The announcement from Fox News was headlined this way: “Laura Ingraham joins Fox News' prime-time lineup.”
The Fox press release read as such:
Laura Ingraham will host a new weeknight primetime show on FOX News Channel from Washington D.C. starting on Oct. 30 at 10 p.m. ET, with “Hannity” and “The Five” shifting timeslots in the process.
“We are delighted to unveil this new primetime schedule for both our current and future generation of loyal FNC fans. Over the last decade, Laura’s extraordinary insight, expertise and strong voice have connected with our viewers across the network’s programming,” FOX News programming President Suzanne Scott said. “We look forward to her providing the audience with her exceptional commentary, engaging insight and spirited debate.”
Within the blink of an eye, as the October 30th launch for The Ingraham Angle approached, the attacks began. Laura was this, Laura was that. Whisper, whisper, whisper.
Notice a pattern here? Of course.
This is the strategy of the Left. Since they can’t make the arguments for their side, the answer is to take out the stars of conservative media. Ruin their careers. If possible destroy their lives. Beck and Dobbs and Rush yesterday, Hannity or Tucker today. And now that Laura arrives on the scene with her own prime time show following on the heels of Sean Hannity’s? Start sharpening the knives.
The question that never seems to get asked is….why? What is so at stake here that all of the time, effort, and money that goes well beyond the norms of competition is put out there in this kind of behavior towards members of the conservative media that wouldn’t be tolerated in junior high school?
One of the perceptive if obvious answers came the other day from Fox’s Howard Kurtz and his piece about the latest Time magazine cover. Here’s Kurtz’s headline: “Time's 'wrecking crew': Trump vowed to slash government, after all.”
The new Time cover features cartoons of President Trump’s head as a series of balls - as in wrecking balls swinging at the end of a chain. Here’s the Time headline: “The Wrecking Crew: How Trump’s Cabinet Is Dismantling Government As We Know It.” Kurtz observed:
Time’s new cover perfectly captures the general media attitude toward the federal government.
Donald Trump is a wrecking ball, and his crew is ‘dismantling government as we know it.’
But is government as we know it such a good thing?
The well-reported story says: ‘Quietly, the Administration has taken thousands of actions, affecting everyone from the poorest day laborer to the richest investment banker.’
But it’s not so quiet, as the piece acknowledges. Trump touts his slashing of regulations all the time. And Communications Director Hope Hicks is quoted as saying: ‘No president or administration has deregulated or withdrawn as many anticipated regulatory actions as this one in this short amount of time.’
The default setting for many in the media is that Republican presidents—especially this Republican president--want to whack government’s vital functions and Democratic presidents want to reinforce them.
This is exactly on point. As noted here in this very space a while back, one need look no further than Time itself to see how this Big Government Is Good-Limited Government Is Bad core belief of the liberal media plays out.
I noted the difference in Time’s treatment of President-elect Obama in 2008 and President-elect Trump in 2016 when both were selected as Time’s Person of the Year. Obama’s cover was a portrait of the smiling new President, while Trump’s was a sinister, glowering portrait with this warning caption: “Donald Trump: President of the Divided States of America.”
Only days after the 2008 election Time had another pro-Obama cover, this one literally photoshopping Obama into a classic FDR photo with the big smile and the uplifted cigarette holder. The caption: “The New New Deal: What Barack Obama Can learn from FDR-and what the Democrats need to do.”
In other words, Time was positively aglow that a left-wing Big Government was about to take over from the hated George W. in 2009. Now, the loathsome Donald Trump is, astonishingly of course, in Obama’s old chair and he got elected on a Reagan-style populist program of returning government to — gasp! — the American people.
The last thing the leftist media wants to see is yet another conservative superstar with an hour of Fox time cutting Big Government down to size with support for the hated Trump and his populist craziness.
But the ultimate, ultimate insult, of course, is that the star of the Ingraham Angle is…a woman. Worse still, this is a woman who never hesitates to wear a piece of jewelry around her neck that is — oh nooooooo! — a Christian cross! Worse, she’s — she’s — Catholic!!!! This, of course, summons the worst of Leftist media demons. Women (like minorities) are supposed to be liberal.
And what in God’s name (so to speak) is a sophisticated woman like this doing in the Catholic Church? Has she never heard of the Church of Sunday Brunch? Worshipped at the Alter of Meet the Press and Face the Nation?
Yet, five days a week on Fox News prime time, there will be a smart woman with an Ivy League (Dartmouth) pedigree and a University of Virginia law degree with three kids. To make it even worse, she has working class roots, making the conservative case to America. Oh yes, she’s an author as well. Right this minute, her latest book, Billionaire at the Barricades: The Populist Revolution from Reagan to Trump, is climbing the best seller charts.
There is everything in her background to drive the left nuts. And right on, cue, in this inevitable Washington Post profile, one found the equally inevitable quote like this:
“She’s right-wing radio’s high priestess of hate,” said Rory O’Connor, a liberal journalist and author of “Shock Jocks,” a book that lays out some of her more offensive lines through the years, such as calling the children of immigrants in the country illegally “anchor fetuses.”
But of course! Laura Ingraham as “right-wing radio’s high priestess of hate.” Well, gosh darn it, the secret is out. Conservatism is all about hate, conservatives are all haters. And on unspecified occasions, it’s only known to members of the Hate Club we all gather in a cave deep underneath Northern Virginia.
This is, without doubt, the real reveal about the left-wing media mind. It seethes with hate for those who dissent from its rituals, rhymes and rhetoric. And that goes quadruple if the target of the moment has strayed from the plantation of liberal thought — and is a woman — a woman of education and religion and motherhood who, dare we say, is pro-life to boot.
As mentioned, the “Laura stories” are already afloat and the blast in The Post that she is a “high priestess of hate” is only the beginning. There will undoubtedly be more.
The betting here is that Ingraham will rise above all this incoming, fight like a tiger, and do it with class and a smile.
And her audience? It can surely be said that the conservatives in her new TV audience will be watching with the exact understanding that this new show makes her a magnet for attacks from the left-wing media and a circus tent of others. They are now long on to this game of get-the-conservative-in-the-media.
But there’s something else they understand. That would be the need to stock up on the popcorn. Watching Laura Ingraham use her Ingraham Angle to dissect liberals and liberalism every night will without doubt be quite the experience.
