Adieu, Fox News

Sigh. It was inevitable, I guess, that Fox News would become part of the Main Stream Media, part of the Establishment. The process is something that OffHisMeds calls the "Good Mexican Restaurant syndrome". See, it works like this:

You find a really good Mexican Restaurant; great Margaritas, excellent nachos, fajitas and enchiladas, and a killer salsa to dump on everything. Life is good, but after some period of time -after they've enjoyed some success - things change. The Margaritas get watered down; the salsa is off the shelf instead of fresh-made; they buy cheaper cuts of meat for the fajitas. Next thing you know, there's nothing to differentiate your favorite joint from the thousand others whose quality ranges from mediocre to crap.

There in a nutshell you have Fox News, and it has happened over just this past election cycle. I'll give you several examples, starting with Talking Head Ann Coulter. A reliable and eloquent Basher Of All Things Not Conservative, she has apparently turned into a Mitt Romney drone, complete with the Romney Talking Points chip embedded in her skull. This was never so evident than this morning when she crucified Newt Gingrich for the crime of winning the South Carolina primary. She also questioned the sanity of South Carolina voters, trashed the Tea Party as an influence on the margins, and recited by rote all of Romney's alleged qualities: "businessman, DC outsider, only one who can beat Obama, blah blah blah". Then, in the space of 60 seconds, she called Gingrich a Liberal, flogged a very short list of inconsistencies in his positions as if he was the only politician to have ever done such a thing, brought up Gingrich's 3 marriages twice, managing to squeeze in references to infidelity and cheating and speaking at a rate normally reserved for those end-of-spot disclaimers you hear on radio commercials for automobile financing or prescription drugs.

The woman was frantic. We'll talk about why a bit later. What disturbs me is Coulter's, and increasingly Fox's, sycophancy for Romney - as liberal a Republican who has ever existed and a man totally lacking authenticity - as well as their continuing repudiation of Conservatism.

On the matter of Gingrich's primary victory, Coulter's analysis defies the laws of physics. Gingrich didn't just beat Romney, he crushed him almost two to one. Those kinds of margins aren't possible if the support for Gingrich can be put off to some kind of momentary psychosis on the part of the Voters, as Coulter suggests. But she's not alone in advancing this opinion. Bill O'Reilly has been in the tank for Romney for months, marginalizing other candidates if he bothers inviting them on his show at all, then demeaning them when they do show up, as he did Rick Santorum last week.

Yesterday, financial host Neil Cavuto - a man I've admired in the past for his sense of fairness - roundly criticized audience members who cheered when Gingrich took John King's opening debate question about Gingrich's ex-wife and crammed it back down King's throat. I mean, Cavuto's defense of King got embarrassing. It went on, and on, and on. Off-camera, there had to be a producer frantically making the cut-throat gesture, but Cavuto was not to be stifled. "John King is an honorable man"; "John King doesn't deserve this treatment"; "John King is one of the finest reporters I've ever met", and my favorite "John King asked a legitimate question". This went on, ad nauseum.

Hey Neil, I cheered Gingrich too, and reveled in King's discomfort. At Last, a Democrat given free rein to start any question to a Republican with the "have you stopped beating your wife" premise got hoisted by his own petard. May it happen a thousand times more in this election cycle alone.

What also disturbs me is Fox's collective employment of the narrative of the Liberal Media, replete as it has been with inaccuracies and outright distortions of the judgment of Conservatives and the demonization of anybody on the political right. Simply put, they are becoming part of the Republican Establishment, the folks who choose not to fight this "Narrative", but work with it.

This is the Establishment that - with the exception of Ronald Reagan - gave us, count 'em, six presidential candidates that were nothing but tools of the Democrat Party: Richard Nixon, Gerald R Ford, George HW Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain and George W Bush. All of them ever-willing to compromise, ever-willing to triangulate, and none of whom stood for anything except their own legacy. Four of them made it to the presidency and did real damage.

My point is that the MSM tolerates only a certain type of Republican. Sure, they'd prefer that the Democrat always win, but they're content to have the likes of Nixon, Ford, Bush 41 and Bush 43 carry the Democrat's water. The conservative media - represented on television solely by Fox News - has been a force in changing the perception of Voters about Conservatism. But with Fox, apparently, no more.

And it's not just Fox's reverence for Liberal correspondents of the MSM, 90% of them self-avowed and activist liberals; it's the hundred other subtle ways Fox has started to skew their reportage: their perpetuation of the factless accusation by Gingrich's ex-wife charge that he wanted an open marriage; their insistence on flogging the notion that he accepted $1.6 million from Fannie & Freddy, something he has plausibly disproved; repeatedly calling Santorum a religious radical; repeatedly defaming Ron Paul for his foreign policy views. And from my standpoint, proclaiming the author of ObamaCare in Massachussetts - Mitt Romney - more conservative than the author of the Contract with America - Newt Gingrich. Certainly all of the non-Romneys opinions are subject to criticism, but the controversial ones are not the only things these candidates stand for. You'd never know that by watching most of the programs on Fox News.

What it boils down to, In OffHisMeds Humble Opinion, is Fox's embracement of celebrity, the relentless pressure by their Liberal counterparts to be "reasonable", and the desire to be part of all the best Salons, dinner parties, awards ceremonies and the hundreds of other self-congratulatory events by which the Establishment not only reward themselves, but tries to convince the Electorate that they really are swell guys. The worst offender is Bill O'Reilly, who regularly invites liberal Talking Heads and politicians onto his program, let's them spew their propaganda, and rarely challenges their astonishingly factless proclamations. He inevitably thanks them for the Disinformation and calls them "stand-up" people for coming into the so-called "No Spin Zone". Greta Van Susteran is a close second.

There might also have been a tad of course correction on the Good Ship Fox News by Rupert Murdoch as a concession to the US government not to crucify him for the misdeeds of the Daily Mail over in London- as they have threatened to do - what with all that unseemly tapping of celebrity phones and the unlimited discretionary prosecutorial powers of the Federal government. Interesting to note that this had been a practice of several tabloids in England, but only the Conservative owner, Murdoch, is under scrutiny. Like dozens of other instances I could cite, yet another relevant fact that Fox News has failed to publish.

It was John O'Sullivan of the National Review who observed that advancing Conservative principles is hard work. His words (and I'm paraphrasing) were that "Conservative principles have to be defended every day, in order for them not to be overwhelmed by Liberalism". I guess Fox just decided that that was too much hard work.

Bottom line, Conservative arguments, like really good Mexican food, are very simple to make, but very simple to screw up. The same thing is true of broadcast news organizations.