The importance of Fox News

Charles Krauthammer:

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... Fox has done a great service to the American polity -- single-handedly breaking up the intellectual and ideological monopoly that for decades exerted hegemony (to use a favorite lefty cliché) over the broadcast media.

I said some years ago that the genius of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was to have discovered a niche market in American broadcasting -- half the American people. The reason Fox News has thrived and grown is because it offers a vibrant and honest alternative to those who could not abide yet another day of the news delivered to them beneath layer after layer of often undisguised liberalism.

What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.

A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn't even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by the rise of Fox News.

What left me slack-jawed was the fact that she, like the cohort of mainstream journalists she represented so perfectly, was so ideologically blinkered that she could not fathom the plain fact that the liberal media were presenting the news and the world through a particular lens. The idea that it was particular, and that there might be competing ones, perhaps even superior ones, was beyond her ken.

That's why Fox News is so resented. It altered the intellectual and ideological landscape of America. It gave not only voice but also legitimacy to a worldview that had been utterly excluded from the mainstream media.

I'm proud to be part of this televised apostasy. And particularly proud to be part of the single best news program on American television, the six-o'clock news -- first with Brit Hume, now with Bret Baier. How good is "Special Report"? So good that even if I weren't on it, my mother would watch it -- and she spent 50 years as a Democrat.

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Special Report is the only show I watch on a regular basis. It is that good.

What I find so fascinating about Fox News is how much liberals hate it. It is not like they have to watch it. There are certainly numerous other choices they can and probably do make for news. They just can't stand the fact that a conservative point of view sees the light of day. That tells you something important about the weakness of liberalism. It does not want to complete in the marketplace of idea. In that regard liberalism is like the fascist who want to block all opposing points of view. Conservatives on the other hand value liberal media as a foil and something to be made fun of.

There is a reason why most of the erroneous reporting on the war over the last eight years has been by left wing news media. They wanted what they wrote to be true more than they wanted to find out what the truth was. That is another reason for the success of Fox News.