Now this is a bizarre development: Tea Party members have decided to boycott Fox News because they feel the network has shifted too far to the left. From The Daily Beast:
“Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.”
The three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and is the second time this group of activists have gone Fox-free in an effort to steer the coverage…
…A leader of the boycott, Kathy Amidon, of Nashville, declined an interview, instead directing The Daily Beast to a website, Benghazi-Truth. The website, a single-page, 23,000-word manifesto complete with multicolored fonts, supposedly incriminating videos of Fox News’s complicity in a coverup, and communist propaganda photographs, is kept by someone who identifies himself online as “Proe Graphique,” and who other members of boycott described as someone who works “in New York media.”
By way of explanation, the website reports: “People ask why not all mainstream media? Why just Boycott FOX? The answer, again, is that FOX needs the Tea Party/conservatives more than the conservatives need FOX after FOX turned left, basically selling out the people who made FOX successful in an attempt to earn an extra buck. FOX is extremely vulnerable to these boycotts while the rest of the MSM doesn’t need us at all, to speak of.”
Who can seriously believe that Fox News is a leftist propaganda outlet? These Tea Party members have mistaken ideology with theology at this point. Instead of taking two seconds for some much needed self reflection after their losses in the 2012 elections, (remember that the GOP lost even the popular vote for the House of Representatives; only gerrymandered districts allowed them to stay in the majority) they have doubled down on their irresponsible beliefs and attacked the most right wing news outlet on TV.
Fox News is also partly to blame for this predicament. They helped create the Tea Party monster. Instead of appealing to mainstream news consumers, they have positioned themselves to the fringe conspiracy crowd. Fox is partially responsible for creating this Frankenstein monster of right wing nuts, so they deserve this.
Even if they were to try changing their image, at this point I do not see Fox News ever making the shift where it can viewed as a ‘normal’ news network. It will always be viewed as, if not a pure propaganda outlet, then at least a right wing marketing/smear machine.
