The Silencing (19 page)

Not only does Fox give air time to people who are left of center, but a fair portion of its audience is comprised of Democrats and independents. Longtime Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, a Fox News contributor, told the
New Republic
, “My reading of the numbers is that more Democrats and independents watch Fox than CNN and MSNBC. Pew just did a study
that showed that thirty percent of Fox’s audience are Democrats.” If you do the math, Trippi said, “Fox has two million people watching, and MSNBC has six hundred thousand. So for MSNBC to have more Democrats watching, every single person watching MSNBC would have to be a Democrat. So it never made much sense to not have people arguing the progressive side of things to that audience.”
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When I discussed the obsession with delegitimizing Fox News with Trippi in 2015 he told me, “From a crass political standpoint it doesn’t make sense. Which Democrats do you think are the persuadable Democrats you need to get your message to—those at Fox or MSNBC?” Clearly, people watching MSNBC are on board with the Democratic cause. They don’t need a push. Trippi noted that in addition to the Democrats watching Fox News there are the independent moderates who are so critical to winning elections. “It’s never made any sense to me that I wouldn’t get my view to an audience this big and more diverse. The more people think through the arguments it doesn’t make sense. Just going through polling data it’s [clear Fox is] not this monolithic audience,” Trippi said.

Obviously Democrats and liberals have access to the Pew data. They know that Democrats and independents are watching Fox, and that seems to be the problem.

How has Trippi found life at Fox? “No one at Fox has ever [gotten] . . . upset because I said something pro-Obama or pro-gay marriage,” said Trippi. “[But] I have progressives who are mad at me for being at Fox. It’s an ideological thing, because God forbid that I happen to agree with O’Reilly on something; that I might have an open enough mind to agree with him. You take more heat when that happens from progressives than from anybody at Fox. Nobody [at Fox] has ever told me to say anything.”

In fact, Trippi—who was previously a contributor at CBS and MSNBC—told the
New Republic
that working as a Fox News contributor was the best media experience he had ever had. It’s the best media experience I’ve ever had too.

Part of that is because, contra the Obama administration, Fox News is a serious news organization that open-minded liberals can respect.
Special Report with Bret Baier
, for instance, one of the best news shows on cable, “frequently beats the ABC or CBS newscasts in select markets, including Atlanta, St. Louis, and even Baltimore, a Democratic stronghold,” according to the
New York Times
.
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Left of center columnist Joe Klein, bemoaning how television news is turning away from covering politics and government, praised
Special Report
as the only “straight newscast” in its time slot.
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Fox News commentators and reporters include the likes of George Will and Charles Krauthammer, both Pulitzer Prize–winning columnists;
Fortune
magazine senior editor Nina Easton; Emmy Award–winning veteran reporters Brit Hume and Chris Wallace; two CNN veterans in Ed Henry, former White House Correspondents Association Board President, and Emmy Award–winner John Roberts; and straight arrow reporters Carl Cameron and Shepard Smith, who are respected by not only conservatives, but open-minded liberals, if not the Obama administration. And of course there are many others, but the point is that Fox has an array of respected professional journalists that would be the pride of any network. But the illiberal left cannot tolerate dissent, and so treats Fox News as a pariah.

THE LEFT’S WAR ON FOX WOMEN

One of the worst aspects of the illiberal left is its heinous sexism against women with whom they disagree.

Megyn Kelly, a former lawyer, is a serious and highly successful television journalist. When her contract was up for renewal in 2013, the
New York Times
reported that both CNN and NBC wanted to hire her away from Fox,
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a strange thing to desire if Fox News is not a “legitimate” news outlet.

