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Fox News: Boogeyman Of The Liberals

Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s a column by Frank Rich saying that the real purpose of Fox News is to bait liberals — bait liberals are all too eager to take. Rich says that liberals should quit worrying, that Fox is merely the best ballerina in Galveston: All three cable-news networks are hemorrhaging young viewers (as […]

Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s a column by Frank Rich saying that the real purpose of Fox News is to bait liberals — bait liberals are all too eager to take. Rich says that liberals should quit worrying, that Fox is merely the best ballerina in Galveston:

All three cable-news networks are hemorrhaging young viewers (as are their network-news counterparts) in an era when television is hardly the news medium of choice for Americans raised online and on smartphones. But Fox News is losing younger viewers at an even faster rate than its competitors. With a median viewer age now at 68 according to Nielsen data through mid-January (compared with 60 for MSNBC and CNN, and 62 to 64 for the broadcast networks), Fox is in essence a retirement community.

As I’ve written here before, I have observed over the last decade that so many of my conservative friends have parents who watch Fox all the time, and who accept what you might call the Fox News View Of The World, but none of us do. It’s not that we are anti-Fox, necessarily, at least not on everything — Fox can be quite good — and it’s not that we are liberals. It’s that Fox is irrelevant to us; it’s something that old people like. It’s The Lawrence Welk Show for elderly conservatives. In fact, the only time I ever hear anybody talk about Fox it’s one of my liberal friends complaining about it. This is anecdotal, of course, but to me, it bolsters Frank Rich’s argument. Yes, Fox bigfoots its competitors, but people my age (I’m in my late 40s) and younger just do not have remotely the kind of relationship with TV news that older Americans do.

Ken Auletta has a piece in the new issue of The New Yorker (gated) talking about Netflix and the emerging media landscape. Here’s an excerpt:

[Netflix CEO Reid] Hastings has succeeded, in large part, by taking advantage of what he calls viewers’ “managed dissatisfaction” with traditional television: each hour of programming is crammed with about twenty minutes of commercials and promotional messages for other shows. Netflix carries no commercials; its revenue derives entirely from subscription fees. Viewers are happy to pay a set fee, now eight dollars a month, in order to watch, uninterrupted, their choice of films or shows, whenever they want, on whatever device they want.

Absolutely right. That’s how it is in our family, and has been for a while. Now, with the exception of local news and the occasional sporting event, all of our TV comes through Netflix, iTunes, or Amazon. We cancelled Dish Network last year after one of our little ones said, “Mom, what is ‘masturbation’?” — this, because the kids had been searching the programming menu for something kidworthy, and had run across some trash TV listing, which, as satellite TV subscribers know, is ubiquitous. Did you know there’s a channel that runs Brazilian Butt Lift infomercials all the time? On Dish Network, there really are 500 channels with almost nothing interesting on. That incident made Julie and me reflect on how we were paying all this money for satellite TV to have access to a handful of channels — meanwhile, we were potentially streaming all this garbage into the house. I don’t want my television to make my nine and seven year olds put questions like that to us. So, we threw Dish Network out.

We could hardly be happier with the on-demand arrangement, not only because it gives us a lot more control over what we watch and when we watch it, but because there are no commercials. This is huge. You may be surprised to learn that this is not because I’m on an anti-consumerism tear. Rather, it’s because we have become unaccustomed to the constant breaks in the viewing experience that commercial TV involves. When we do watch a commercial program — say, the network evening news — it is jarring how jagged the experience is, when you have gotten out of the habit of taking commercials on television. It’s incredibly irritating, as a matter of fact. Whenever I visit someone who has the TV on — commercial TV, I mean — I wonder how they can stand it. Well, most of us grew up with that experience of TV; it’s normal, and we’re used to it. But if you wean yourself from it, you may find that coming back to it is an unpleasant experience.

My kids, however, are of a generation growing up without constant exposure to commercial TV. Mind you, we manage our kids’ TV exposure anyway, but when they do watch TV, they do it without commercials. My guess is that they would find the experience of commercial TV to be unnatural and unpleasant — again, not because they’re forced to watch advertising per se, but because the ads break up the experience of watching the program. Imagine going to the movies and having to sit through commercials interrupting the film. It would make you crazy. That’s how it is watching commercial TV for me now, and that’s the way my children’s televised media experience almost always has been.

Maybe my family is not typical of families today. But if not, I think it’s going to become more typical. When I was a kid, there were three networks, plus PBS, which no kid watched because that was “educational TV.” You took what you were served, and you took it in the way you were served (larded with commercials). What we have now is infinitely better — and that can’t be good, over the long term, for the commercial TV model. Once you get used to the taste of good beer, it’s hard to go back to being satisfied with Natty Light.

Anyway, the original point of this post is that Fox News is, in my experience, not a thing that middle-aged and younger American conservatives pay much attention to. Again, it’s not that we don’t like Fox, necessarily, but that watching TV news is something we don’t much do. I get almost all my news from the Internet and, when I’m in the car, NPR. Most evenings when I’m at home, I watch the network evening news with my kids, so I can talk to them about what’s going on in the world, and so I can see what the Official Story is. But that’s it.

UPDATE: Mrs. D. informs me that our satellite TV service is not Dish Network, but DirectTV, and that she didn’t cancel it outright, only dialed it back to the minimal service. Sorry; didn’t mean to mislead.

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