THE LOW POST: Keep on Hatin'

There is obviously a tremendous moral argument to be made here -- that Fox News stepped into an ethical minefield when it scored huge ratings supporting the Iraq invasion, a decision that soon after left it under enormous pressure to vindicate White House policy by sugarcoating the spiraling Iraq disaster. This is supposedly why commercial news networks are supposed to stay out of the politics business; you back the wrong horse, you end up sharing the same bottle of glue.

That is why the recent ratings reshuffle is being celebrated so loudly in the media world. In a business where ethics stopped being an important consideration for news directors fifty years ago, the blow to Fox is being seen as an overdue expression of capitalist justice, a punishment to the network that abandoned the true mission of the news business (providing objective news to consumers) and a reward to the Lou Dobbses and Anderson Coopers of the world who at least remained in the ballpark of non-partisan truth, whatever that is.

Sadly, this is bullshit, and we all know it. What happened this year was not an abatement of the Fox phenomenon. It was a super-acceleration of the Fox era. This idea that what Fox is selling is a specific policy or ideology is a myth that is going to be furthered in every corner of the media landscape. What Fox has been selling in the last ten years is a formula for building and retaining a mass media demographic. The formula is Blame, Hate, Coalesce: You address the widest possible political demographic, blame their problems on a numerically smaller group, and then you solidify the collective identity of the first group by feeding them a regular and addictive diet of warnings and dire threats to their existence. Every FAIR-reading media-savvy lefty knows how this works; you take aim at the religious middle class, for instance, and you plaster their evening news shows with pictures of queers in bridal gowns tongue-kissing in some reviled Leninist paradise like Massachusetts or San Francisco. Surround that news story with jazzy ads for products Joe Q. Layoff can no longer afford to buy (displayed by huge-chested models he will later see on the cover of a celebrity mag arm-in-arm with someone slimmer and richer than himself) and you have a perfectly addictive media formula, a neatly profitable little cycle of fear, titillation and self-loathing that never needs to be broken.