Julie Kelly: Chris Wallace and the Weekly Standard-ization of Fox "News"

I'm already nodding my head and I haven't even read it yet.

Update: In the past few minutes, Chris Wallace has lied -- again -- and claimed Trump called "the protesters" thugs, when of course he was referring to arsonists, rioters, and looters.

This is FoxNews, baby. The Fair and Balanced News Alternative.

What is happening to Fox News Channel?

With the exception of its primetime lineup and a few regular contributors, Fox News increasingly is indistinguishable from its cable news competitors. The network, once considered the sole antidote to dominant left-wing news organizations--both print and broadcast--is making a fatal brand mistake: Alienating its customer base.

...

[T]here is a noticeable change in the tone at Fox News.... [T]rump haters on the Right--folks who long ago burned their credibility with rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives--continue to earn air time on the network. I mean, Chris Stirewalt? Really?

Once-trusted anchors now are openly hostile to President Trump. In a dramatic repudiation of Trump’s comment that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine, Neil Cavuto ranted that the drug is deadly and not effective.

"If you are in a risky population here and you are taking this as a preventative way to ward off the virus or in a worst-case scenario, you are dealing with the virus and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you," Cavuto warned his viewers on May 18. "I can't stress this enough. This will kill you." Cavuto insisted he wasn't making a political point but rather a "life-and-death point"” (Cavuto, who is not a doctor, was referring to one non-peer reviewed, retrospective analysis of 368 Covid-19 patients in VA medical centers.)

I'd also note that Neil Cavuto is not a doctor, and in fact looks like a man who routinely hides from medical advice. But here he was, on his own authority, telling you what the "science" says, and picking and choosing between conflicting studies.

Then she gets to Chris Wallace, who is plainly a fat, decaying MSNBC host who gets on the wrong bus every Sunday and shows up at the wrong "news" organization.

Before the release of the Mueller report, Wallace accused Attorney General William Barr of "acting as the counselor for the defense, the counselor for the president, rather than the attorney general," a common refrain of the Left. In a testy exchange, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Wallace, who claimed the administration was ignoring Russian election interference, that the peevish journalist was "fixated" on Robert Mueller.

Hit the link for more.

She concludes that FoxNews' current, but not eternal, core audience is Trump supporters -- whether the Murdoch Boys like it or not, whether Paul Ryan likes it or not, whether Chris Wallace and Chris Stirewalt like it or not -- and they will soon lose most of their audience if they continue trying to cultivate Rachel Maddow's audience.

Do we need yet another #Resistance TV channel?

If you follow ComicsGate, you know the problem occurred when Marvel looked at its actual audience, and discovered they were almost entirely male, almost entirely in their thirties, forties, or fifties, and mostly white.

And Marvel decided it didn't like this audience, so it would start alienating this audience deliberately and chase a "phantom audience" it liked better, a phatom audience of young multi-ethnic girls who love superhero comics becuse if there's one thing a teenaged girl likes, it's stories which are almost entirely about macho posturing followed by single combats or small-team group skirmishes.

I mean, young girls are just ga-ga for barely-disguised boxing stories and war stories! Everyone knows that.

Why, it's working out so well for Marvel they're now in year five of a five year decline in sales.

But hey -- at least they got rid of some of those Deplorable former customers.

Hey, good luck with your new direction in programming, FoxNews. I'm sure you'll have a lot of success when all conservatives are boycotting you and you're forced to compete for the same audience that's already split seven ways by all the (open) liberal outlets.

Oh -- and I'm sure you'll have success fighting for an audience which has lived on poisonous hate for you for twenty five years.

Hey, I've got an idea for a new show you can run to attract your new Phantom Audience.

Can I interest you in a news show hosted by "The New Warriors"? Maybe "The News Warriors"?

I think that's the direction you should take.

Correct:

Reposting, from the day before yesterday, as it's relevant to content:

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Fox News is a curious case. Their product is shit. It has always been shit. Even in context of the rest of our execrable cable news media, it's of noticeably lower quality.

Their people are so low-grade, that I'm surprised they can finish complete sentences between Crossfit sessions and appointments with the hair stylist. It's like the cable news version of Balls' Models from Zoolander.

But they've been #1 for quite awhile, on the strength of precisely one strategy: being the only right-of-center news outlet in the United States.

Rupert Murdoch rightly perceived that he could serve up the very thinnest of gruel - a thoughtless, cheap, trashy product - and make a gazillion dollars by serving a yuuuuge and utterly ignored mass-market.

And they are knifing that golden goose right in the neck. It's bewildering.
Posted by: Yudhishthira's Dice

I constantly ask this of low-level twitter idiots who think they're "thinkfluencers" or whatever -- if all you can do is repeat what's on Jake Tapper's twitter timeline every fucking day, what possible reason would I have to go to a scrub like you? Why not just go to the source?

And yeah, Fox is a rather shabby, shoddy, tawdry brand. It's always been tacky.

Always has been -- and not because of the conservatism. Just was a cheap-ass knockoff brand. They hid the cheapness of the outfit with a bold design innovation -- sticking flags and eagles everyfuckingwhere.

Why would anyone watch a cheap CNN knockoff while CNN is still available? And available in airport lounges, to boot?

posted by Ace at 03:15 PM

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