Alex Koppelman has a smart piece over at Salon detailing the many ways in which Fox News uses Democrats to bash, harm, or misrepresent the Democratic Party.
Take, for example, the scary Democrats. Think about frequent guests like the Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., both big-city liberals, or Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Vegan Peacenik. Then consider Fox's audience. Besides being rather elderly -- the median age of a Fox viewer tops 60 -- it is disproportionately conservative and Republican. In the 2004 election, according to Mark Mellman, Fox viewers preferred President Bush over John Kerry by an astonishing 88 percent to 7 percent. Bush's backing among Fox viewers was more solid than his support among white evangelicals, gun owners or supporters of the Iraq war. Sharpton, Rangel and Kucinich help confirm the worst fears of such a homogenous audience, even before the occasional cameo appearance by someone like Minister Hashim Nzinga, national chief of staff of the New Black Panther Party.
What Koppelman doesn't say, of course, is that Sharpton and Rangel are not only urban, they're black. Fox's audience, in contrast, is disproportionately rural, and white.
I'd love to see, though, some actual data on which self-identified Democrats go on Fox, when, and how often. What are the booking patterns? John Edwards has been on the network more than 30 times. Is that average? A lot? A little? It's the sort of thing progressives need to know, not only to understand how the largest cable news network is presenting the Democratic Party, but how individual Democrats are, consciously or unconsciously, aiding and abetting that representation.
And look, I don't hold a grudge against Bob Beckel or Susan Estrich or Kristen Powers or the rest of Fox's paid Democratic lineup for their involvement (the exception here is Pat Caddell, who's awful). I'm sure it's very exciting to represent the left on a massive news network, and particularly for folks like Beckel and Estrich, who've been on the margins of national politics since the 80s, it's a way to remain politically relevant, and even seems like an opportunity to do some good. They wouldn't be the first liberals to trick themselves into believing good arguments can cut through bad faith replied.
What they either don't understand or won't let themselves realize is that they're betting against the house. And even if they have rare moments of point-scoring and triumph, in the end, the house always wins, and it wouldn't have hired them -- and wouldn't keep them -- if their involvement didn't, in the long-run, help the house's percentage.
