THE LOW POST: Keep on Hatin'

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"Crazy, isn't it? It just goes to show you how low our standards are."

-- End-of-the-world-preaching CNN anchor Glenn Beck, on seeing his ratings jump 84 percent this year.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the supposed "demise" of Fox News, and the return of legitimate competition to an information landscape that for many years now has been dominated by the network of Bill O'Reilly and Brit Hume.

If you look closely you will find a wealth of news analysis pieces about this very phenomenon rocketing around the Internet and in the media/entertainment sections of the various major daily newspapers. This is because media critics are using the end of the year to gloat anew about the fallout from this year's election season -- now almost universally interpreted as a catastrophe not only for the Republican Party, but for Fox's much-loathed bullies of the media world, who for years looked like a threat to eventually put every milquetoast broadcast hack east of Bob Costas out of a job.

The tone of these news analyses makes me a little nervous. I get the sense that there are a great many people in our business who would like to believe that America's media consumers are somehow "tired of hate" and are moving en masse from an invective-based news paradigm back to the supposed old standards of "objectivity" and "nonpartisan reporting." At the very least, the critics of our business are rushing to interpret the rise of now-formidable Fox competitors like Murrow-esque former ESPN wiseguy Keith Olbermann and yukster apocalypse merchant Glenn Beck as something other than a case of adaptive imitation.

Some say that networks like CNN have struck back by presenting the news with "personal flair" or "attitude"; others believe that the Fox ratings dip (a 21 percent decline in total viewers compared with the last quarter of 2005) is just a reflection of viewer sentiment toward a flailing White House that is closely tied in the public imagination to Rupert Murdoch's information empire. In the latter view, the recent blow to Fox is a cautionary tale about what happens when a news network ties its economic fortunes to a political ideology; that network then becomes a prisoner to the whims and policies of individual politicians, in this case the increasingly unpopular George W. Bush.