not always right, that their ideology just might be flawed… then this bill might never have been introduced. They would have acknowledged that the ACA, while no doubt flawed as only large pieces of legislation must be flawed, has greatly improved the healthcare sector’s performance and accomplishments – even if the insurance industry doesn’t like it.
But Fox News doomed that possibility. And if, without fact-checking or even a simple logic review, we believe the rhetoric that we’re being served up, then collectively, we doom it too.
