On May 31, 2011, at 1:53 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
> Long article, but enjoyed it:
>
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525
>
> I'm kind of embarassed to admit how many things I learned that I didn't know but now feel that I ought to have.
This article assumes that Fox has a vast influence. But what about this:
> Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent) with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”
This doesn't sound like the most crucial demographic in the U.S. These are people who are already right-wing, who have little social influence, and are, as Wallace Stevens put it in a poem title, on the way to the bus. (Total viewership is on the order of 3 million, which is 1% of the U.S. pop.) Yeah, Ailes is evil, but is Fox all that it's cracked up to be?
Doug