FNC’s Tea Party Boosterism – More Harm Than Good?

posted at 2:42 pm on April 14, 2009 by CK MacLeod

First off, let me say that I’m a Fox fan, not just of Fox News Channel, but of the whole Fox media empire.  I don’t love it all, but, when I watch TV or have it on in the background, I’m more often than not watching some Fox product.  I watch local sports teams brought to me via Prime Ticket/Fox Sports Network.  I’ve caught the entire seasons of 24 and AMERICAN IDOL.  I think the SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES has proven to be overall the best sci-fi ever on television.  If I had more time and general TV-watching interest, I’d probably give HOUSE, FRINGE, DOLLHOUSE, THE SIMPSONS, KING OF THE HILL, FUTURAMA, and FAMILY GUY my time as well (though frankly I’m not 100% sure if they’re all even still on TV).

Second, I’m glad that FNC is giving the Tea Parties ample attention, and I’m grateful for the efforts of Neil Cavuto, his sometime replacement Stuart Varney, Glenn Beck, and frequent Fox guests like Dick Morris, Karl Rove, and Stephen Moore to shine a bright light on the sheer insanity of Obamanomics.  I’m not a huge fan of the “prime time” FNC line-up, but I’d hardly even think of watching their competitors, and I am a fan of many other FNC personalities and regulars.

But when FNC turns itself into the Tea Party Network tomorrow, having built up to it with a series of completely one-sided promos, it doesn’t just make “fair and balanced” into a joke, but threatens to undermine if not overwhelm a nascent movement of citizens and make it look like what the Obamanauts will dismiss it as being – a manufactured tool of the already committed Right.

In my opinion, that’s not news coverage, it’s political PR.

I know the “other side” has virtually the entire mainstream media working for it, but will Fox’s approach help shame the MSM, whose reach is by definition much wider than any cable network’s, into covering the Tea Parties and what they represent, or will it instead make reporters, producers, and, most important, viewers feel more comfortable in dismissing them?

I remember back on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, when Jon Stewart satirized Fox’s coverage:   We saw the then-familiar nighttime shot of Baghdad, as word came that the war was a go:  Cheers from offscreen, a few party balloons drifting across the screen.  At the time, the implicit charge of warmongering didn’t seem very harsh, if only because all of the news stations were equally looking forward to viewership bonanzas, and also because support for the war was extremely popular:  Bush’s approval rating on March 13, 2003, was 71%.

A lot more of us were “warmongers” then than are “socialists” now, whatever NEWSWEEK thinks, and that’s the problem.  Obama’s personal popularity far exceeds the popularity of his program, which means that polarizing the opposition to it, pouring it into pre-fabricated “right” and “left” partisan positions, is disadvantageous to the movement.   Let MSNBC and its target audience snicker like Beavis & Butthead about “tea-bagging”:  We should be happy to have that part of the country on our side whose first, second, and third free associations with a tea bag isn’t a crude sexual joke.  Polling seems to suggest that we already do have majorities more than a little worried about Obamanomics and its prospects.

It may be that some day, as Obamanomics perhaps gains an even worse reputation, that having attached a partisan association with the 2008 Tea Parties will be a boon to the right.  Indeed, if our conservative politicians were more aggressive, they’d be scrambling to associate themselves with the protests as prominently as possible – more prominently than, in the main, they seem to be so far.  Maybe they’re chickens, or maybe they, like the Lefties with their conspiracy theories about rightwing plots and sponsors, extending to FNC, rightly sense that the movement is much more powerful and significant as a registration of spontaneous opposition, not as rented political noise.

If you look at the FoxNews.com web page pictured above, you’ll also see hints of the rest of the problem.  In the political sense Fox can’t be trusted, and certainly can’t be depended on:  It’s a vast corporate entity, and, as a media enteprise, as subject to the winds of fashion as its liberal competitors.  Like the NBA, NBC, 99% of Hollywood, your public school, more likely than not your local newspaper, it’s busy being Green these days (no comment on having to point this out from the Green Room).  The web page features a “WHAT’S HOT?:  How Green Is Your Life?” link, and I cropped out the big, colorful come-on that was off to the right.   In short, Fox is also part of the Ideological State Apparatus (to recall a phrase from my radical left past), and, if it shakes your hand, it will likely as not be for the purpose of distracting you while it reaches into your pocket (and re-arranges your brain).

I’m not paranoid, really – and, hey, I recycle and, since I work at home, even happen to manage a small carbon footprint!  But I also know that the far Left did have something right:  The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.  It will certainly be covered, but it won’t and can’t be a phenomenon of the mass media, on the mass media’s terms.  It won’t and can’t be brought down to the level of those anti-Global Warming public service announcements delivered by selected members of 24′s cast near the end of each weeks’ episode:  At first a disjunctive annoyance, eventually folding seamlessly into the apocalyptic phoniness that makes the show what it is – more media noise, take it or leave it as you will, but taken seriously only by fools.

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