Duncan's got a plan:
If I were running CNN, once I fired most of the people that worked there and replaced them with decent TV journalists, I'd get rid of their little daily blog show and replace it with the "Fox News Fuckup of the day." They could just steal it from Media Matters. Then I'd add a "crazy shit people are hearing on talk radio which aren't true" segment.
I don't know how his blog ads are doing, but I figure it'll be awhile before he can steal "America's Most Trusted Name in News". His idea, however, should be stolen from him. Again. Because Fox took it once already. That, after all, is what "fair and balanced" was. It's not aimed at simply providing ready fodder for Fox-haters looking for easy jokes. It's aimed at the rest of the media. "Fair and balanced", as a tagline, is a jab at what the others aren't. The others are liberal. America-hating. Soft. Unbalanced, unfair. Not patriotic enough.
So Fox carved out a new definition of fair -- a conservative, nationalistic definition -- and never looked back. They formed a network aimed at all those Limbaugh-listeners trained to attach "liberal" to the word "media". It made no sense, but so long as a fair number of people thought the news full of shit, an audience was available for a network implicitly proving it. Proving it, of course, meant echoing the ideological biases of such "fair and balanced" forefathers as Rush and, for that matter, the anti-media Nixon. The press was unfair and unbalanced because it disagreed with their reality, therefore a fair and balanced network would agree with it. And lo, Fox was born.
But there's a surprisingly logical progression from Limbaugh to O'Reilly to Jon Stewart. Undeniably, these guys dominate their media realms. The rightwing extremist owns talk radio, the avowed centrist dominates cable news, and the sarcastic liberal has carved his niche into a full-blown canyon. But the ideology is secondary to the populism, the sense that they're on the viewer's side. As a media strategy, it's almost insanely potent. Particularly now, as audiences have jigsawed themselves into endless partisan pieces, each convinced the media is out to get them and desperate to find an outlet willing to agree with their biases.
What Fox started, some new network should finish. Trust in the cable outlets is shockingly low, with CNN abysmal ratings a few points ahead of Fox's atrocious score. That means most viewers believe the faces on their TV are lying to them, and often lying against the,. Fox, which originally tried to capitalize on this dynamic, has become too rigidly ideological, offended too many people, and has now become part of it (maybe even in the eyes of their natural audience if Digby is on target). Stewart has profited from it, but he's only got 30 minutes, four times a week. Which leaves room for some new network to step forward and own it. Ideology doesn't matter so much as the wholesale destruction of idiocy. You can have hosts from the right, hosts from the left, hosts from the fringe -- so long as the tone is unabashedly anti-establishment, there's a market for it. And God would it ever be more interesting than the talking, nodding, identical heads who currently parade across my screen. Shows could, and should, be dedicated to the issues of the day, but the aim would be to puncture whatever everyone else was saying about them.
Would it be reflexively, and on occasion unnecessarily, contrarian? Of course. But in a realm where everything else instinctively gropes for the standard line -- whether it be the CW of the center or the right -- a network that didn't take itself too seriously and spent its airtime on populist tirades against the deadweights who did would fare quite well. Not long ago, the grail was accumulating authority, trust, Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw. Nowadays populism rules the roost and all anyone wants is to see their enemies torn apart. And since every network has made its share of enemies, an upstart willing to take on all comers would find a bipartisan audience breathlessly waiting for them to savage their favorite foe.
