Just a Quick Note on Fox News

Whether watching CNN or MSNBC or PBS or The View, etc., over the last twenty-four hours since Rupert Murdoch stepped down as Chairman, the smug condescension of the American press corps has been on display.

They’re collectively getting their asses kicked by Fox News, and they hate the network, hate its hosts, hate its management, and, most especially, hate its viewers.

Fox is not perfect, and, in fact, I do think has made some significant mistakes — to the tune of several billion dollars to Dominion, etc. Likewise, I think Fox put hosts in dominant positions whereby those hosts could leverage their clout in bad ways.

But the media’s problems with Fox are not recent problems. They are decade-long problems. The other networks were blasting Fox before the Obama era. They could have replicated Fox’s successes but have consistently chosen to misinterpret what has made Fox so successful.

The reality is that Fox News spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on things people near America’s river valleys care about and largely ignores the contemporary secular views of the coastal elite. The hostility of that very coastal elite on the other networks of the past 24 hours shows the arrogance and hubris of a media elite headed towards financial turmoil and irrelevance.

You don’t have regular, reliable reporting on the border crisis anywhere except Fox News with Bill Melugin and Griff Jenkins. You don’t regularly see firsthand the impact of the fentanyl crisis in the country. You are far likelier to see stories from small-town America on Fox than the other networks.

It’s not just opinion-driven commentary shows at night that matter. It’s the other stuff people in Alexandria, LA and Hutchinson, KS and Ottumwa, IA care about that is not the Hollywood celebrity news, the proud family of the transgender homecoming queen, and the guy who beat all the girls in swimming who is a hero.

You can turn on any other news channel if you want that stuff. At Fox, you’re going to hear about the girls who lost out to the boy and you’re going to hear about the foster family in Abilene, TX, who took in the foster kids after the celebrity abandoned them once the cameras from the other networks went away.

Fox News is far from perfect. But its ratings have far more to do with its hosts not treating its viewers with contempt, which too many of the other networks do.

Pick any other network and they’ll have on a Biden Administration talking head to tell Americans they are wrong about the economy and should be grateful. Turn on Fox, and you’ll see the family of five that can no longer makes ends meet because of the Biden economy.

If other networks were smart, they’d stop looking down on Fox and figure out what they can take from it to improve without becoming like it. But the progressives who control the editorial flow would never do that. So Fox remains a media pariah and a ratings darling. I suspect they’re okay with that.