What would happen if CBS reporter Dan Rather were punched in the
stomach by some goons on live television back in the day? Well,
actually, he was. On the floor of the 1968 Democratic Convention.
Here’s the
clip.
Do you think this was blacked out by CBS? Of course not. Walter
Cronkite, sitting up in the anchor booth, exploded in anger on air:
“I think we got a bunch of thugs here, Dan” he snapped, the clip
later shown over and over.
Has CBS shown what happened to Fox contributor Steven Crowder
the other day? When Crowder, like Rather, was punched by “a bunch
of thugs”?
Not a prayer. As Newsbusters
reports, CBS totally ignored the attack on Crowder, as was
true of NBC and ABC.
All of which helps explain why our friends at Fox News have once
again spent another year clobbering the liberal cable channels in
the ratings.
As the Daily Caller reports
here, this makes the 11th year in a row — say again the
11th year in a row — that Fox has beaten the pants off of
MSNBC and the once-dominant CNN.
The 2012 data comes as always from the Nielsen Media research
folks. And it is indeed amazing data when you consider the
hammerlock liberal networks once had in the ratings department.
Fox wins the day outright in eleven out of the first eleven
categories in total viewers, and wins the first seven with that
always coveted 25-54 demographic.
Our friend Sean Hannity has almost twice or more the audience of
his competitors.
In fact, the entire Fox lineup runs the table. To
put names and faces to all of this, it means the combined efforts
of the various Fox shows, beginning with the morning Fox and
Friends and running through the day with hosts Bill Hemmer,
Martha McCallum, Jon Scott, Jenna Lee, Megyn Kelly, Shepherd Smith,
Neil Cavuto, The Five, Brett Baier, Smith again, and on to
O’Reilly, Hannity and Greta Van Susteren, are cleaning the
collective clocks of their rivals.
Somewhere along the line here it might be noted that
professionally speaking Fox simply gives good television. A vastly
superior product gushing forth daily not to mention hourly. For
which Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch deserve immense credit.
The defeat of Mitt Romney can easily make some believe that the
efforts of presenting a fair and balanced network with a decided
positive focus on conservatism is somehow to no avail.
This is a mistake — and a big one.
The dominance of the liberal media in the pre-Fox era did not
prevent the election of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, or George
H.W. Bush, not to mention the election of a GOP Congress in 1994 as
led by Newt Gingrich. It is a mistake to equate network ratings
with the ability of candidate A or B to win the presidency or the
Congress.
The importance of Fox — and talk radio as well, the latter an
institution that was revolutionized by Rush Limbaugh — is that the
monopoly on the media narrative of what is happening in America and
the world has been not just broken but shattered.
For good.
One need only look at the recent dust-up in Lansing, Michigan,
with Big Labor to understand how the game works. Every bit of that
story made Fox News — both the labor side of the story… and the
incredible story of labor goons physically attacking Fox
contributor Steven Crowder and tearing down the tent of the people
from Americans for Prosperity.
For that matter, when CBS correspondent Lara Logan was attacked
in Cairo a while back Fox made a point of reporting the story, with
Hannity discussing it several times.
Why? Not as some sort of favor to CBS. But because — hello? —
the attack on Logan was news.
News. And unlike the liberal media, Fox News is about news.
One need look only to the angry whining coming from uber-leftist
Robert F. Kennedy,Jr. the other day to understand how traumatized
the American Left has become because of the success of Fox and talk
radio.
Said RFK Jr. as reported
here by Newsbusters:
There’s two things happening. One is the influence of big money
in politics, and the other is the right-wing control of the
American media, particularly starting with Fox News. 95 percent of
talk radio in our country is right-wing, and you need, according to
Pew survey, and you, so a whole section of our country that that’s
what they’re hearing. They wake up in the morning, when they go to
bed at night.
Twenty-two percent of Americans say their primary news source is
Fox News. I think that that has, that has, it’s divided our country
in a way that we haven’t been divided probably since the Civil War,
and that it’s empowered these large corporations to get certain
kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United States
Congress elected — the Tea Party ideologues who control the
Republican Party.
Well.
It is always amusing to see the horror that liberals display at
the realization that ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the New York
Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles
Times, Time, Newsweek and all the rest no
longer control the narrative of the day. Not to put too fine a
point on this, but in a few weeks Newsweek in print will
simply cease to exist, so badly did its flag carrying of the
liberal narrative damage its circulation.
So as the end-of-year reflections begin to pour forth — here’s
to Fox News. Congratulations to Hannity and all the Fox crew from
the on-camera talent to the behind-the-scenes production crews to
those working in the executive suites.
A job well done. The American television audience has just given
them all a well-deserved two-thumbs up yet again.
And a Merry Christmas to you to, Mr. Kennedy.