But to the illiberal left, Megyn Kelly is not a reporter or a commentator or a woman to be respected for her achievements. She is a Fox “babe”
to be characterized by her looks. The Huffington Post linked to a
New York Times
story about Kelly adding the headline, “Megyn Kelly, ‘Attractive-Looking Blond’ Anchorwoman, Leads the Pack at Fox News,”
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twisting a flattering quote from the story to make it seem as if the only positive attribute she possessed were her looks. Over at the feminist website Jezebel, where they are all about being “pro-woman,” one writer said she liked Kelly the way she did “Ursula from the Little Mermaid,” adding that she “sort of” loved her despite Kelly being “largely a horrible, terrible person with many horrible, stupid thoughts and opinions.” This was the same “feminist” site that had previously described the prime-time host and former corporate litigator as a “Fox Newsbot.”
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It is also a website that the illiberal left considers a “legitimate” news source, as there were no complaints when MSNBC hired former Salon. com columnist Irin Carmon, who also happened to be a former blogger for Jezebel,
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to be a national reporter to cover politics and women’s issues. The outspoken liberal feminist and supporter of Democrats has a fellowship at Yale University on Reproductive Justice. (Imagine if Fox News hired a conservative “pro-life” blogger and gave her the title of national reporter and had her covering women’s issues.) The website Capital New York ran a January 2015 profile on Carmon, in which they asked her, “Was it a tough adjustment going from opinionated blogging with a strong voice to reporting for cable news?” Carmon explained that, “Well, we get to do some opinionating and strong voice-ing on the air around here . . . but I’ve always seen myself as a reporter first. . . .”
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At Fox News there is a sharp distinction between commentators and opinion hosts and reporters. In the media corners of the illiberal left, not so much. Carmon explained that, “there’s so much more space now for reporting with a passionate point of view, which is where I see my own work, than there was even a few years ago when I was starting out.”

If Carmon is an example of a woman the illiberal left considers a legitimate journalist, Megyn Kelly is someone the illiberal left tries to delegitimize through the oldest sexist trick in the book—objectifying her
as a woman. In 2010, the
New Republic
’s Jonathan Chait posted a screenshot of Kelly seemingly in mid-sentence under the headline, “The Quintessential Fox News Image.” He wrote: “Everything you need to know about Fox News is captured in this screenshot: the American flags, the fear-mongering image in the upper-right corner, the blond anchor with a facial expression that somehow combines sneering with absolute terror.”
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Kelly wasn’t sneering or looking frightened, though she is blonde and is on Fox which to the illiberal left means she’s a nameless “blond anchor” and candidate for being objectified and dehumanized.

Liberal journalist Lee Siegel
⁵¹
wrote for
Men’s Journal
explaining to liberal men what they were missing about “the blondes of Fox News.” He explained how fun it was to watch them, as “Fox women are studies in passive-aggressive revolt against their ideological masters.” These “masters” are white men who the “Fox women” secretly believe are “fools.” His article was headlined, “The Right, Hot, and Bothered Blondes of Fox News: One man’s guilty obsession with Megyn Kelly and the blondes of Fox News.” He explained his liberal brethren needed to appreciate that, “Most blonde anchors on Fox are dyed blondes,” and a woman who dyes her hair blonde has “on some level, subordinated her will to male desire.” But there’s more. The Fox News blonde “is also dangerous. She has another identity concealed by the one she submissively shares with you. Lurking within every Fox blonde is a CNN brunette.” He closed with, “Fox blondes hold out the promise of rational intelligence and sexual gratification—two precious and tragically incompatible human qualities. Of all the shameless lies Fox tells, that beautiful illusion may be the most potent.”

VH1.com
ran a July feature, “Meet the Blondes of Fox News” featuring a picture of Megyn Kelly, Dana Perino, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck along with a photo gallery of a few of Fox’s female journalists. “If you thought Fox News Channel was just a boys club, think again,” VH1 exclaimed. (Who ever thought that?) They went on to explain that yes, Fox hires women, “but they’re not necessarily adding sensibility to Fox News’ reporting. We’re all for strong women in the newsroom, but we’re not sure if Fox
News’ blondes fit that bill.” In particular, they explained that “Fox News’ blonde bombshells” such as Megyn Kelly “can’t be taken seriously” and included Greta Van Susteren, who holds a law degree from Georgetown and whose show
On the Record
has been top in its time slot for more than a decade, and Laura Ingraham, who holds a law degree from the University of Virginia, in their roundup of dumb blondes.

