Monday, October 05, 2009

Fox to Fire Beck?

That's a HuffPo fantasy to be sure, but it's instructive of what the Left doesn't get about either Glenn Beck or Fox News.

When news show host Glenn Beck explicitly called Barack Obama a racist, it caused a media hailstorm and an advertising exodus from his show that reached as far as the U.K (Beck's show is broadcast on Murdoch's 'Sky News' channel). On a recent political talk show tour, President Obama sat down with five networks, none of which were Fox. The Murdoch-owned network was humiliatingly replaced with the Spanish language channel Univison. In another spat, the White House press secretary publicly criticized the network for not airing Obama's health care speech, a move it would never have considered with any other network.

While Glenn Beck is not the lone voice of dissent within Fox News (O'Reilly, Hannity and Malkin are similarly offensive), he does epitomize what is wrong with the network, and just how out of sync it is with the mainstream. His continued assault on the President which consists of a remarkable slew of accusations and innuendo (Obama is a socialist/communist/Nazi/racist), does not reflect well on the network, regardless of how right wing it is.

Teh One's snubbing of Fox News says far more about him than it does about either Rupert Murdoch or Fox News itself. Liberals hated Fox News long before Beck moved to that network and will hate it long after Beck has fizzled out. Why? Because Fox News has dared to offer news and perspective that is not "the mainstream," which is to say, isn't liberal.

Most Americans have argued for 40 years that news organizations are too liberal, but it's only been in the last 15 or so that those same viewers have had an alternative to the liberal bullshit of the MSM. That alternative is Fox News, and despite the hopes and prayers of HuffPo writers, it's not about to tank any time soon.

Both Beck and Fox News have managed to scoop "the mainstream" multiple times, the only sort of "snubbing" that actually matters. And as HopeNChange continues to fumble, flub, and flip-flop, Fox News will continue to chronicle it. Will Murdoch fire Beck? I have no idea but there's no reason to think so at this point. His ratings are fine and he's no more unreasonable than Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. When you see MSNBC dropping those clowns, maybe Beck should moderate.