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The article of the day is Gabriel Sherman's excellent piece in New York magazine about the current state of Fox News and its leader Roger Ailes. It's a fascinating read, and one of the things it reveals is how difficult it is to build ratings, serve the interests of the Republican Party, and maintain the idea that you're an actual news organization all at the same time:
So it must have been disturbing to Ailes when the wheels started to come off Fox's presidential-circus caravan. ... The problem wasn't that ratings had been slipping that much—Beck's show declined by 30 percent from record highs, but the ratings were still nearly double those from before he joined the network. It was that, with an actual presidential election on the horizon, the Fox candidates' poll numbers remain dismally low (Sarah Palin is polling 12 percent; Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively). Ailes's candidates-in-waiting were coming up small. And, for all his programming genius, he was more interested in a real narrative than a television narrative—he wanted to elect a president. All he had to do was watch Fox's May 5 debate in South Carolina to see what a mess the field was—a mess partly created by the loudmouths he'd given airtime to and a tea party he'd nurtured. And, not incidentally, a strong Republican candidate would be good for his business, too. A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he'd invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie, who nevertheless politely turned down Ailes's calls to run.We know what conservatives would be saying if the head of MSNBC were meeting with Democratic politicians to try to shape a race for the presidency. But Fox is different, not least in the way they simultaneously display vigorous partisanship and demand to be granted special privileges (I discussed the issue of how the White House should treat them in greater detail here).For the last couple of years, Fox has operated a support system for past and future Republican presidential candidates, the elite version of "wingnut welfare." But as they've discovered, the benefits to their bottom line are marginal at best. Viewers weren't breaking down the doors to hear what Rick Santorum or John Bolton has to say; the network recently canceled the contracts of Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who are both running for president, and no one thinks the network will suffer for it. Even Sarah Palin has turned out to be more trouble than she's worth. The network attempted to create a show called Sarah Palin's Real American Stories; they aired one crappy episode and never bothered again. After Palin's disastrous "blood libel" video in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting (something she did against Ailes' advice), her star dimmed dramatically. And no one looks forward with bated breath to her next appearance on The O'Reilly Factor.Perhaps Fox's spirit will be revived if Barack Obama wins a second term -- after all, outrage and resentment are the network's fuel. But they may have to find some new attractions.
