Almost overnight, three huge changes in communications have injected conservative ideas right into the heart of that debate. Though commentators have noted each of these changes separately, they haven’t sufficiently grasped how, taken together, they add up to a revolution: no longer can the Left keep conservative views out of the mainstream or dismiss them with bromide ("clichématige slogans") instead of argument. Everything has changed.
1. The first and most visible [no pun intended? :-)] of these three seismic events [...] Since its 1996 launch, Fox News has provided what its visionary CEO Roger Ailes calls a “haven” for viewers fed up with the liberal bias of the news media—potentially a massive audience, since the mainstream media stand well to the American people’s left.
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Fox’s conservatism helps it scoop competitors on stories they get wrong or miss entirely because of liberal bias. In April 2002, for instance, the mainstream media rushed to report an Israeli “massacre” of Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin; Fox uniquely—and correctly, it turned out—treated the massacre charge with complete skepticism. “We try to avoid falling for the conventional liberal wisdom in journalistic circles—in this case the conventional wisdom ‘Israeli bad, Palestinian good,’ ” says daytime anchorman David Asman. “Too often ideology shapes the tendency to jump to a conclusion—something we try to be aware of in our own case, too.”
Nowhere does Fox differ more radically from the mainstream television and press than in its robustly pro-U.S. coverage of the War on Terror. [...]
Fox’s very tone conveys its difference from the networks’ worldview. “Fox News lacks the sense of out-of-touch elitism that makes many Americans, whatever their politics, annoyed with the news media,” maintains media critic Gene Veith. “Fox reporters almost never condescend to viewers,” [media critic Gene Veith] observes. “The other networks do so all the time, peering down on the vulgar masses from social height (think Peter Jennings) or deigning to enlighten the public about things that only they understand (think Peter Arnett).” This tone doesn’t mark only Fox’s populist shows, like pugnacious superstar Bill O’Reilly’s. Even when Fox goes upscale, in Brit Hume’s urbane nightly Special Report, for example, the civility elevates rather than belittles the viewer. For Ailes, Fox’s anti-elitism is key. “There’s a whole country that elitists will never acknowledge,” he told the New York Times Magazine. “What people resent deeply out there are those in the ‘blue’ states thinking they’re smarter.”
The “fair and balanced” approach that Fox trumpets in its slogan is part of this iconoclastic tone, too. Sure, the anchor is almost always a conservative, but it’s clear he is striving to tell the truth, and there’s always a liberal on hand, too. [Although in truth, I often get the feeling that e.g. Alan Colmes is less Sean Hannity's opponent than his "straight man".] By contrast, political consultant and Fox contributor Dick Morris notes, “The other networks offer just one point of view, which they claim is objective.” Not only does the Fox approach make clear that there is always more than one point of view, but it also puts the network’s liberal guests in the position of having to defend their views—something that almost never happens on other networks.
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The numbers make clear just how stunning Fox’s rise has been. Starting with access to only 17 million homes (compared with CNN’s 70 million) in 1996, Fox could reach 65 million homes by 2001 and had already started to turn a profit. A year later, profits hit $70 million and are expected to double in 2003. Though CNN founder Ted Turner once boasted he’d “squish Murdoch like a bug,” Fox News has outpaced its chief cable news rival in the ratings since September 11 and now runs laps around it. This past June, Fox won a whopping 51 percent of the prime-time cable news audience—more than CNN, CNN Headline News, and MSNBC combined. [...]
Fox enjoys especially high numbers among advertiser-coveted 25- to 54-year-old viewers, and it is attracting even younger news junkies. As one CNN producer admits, Fox is “more in touch with the younger age group, not just the 25–54 demo, but probably the 18-year-olds.” Even more attractive to advertisers, Fox viewers watch 20 to 25 minutes before clicking away; CNN watchers stay only ten minutes.
Not only conservatives like what they see. A new Pew Research Center survey shows that, of the 22 percent of Americans who now get most of their news from Fox (compared with a combined 32 percent for the networks), only 46 percent call themselves “conservative,” only slightly higher than the 40 percent of CNN fans who do so. Fox is thus exposing many centrists (32 percent of Fox’s regular viewers [including yours truly]) and liberals (18 percent) to conservative ideas and opinions they would not regularly find elsewhere in the television news [...]
2. Cable comedy [...] Take South Park, Comedy Central’s hit cartoon series, whose heroes are four crudely animated and impossibly foul-mouthed fourth-graders named Cartman, Kenny, Kyle, and Stan. [...]
Not for nothing has blogger and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan praised the show for being “the best antidote to PC culture we have.” South Park sharpens the iconoclastic, anti-PC edge of earlier cartoon shows like The Simpsons and King of the Hill, and spares no sensitivity. [He illustrates this by summarizing plots of episodes like Rainforest Schmainforest --- which pokes fun at brainless enviro-extremism and "worship of the noble savage" --- and Cartman joins NAMBLA which satirizes] the effort to draw the mantle of civil liberties over behavior once deemed criminal, pathological, or immoral. Another episode—“Cherokee Hair Tampons”—ridicules multiculti sentimentality about holistic medicine and the “wisdom” of native cultures. Kyle suffers a potentially fatal kidney disorder, and his clueless parents try to cure it with “natural” Native American methods, leaving their son vomiting violently and approaching death’s door.
