Fox New's 24-hour outrage cycle and how it hurts Republicans

By Richard Barry

James Fallows at The Atlantic cites a new study by Bruce Bartlett called "How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics."

He draws attention to two aspects of the study he finds particularly noteworthy.

The first is its source—for those who don’t know, Barlett is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations and was an influential early proponent of supply-side / tax-cut economics. He also worked for Ron Paul. Since then he’s harshly criticized the Bush-43 administration, but in no sense does he come at this as a Democratic party operative.

The second and more important reason is Bartlett’s accumulation of detail showing (a) that Fox’s core viewers are factually worse-informed than people who follow other sources, and even those who don’t follow news at all, and (b) that the mode of perpetual outrage that is Fox’s goal and effect has become a serious problem for the Republican party, in that it pushes its candidates to sound always-outraged themselves.

As it was written by a relatively high profile Republican, I suppose that means it can't be so easily dismissed as a piece of partisan tripe, although Fox News watchers have a name for those putatively on the inside who question their world view and the politics that flow from it: RINO.

That Fox News viewers are poorly informed, well knock me over with a feather.

On Fox's goal of perpetual outrage and how that pushes Republican candidates to "sound always outraged themselves," that's interesting. 

This approach works when preaching to the choir but not all that well when the goal is to expand one's reach, which is something the GOP would need to do to, say, win the presidency. 

Most voters don't live their lives in a state of high agitation and quickly grow weary of being around and listening to people who do. 

Criticizing the state of affairs as they are is always a part of electoral politics, but so is providing a plan to move things in a positive direction, usually the greatest part. 

If Ronald Reagan had just been about bemoaning the sad state of America due to liberal malfeasance and not also about a bright and shiny future, however unrealistic, he wouldn't have gotten very far.

Yes, positive works, and is in fact necessary. Fox News doesn't really do positive, and to the extent that conservative politicians tailor their message to be in sync with Fox's 24-hour outrage cycle, they are setting themselves up for failure.

Fallows v. Ferguson

By Mustang Bobby

Niall Ferguson, a tenured professor of history at Harvard, wrote a cover story for Newsweek making the case for the defeat of President Obama. Numerous pundits and fact-checkers have gone over the article and pronounced it flawed, including blaming the president for bad things that happened a year before he took office.

But leave it to James Fallows of The Atlantic (and a Harvard alum) to really give Mr. Ferguson his comeuppance, and it is a thing of beauty:

-- "I was a good loser four years ago. But this year, fired up by the rise of Ryan, I want badly to win."

According to an article in the Telegraph this year, Ferguson has chosen America over Britain because the intellectual life back home is so shallow. It is good that he is deepening our discourse with observations like these. (To the best of my knowledge, he is not a U.S. citizen, which I note only because it gives the "good loser" and "want badly to win" observations an unusual edge.)

There is lots more, which you can judge for yourself. Let me re-establish the point: I have no complaint with anyone making a strong case against Obama, or in his favor. That's what an election year is for. My point concerns the broadside pamphleteering nature of his argument, which is no worse than what we expect on cable-news talk shows but also no better. And it comes from someone trading heavily on the prestige that goes with being a tenured professor at the world's leading university.

[...]

You can say these things if you're a talk-show host or a combatant on some cable-news gabfest. To me this is not what the tradition of Veritas and the search for scholarly enlightenment is supposed to exemplify. Seriously, I wonder if one of Ferguson's students will have the panache to turn in a similar paper to see how it fares.

Game, set, match. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)