Fox is Boring

by Brant Watson

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Hurricane forums are full of excited comments about central pressure and wind speed and comparisons to Camille and 1931 and 1938, with hastily-tacked-on notes about how it will be tragic if anyone dies and they hope it’s a dud. Source: XKCD

Fox News rose to prominence by casting itself as the conservative channel. As a business maneuver this was extraordinarily successful. The act of self labeling as right of center left all the other news organizations to fight like scavengers over the other half of the spectrum. It didn’t take long for MSNBC to attempt to clone the success of Fox by essentially becoming it’s left wing mirror. Early under Bush, Fox News was successful in courting a breed of patriotism and acting as a bulwark against left wing anti-war sentiments. In the Obama administration the news station was part of the cultural and political opposition to the left wing power structures.

Now Fox’s dominance is slipping. It’s easy to think that is the result of recent shake-ups in their line-up and some of the scandals that have plagued the network but this isn’t the whole story. Tucker Carlson took over Bill O’Reilly’s slot and initially easily maintained his ratings. In fact Fox weathered most of the scandals just fine without a major loss in ratings, at least until very recently.

Humans enjoy spectacle. Whether or not you think that the bulk of the drama surrounding the Trump administration is a conspiracy by the left wing media cabal, completely true, or some intricate and nuanced mixture of the two, it’s difficult to dispute that it’s highly entertaining. Fox is missing the best political soap opera in recent memory—maybe even the best in all of American history.

Currently Fox and it’s evening commentary shows are running headlines that are permutations of the following:

  • Why [insert latest scandal here] isn’t a big deal

  • Leftist anti-free speech on college campus

  • Stories about cultural wars:

    • people saying bad things about Trump

    • paid protestors

    • snowflake generation articles about millennials

    • ethnic/sexual/gender idenity

    • people faking hate-speech

  • Hillary/Killary scandals or shady dealings

While an over-generalization, some of those stories have been running on Fox in some form or another for years now. That gets boring no matter how good or accurate the actual stories are and therein is the problem for Fox. News is mostly about what’s going wrong. No one wants to see the headline “112,924 Flights Landed Safely Today” on the front page every day. It’s not news because it’s not spectacle.

The viewership of Fox under the Obama administration was driven by the sense of spectacle that their narrative pushed. Words like “war” came to be applied in more general ways. A war on Christianity. A war on Christmas. The culture war. The media on the left suggested that the stories Fox pushed simply did not exist; that they were strawmen built by the right wing to push a fightening but entertaining narrative.

Now the tables have turned.

By not joining in the media’s feeding frenzy over the Trump administration, Fox is missing out on the fodder that is driving the ratings of their competition. Even IF the rest of the media or liberal politicians and pundits invented the current spectacle it’s still real. Fox is trying to suggest that there is no story and if there is no story well… then there is nothing for people to tune in to. They’ll flip the channel to the next station that’s playing up the big scandal of the day and go back to vicariously enjoying it from their own safe and comfortable abode.