News World: The End of the Liberal Media

Fox New Channel has again destroyed its closest cable news competitors. It’s primetime line-up, which includes Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glen Beck, regularly grosses more viewers than its next two competitors combined. CNN is the second runner up, but MSNBC is giving the cable news warhorse a run for its money. Whether or not MSNBC is able to surpass CNN in the near future, it will probably be a while before either of them gives Fox News any serious competition. For anyone familiar with the spiritual precursor of Fox News–talk radio–the current state of affairs craves the question: What has become of the liberal media?

Make no mistake about it, the vast majority of Fox News’ 2.3 million nightly viewers believes in the liberal media, and by “liberal media” they do not mean The Village Voice. They are also not referring to the likes of Alan Colmes, the liberal baggage Sean Hannity recently dropped from his show to the further benefit of his ratings. Rather, the liberal media refers to what others might call the mainstream media: NBC, ABC, and CBS network news, along with most major newspapers and news magazines. This media, many Fox News viewers believe, offers a persistent left-leaning bias on the news. What is even worse, the liberal media presents this bias without openly owning up to the fact. In the guise of objectivity, they believe, the liberal media has spent decades injecting lefty cant into popular journalism. Fox News, with its openly opinionated primetime hosts, is the self-conscious antidote to the perceived poison of the liberal media. And as such, it’s clearly doing quite well for itself.

Sean Hannity is an important link between Fox News and talk radio, and it’s no coincidence that he plays second-fiddle both on cable and on the air. On TV, it’s Bill O’Reilly who’s top dog, while on the radio, it’s the granddaddy of right-wing canines, Rush Limbaugh. It was Rush who invented the liberal media in its current form. He began as a true outsider and gadfly, churning his way through three hours of airtime a day for almost a decade before Fox News Channel existed.  Even now, it’s not unrealistic to think that Rush has as many listeners as Fox News has nightly viewers (Rush claims 20 million listeners a week, but even low-ballers don’t put it below 12 million). In any event, Sean Hannity, as both a radio and TV personality, provides the bridge between right-wing talk-radio  and the cable news renaissance.

The big difference between right-wing radio and cable news is that Rush Limbaugh bills himself as a conservative commentator, while Fox News bills itself as “Fair and Balanced.” In a very real sense, Fox’s tagline is a purposeful reclamation of journalistic objectivity from the clutches of the liberal media. It is tantamount to saying, “If the liberal media can call itself objective, so can we.” Never mind that your number 2 guy is so humorlessly conservative that he makes Rush look like a cuddly clown by comparison and your top guy touts his working-class Catholic roots as if they were enough to forbid comparisons with the wannabe WASP aspirations of the cigar-chomping Limbaugh. Despite these right-wing credentials, Fox News has no qualms about labeling itself as, well, news.

Nor, as it turns out, do other media outlets. Fox News Channel is ranked as the top cable news channel, in direct competition with CNN at number two and a fast growing MSNBC at number three. Of these three networks, only Fox is in the top ten of all basic cable stations, coming in at a healthy number two behind USA Network and running neck and neck with the Disney Channel. CNN, meanwhile, is on the decline, while MSNBC is moving up. These trends all make sense if you consider the relationship of each network to both the old mainstream–“liberal”–media and to the emerging partisan media marketplace.

CNN was founded 1980, well before the emergence of either conservative talk radio or “Fair and Balanced” cable news. At the time, it’s function was to provide a twenty-four hour source for news, a commodity previously served up only in half-hour slices several times a day by the broadcast networks. Other than having a longer day, however, CNN’s journalistic model was pretty much the same as that of broadcast news. Like the rest of the mainstream media, CNN presented itself as a nonpartisan, objective observer of current world events. This journalistic model is still the dominant form, despite its decline. Even in today’s market of slipping ratings, the least watched broadcast news show on CBS has three times the viewers of the Fox News Channel. Trends, however, are all towards partisanship, which is not something that works in CNN’s favor. As a member of the old guard, modeled on the network news of the late twentieth-century, CNN has long been a part of the unacknowledged liberal media that Rush Limbaugh built his career by defining and belaboring.

Fox News Channel, then, is the news channel for the non-liberal news seeker. It is, both explicitly and implicitly, the news source for people who want an alternative to the liberal media as they define it. That this market exists was proved almost two decades ago by talk radio, and the fact that it is the strongest market in cable news today should be neither surprising nor especially worrisome. The cable market is, by definition, specialized, and the success of a cable network has as much to do with precise targeting as it does with broad appeal. Fox News knows its audience better than CNN does, and it’s audience is real but not enormous. On any given night, far more cable viewers are watching something besides the news. Conversely, most people who watch any kind of news at all are still checking in with the liberal media mainstays of the big three, ABC, NBC, and CBS.

But hegemony is on its way out, and the hot product in the news is partisan. This is why the lowly number-three cables news channel, MSNBC, is nevertheless on the rise. Finally recognizing that part of the success of Fox News is based upon its embrace of partisanship, MSNBC is trying to do the same thing. For just as there is an audience who believes the mainstream media is too liberal, there is also a growing audience who thinks that it is too conservative. This is the other side of the coin that MSNBC is trying to exploit, despite the failure of less sophisticated imitations of right-wing success like AirAmerica radio. CNN, meanwhile, is stuck trying to play to the middle in the broad but shrinking field of moderate media.

Whatever news looks like in ten years, it will owe something to both Fox News and, ultimately, Rush Limbaugh. This is true whether or not Rush’s claims of “liberal media bias” were ever founded on anything other than paranoia. The fact of the matter is that hegemonic media, by virtue of its universality, will always rightfully inspire paranoia in any faction that does not feel served by its hegemony. The success of Fox News need not be the precursor of increasingly polarized media, wherein we are all strung out between left- and right-wing info-propaganda. Rather, the history and numbers at Fox News suggest that it is on the forefront of a media differentiation that will probably continue until the the great mass of uncritical news viewers is parcelled out into small, self-selecting groups. Conservative and liberal news outlets are just the start: We will all, eventually, be able to find some slant on the news that suits our own leaning.