THE LOW POST: Keep on Hatin'

What everyone seems to now forget is that Fox's blame game works in reverse as well. When you demonize a certain group, you not only build the collective identity of your own target market, you build a sense of collective identity among your chief demographic's enemies as well. The genius of the Murdoch method was always that his attack dogs somehow managed to paint an extremely diverse group of "outsiders" with the same demonic brush; you take even a gazillionaire arch-capitalist creature like Teresa Heinz Kerry and sell her to the public as a closet socialist pining for a Sovietization of the economy while huddling in the same tent with the ghosts of the SDS and Lev Trotsky. Or you take a Holocaust denier like Iranian president Ahmadinejad and you claim that his very existence is a symptom of the same America-hatred taught in New England high schools, where closet socialist "red diaper baby" teachers skip over America's liberation of Hitler's death camps out of sheer irrational hatred for the military (I actually heard this argument made on Michael Savage's show).

If you lived in America in the last fifteen years and happened not to be a fan of Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, you almost certainly turned on Fox News at some point and found yourself unfairly bound at the hip with some invidious America-hating villain, and denounced as an accomplice in his "treason" simply because you happened to share some particular policy opinion, like opposition to the Iraq war. And if you had any backbone at all, had even a shred of decency, your instinct was to reject this crude and vicious attempt at political labeling and come to the defense of this supposed villain, stand with him, show solidarity. After about ten years of this -- before you know it -- there is a whole diverse class of people standing now united with very similar passions, those passions mainly having to do with resenting being labeled by the likes of Hannity and O'Reilly and feeling bound to others in opposition to their tactics.

Thus, after a time, a media strategy aimed at coalescing a broad middle under a paranoid umbrella against a smaller common enemy has the effect of backing said enemies into their own paranoid corner, where they in turn are ripe to be seized and eaten by some other canny media predator using exactly the same tactics.

That's what's happening now. When I go to a bookstore now, I don't see any relief from the same basic Blame, Hate, Coalesce strategy Murdoch started rolling half a generation ago. I just see it working in reverse. We had Bernie Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America and now we have Keith Olbermann's The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders. We had Bill O'Reilly's Culture Warrior and we now have Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly. We had Ann Coulter's Godless, which in turn spawned Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter and Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate and even the inspired I Hate Ann Coulter! by Anonymous. You had Rush's The Way Things Ought to Be and the way things are according to Al Franken, which is that Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. For those who don't want to buy all the new liberal books, you can get it all in one volume in The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. . . Reader: The Hideous Truth About America's Ugliest Conservatives, edited by Clint Willis.