Articles from the media about what other media outlets are doing don’t tend to be very enlightening. We know there are alot of liberal media outlets and journalists; surprise, surprise. What is the main conservative TV station, Fox News, up to these days? For the past two weeks the front headline for Fox News has focused not on a big national politics story like Afghanistan, but on the disappearance of a young woman in Colorado- Gabby Petito.
It is a tragic, horrific story but it does cause me to wonder: why is Fox News giving so much airtime to a murder case? Literally two weeks at the top? MSNBC has an idiotic answer for us: racism. That’s not only stupid, but also somewhat of a racist answer because it generalizes that the Fox News audience wouldn’t care about Gabby Petito’s life if she were not white (as the Babylon Bee points out).
The explanation that I think is much more plausible is that Fox News producers are focusing more on headlining “personal interest” than politics. Petito’s story fits the genre of the “true-crime” podcasts that are popular entertainment these days, and this is the content Fox News thinks their audience would like to listen to. In the big scheme of things, entertainment is replacing more serious topics on the channel. Fox News has gone from nonstop coverage of conservativism to nonstop coverage of Britney Spears’ conservatorship.
What serious person could care less about such things?
There’s no question this is going on at Fox News, the only question is: why? It was evident from several episodes during the 2020 campaign year that many on the channel are not really conservative. Chris Wallace infuriated the Fox News audience during the debates, which they think were conducted in a way biased against Trump. On election night itself, many state races were called prematurely for Biden, again angering the audience. The one consistently solid conservative voice left on the channel is Tucker Carlson; if they ever lose him, Fox News is done. Tucker focuses on the serious political and cultural topics in a way that few others on the channel do these days (Levin I’d count as one more exception).
Fox News has drifted away from conservativism over the past few years. At the same time they did not want to lose their audience- so they have switched over to more non-controversial, entertaining offerings. Perhaps they think we Conservatives are just exhausted, tired after the battles of the Trump years. So keep ‘em laughing, and have some tough talkers on to make the conservatives out there think they’re hearing from the right people still, even though the topics are trivial.
That is a shame; we conservatives should demand more serious, broad-impact content in our news. There is more than enough going on these days in national politics with Biden in office that we ought to be keeping abreast of. We need to know about what’s going on to even have a chance of confronting our political enemies.
It's a little bit like the History Channel's transition from nonstop shows about World War II to nonstop shows about aliens
Are we looking for a revolt against entertainment?