South Park has satirized the sixties counterculture[...] anti-big-business zealots [...] sex ed in school (featuring “the Sexual Harassment Panda,” an outrageous classroom mascot); pro-choice extremists (Cartman’s mother decides she wants to abort him, despite the fact that he’s eight years old, relying on the “it’s my body” argument); hate-crime legislation, anti-discrimination lawsuits, gay scout leaders, and much more. Conservatives do not escape the show’s satirical sword—gun-toting rednecks and phony patriots have been among those slashed. But there should be no mistaking the deepest thrust of South Park’s politics.
Andrew Sullivan dubs the fans of all this cable-nurtured satire “South Park Republicans”—people who “believe we need a hard-ass foreign policy and are extremely skeptical of political correctness” but also are socially liberal on many issues, Sullivan explains. [...] Arizona State undergrad Eric Spratling says the definition fits him and his Republican pals perfectly. “The label is really about rejecting the image of conservatives as uptight squares—crusty old men or nerdy kids in blue blazers. We might have long hair, smoke cigarettes, get drunk on weekends, have sex before marriage, watch R-rated movies, cuss like sailors—and also happen to be conservative, or at least libertarian.” Recent Stanford grad Craig Albrecht says most of his young Bush-supporter friends “absolutely cherish” South Park–style comedy “for its illumination of hypocrisy and stupidity in all spheres of life.” It just so happens, he adds, “that most hypocrisy and stupidity take place within the liberal camp.”
3. [...] the rise of the Internet, the second explosive change shaking liberal media dominance. It’s hard to overstate the impact that news and opinion websites like the Drudge Report, NewsMax, and Dow Jones’s OpinionJournal are having on politics and culture, as are current-event “blogs”—individual or group web diaries—like AndrewSullivan, InstaPundit, and The Corner department of NationalReviewOnline (NRO), where the editors and writers argue, joke around, and call attention to articles elsewhere on the web. This whole universe of web-based discussion has been dubbed the “blogosphere.”
While there are several fine left-of-center sites, the blogosphere currently tilts right, albeit idiosyncratically, reflecting the hard-to-pigeonhole politics of some leading bloggers. Like talk radio and Fox News, the right-leaning sites fill a market void. “Many bloggers felt shut out by institutions that have adopted—explicitly or implicitly—a left-wing orthodoxy,” says Erin O’Connor, whose blog, Critical Mass, exposes campus PC gobbledygook. The orthodox Left’s blame-America-first response to September 11 has also helped tilt the blogosphere rightward. “There were damned few noble responses to that cursed day from the ‘progressive’ part of the political spectrum,” avers Los Angeles–based blogger and journalist Matt Welch, “so untold thousands of people just started blogs, in anger,” Welch among them. “I was pushed into blogging on September 16, 2001, in direct response to reading five days’ worth of outrageous bullshit in the media from people like Noam Chomsky and Robert Jensen.”
For a frustrated citizen like Welch, it’s easy to get your ideas circulating on the Internet. Start-up costs for a blog are small, printing and mailing costs nonexistent. Few blogs make money, though, since advertisers are leery of the web and no one seems willing to pay to read anything on it.
The Internet’s most powerful effect has been to expand vastly the range of opinion—especially conservative opinion—at everyone’s fingertips. “The Internet helps break up the traditional cultural gatekeepers’ power to determine a) what’s important and b) the range of acceptable opinion,” says former Reason editor and libertarian blogger Virginia Postrel. InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, agrees: “The main role of the Internet and blogosphere is to call the judgment of elites about what is news into question.”
[...] Almost daily, stories that originate on the web make their way into print or onto TV or radio. Fox and Rush Limbaugh, for instance, often pick up stories from FrontPage and OpinionJournal—especially those on the antiwar Left. [...] Phrases introduced in the blogosphere now “percolate out into the real world with amazing rapidity,” InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds recently noted. For example, the day after the humor blog ScrappleFace coined the term “Axis of Weasel” to satirize the antiwar alliance of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, the New York Post used it as a headline, talk radio and CNN and Fox News repeated it, and it soon made its way into French and German media.
4. Book publishing [...]The Internet giant [Amazon.com] betrays no ideological bias in selling books. Nor do big chain booksellers like Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble, where Bill O’Reilly books pile up right next to Michael Moore’s latest loony-left rant. “The rise of Amazon and the chain stores has been tremendously liberating for conservatives, because these stores are very much product-oriented businesses,” observes David Horowitz. “The independent bookstores are all controlled by leftists, and they’re totalitarians—they will not display conservative books, or if they do, they’ll hide them in the back.” Says Marji Ross: “We have experienced our books being buried or kept in the back room when a store manager or owner opposed their message.” She’s a big fan of Amazon and the chains.
Amazon’s Reader Reviews feature—where readers can post their opinions on books they’ve read and rate them—has helped diminish the authority of elite cultural guardians, too, by creating a truly democratic marketplace of ideas. “I don’t think there’s ever been a similar review medium—a really broad-based consumers’ guide for culture,” says 2blowhards blogger Michael. “I’ve read some stuff on Amazon that’s been as good as anything I’ve read in the real press.”