Remember when Megan Kelly at Fox News paused to reassure all the kids watching her program that Santa was a white guy? And Jesus too? And remember how the liberal blogosphereâSlog includedâwent immediately to Outrage DEFCON 1? Remember how Jon Stewart and Media Matters and MSNBC spent an entire week mocking and refuting Kelly? (St. Nicolas was a Turk; Jesus would qualify as "a person of color" today.) Today Frank Rich argues in New York Magazine that our freak outs about Megan Kelly's commentsâand our freakouts about whatever the Fox News outrage of the day might beâplay right into Fox News' hands and that we should stop wetting our pants over Fox News:
Of course what Kelly said was dumb. But the reaction was even dumber. Every year, Fox News whips up some phantom âwar on Christmasâ plotted by what the networkâs blowhard-in-chief Bill OâReilly calls âsecular progressives.â This seasonal stunt has long been old news, yet many in the liberal media still canât resist the bait.... When this supposed ânational firestormâ (as Al Sharpton inflated it on his MSNBC show) finally died down, only two things had been accomplished beyond the waste of everyoneâs time. Liberals had played right into Foxâs stereotype of themâas killjoy p.c. police. And Fox News could once again brag about its power to set an agenda for its adversaries even as it also played the woebegone victim. âBecause they canât defeat us on the media battlefield, the far left seeks to demonize Fox News as a right-wing propaganda machine and a racist enterprise,â said OâReilly when sermonizing about the episode on his show. âThatâs why Miss Megyn got headlines about a Santa Claus remark that was totally harmless.â
Fox News is a right-wing propaganda machine and at times (if not this one) a racist enterprise (witness, among other examples, its fruitless effort to drum up a âNew Black Panther Partyâ scandal over some 95 segments in the summer of 2010). But OâReilly was half-right. Kellyâs inane remark was harmless and unworthy of headlines. Without the leftâs overreaction, there wouldnât have been any pseudo ânational firestorm.â
Rich goes on to argue that liberals have to learn to ignoreâthat liberals now have the luxury of ignoringâFox News:
In truth, Fox News has been defeated on the media battlefieldâand on the political battlefield as well. Even the 73-year-old wizard of Fox, Roger Ailes, now in full Lear-raging-on-the-heath mode as Âportrayed in my colleague Gabriel ÂShermanâs definitive new biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room, seems to sense the waning of his power. The only people who seem not to know or accept Foxâs decline, besides its own audience, are Âliberals...
And ignoring Fox News isn't just something liberals can do, Rich argues, it's something liberals should do:
The most interesting news about Fox News is that for some years now it has been damaging the right far more than the left. As a pair of political analysts wrote at Reuters last year, âWhen the mainstream media reigned supreme, between 1952 and 1988, Republicans won seven out of the ten presidential elections,â but since 1992, when âconservative media began to flourishâ (first with Rush Limbaughâs ascendancy, then with Fox), Democrats have won the popular vote five out of six times. Youâd think theyâd be well advised to leave Fox News to its own devices so that it can continue to shoot its own party in the foot.
Go read the whole delicious thing.