Allure
, a women’s beauty magazine, ran a poem by one of their editors, David DeNicolo, under the headline “Fox News Anchors: Hot or Not? With its bevy of babes, the network should be called the Foxy News Channel.” DeNicolo rhymed about the legs and hair and “gleaming smiles” of Fox News anchors and then, “Sure, Rachel Maddow has the smarts, But can she work her giggly parts?”

Jonathan Chait at
New York
magazine wrote: “If you have never seen Fox News before, here is a four-minute clip that captures the essence of the network so perfectly that you need never watch anything on it again. It’s all here. At the center, you have an old conservative white guy who is enraged about a fact that exists only in his addled brain. At his side, there’s a blonde sidekick who nods along with him but doesn’t get in the way.”
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The alleged cipher and “blonde sidekick” was Monica Crowley, a conservative radio host who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in international affairs.

So pervasive is the smear that all the female commentators and anchors on Fox are dumb blonde chicks that it was actually fact-checked by PolitiFact. That’s not a joke. They analyzed the female hosts’ and anchors’ hair color and found the assertion “mostly false,”
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because Fox had its fair share of black-haired and brunette women.

What might have been more elevating was recognizing the achievements of Fox News’ female anchors, reporters, and commentators. Mentioning for instance that Gretchen Carlson is an Emmy Award–winning reporter who used to work for CBS, or that Kimberly Guilfoyle of
The Five
is a former assistant district attorney, or that Jeanine Pirro is a former judge and district attorney. But acknowledging the talent and achievements of
the people who work at Fox News contradicts the illiberal left’s propaganda that Fox News is somehow illegitimate. It is only “illegitimate” because the illiberal left wants to silence dissent and seeks to do so not through besting its opponents in argument and debate but through the lowest form of scurrilous sexism or simple refusal to tolerate other points of view.

THE WAR ON FOX INTENSIFIES

By 2011, Media Matters was dedicating almost its entire $10 million annual budget to the destruction of Fox News.
Politico
’s Ben Smith reported, “The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of ‘guerrilla warfare and sabotage’ aimed at the Fox News Channel.”
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While Media Matters pretended to
Politico
that the organization had “transformed” itself into a vehicle to shut down Fox News; in fact its purpose had long been to harass anyone who deviates from leftist dogma and, in particular, delegitimize Fox. It says something that Media Matters felt comfortable being so transparent about its purpose, which involved “sabotaging” a news organization. More noteworthy is how little interest there was in this “transformation.” It’s hard to imagine such a collective yawn if a conservative organization was annually spending $10 million of some of the Republican Party’s highest profile donors’ money to destroy a media outlet, especially if the president of the United States (let’s just say President George W. Bush, for example) was joining in the fun.

Media Matters outlined its McCarthyite campaign in a 2010 memo to liberal donors which was provided to
Politico
. In it, Media Matters complained of the “pervasive unwillingness among members of the media to officially kick Fox News to the curb of the press club” and outlined how they planned to change that through targeting elite media figures and turning them against Fox. They shared a plan to set up a legal fund to sue (harass) conservatives for any “slanderous” comments they make about
progressives on air. They outlined how they had plans to assemble opposition research on Fox News employees. Incredibly, this “progressive organization” identified one of the best journalists around, Jake Tapper, as a problem because he questioned the White House about calling Fox News “illegitimate.” Media Matters, like the Obama administration, not only thought Fox News was illegitimate: they would only be satisfied when the mainstream media as a whole adopted their viewpoint.

In their strategy memo, Media Matters complained about “an expansive view of legal precedent protecting the freedom of the press” and described the “progressive movement’s own commitment to the First Amendment” as an impediment to be overcome or changed. Media Matters was “consider[ing] pushing prominent progressives to stop appearing on Fox News”—putting Media Matters in the rather odd position of claiming that Fox doesn’t give sufficient airtime to “progressive” points of view while Media Matters itself plotted to keep “prominent progressives” off the channel. The memo stated that Media Matters was considering publishing the names of Democrats who appeared on the channel as a way to shame them. If that didn’t work, presumably they could just shave their heads and march them down Constitution Avenue.