Democrats have long envied Republicans’ message discipline, which presumably means Dems are relishing what The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman calls the “disarray” in the GOP and in its main “official organ,” Fox News.
In his Wednesday post, Longman piggybacked on Gabriel Sherman’s item which noted that Donald Trump’s decisive win in New Hampshire “demonstrated that disregarding Fox News doesn’t spell political ruin for a Republican” and reported that “inside Fox there is confusion about what role the network should play in this altered media ecosystem going forward.”
“I don’t think right-wing media is set up to deal with an unorthodox candidate who doesn’t consistently hew to the conservative line,” remarked Longman. “I also don’t know how they’d promote [Ted] Cruz without willing and eager surrogates to fill the chairs…The Dems are suffering from their own form of schizophrenia, but their media outlets actually kind of thrive on the debate and excitement.”
From Longman’s post (bolding added):
I’m not a Foxologist. I can’t watch the network without feeling ill. And I know that this gives me a bit of a blind spot in my political analysis, but I’m just not willing to pay that kind of price to know everything I ought to know…
There has been a lot of focus on how Trump and Cruz are giving elected Republican officials a bad case of heartburn, but much less on how their successes are messing up the operation of their Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer.
I don’t think right-wing media is set up to deal with an unorthodox candidate who doesn’t consistently hew to the conservative line, let alone one who attacks their talent and boycotts their debates. I also don’t know how they’d promote Cruz without willing and eager surrogates to fill the chairs. I’m sure they’d muddle through, but they’re not effective if they can’t do their thing the way they been trained to do it.
The GOP is definitely in disarray.
The Dems are suffering from their own form of schizophrenia, but their media outlets actually kind of thrive on the debate and excitement. It helps that they’ve never really been an official organ of the party. It reminds me of how countries with official state religions couldn’t weather the pedophilia crises nearly as well as countries where no religion was tightly aligned with the government.
