"Stop Beating A Dead Fox" - Frank Rich

Click here to read a (longish) column by New York Times columnist Frank Rich on the decline of Roger Ailes and Fox News. He maintains that Fox's influence is ebbing:

In truth, Fox News has been defeated on the media battlefield—and 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 ­portrayed in my colleague Gabriel ­Sherman’s definitive new biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room, seems to sense the waning of his power.

Rich acknowledges Fox's success in the cable news rating wars --

The notion that Fox News has been defeated would seem absurd if you judge solely by the numbers. The year just ended was the network’s twelfth in a row as the most-watched cable-news network. Its number of total viewers surpasses CNN and MSNBC combined.

But cable news overall is in a steep decline, overtaken and surpassed by the new media. And while Fox draws a prime-time audience of 1 million, the least of the three networks, CBS, draws 8 million; ABC and NBC draw far more.

Fox, like the other cable news stations, is "hemorrhaging young viewers"; it draws a median age of 68. "Fox is in essence a retirement community." And while its demographic is shockingly old, it is also astonishingly white:

Hard as it may be to fathom, Fox Nation is even more monochromatically white than the GOP is, let alone the American nation. Two percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were black. According to new Nielsen data, only 1.1 percent of Fox News’s prime-time viewership is (as opposed to 25 percent for MSNBC, 14 percent for CNN, and an average of roughly 12 percent for the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs).

The current conflict within the Republican party is reflected at Fox:

Fox News’s theoretical political power is further compromised by the internal crisis it shares with the GOP: its inability to navigate the conflict between the party Establishment and the radical base that is dividing the conservative ranks. The network has veered all over the place to try to placate both camps, only to end up wounded in the crossfire.

An early and enthusiastic backer of all things tea party, Fox gleefully promoted every wingnut rally, event, and candidate, including "any and all tea-party fantasy presidents, from Sarah Palin to Herman Cain."  [I'd add Donald Trump to that august list.] But when establishment Republicans like Romney and Rove started to be savaged by tea party darlings Limbaugh, Levin, and Beck, Fox was severely damaged by the  backlash: "... the anyone-but-Mitt GOP base disdained Fox much as it did the nominee himself."

That schism has only widened since Romney’s defeat. When Fox regulars like Rove, O’Reilly, Brit Hume, Dana Perino, and Greg Gutfeld agreed with John Boehner that shutting down the government to defund Obama­care had proved a self-destructive strategy for the GOP, the base was having none of it. “Karl Rove, your record sucks!” ranted Levin in September. “Why would we listen to you?”

Perhaps Fox's biggest problem is Roger Ailes' technophobia:

More than in any political credo, Ailes believes most of all in the power of television, the medium he grew up in and mastered as a political tool well before many of his competitors. But as his viewers were gobsmacked by the reelection of Obama, so he has been blindsided by the fading of television as the dominant news medium. About new media Ailes knows very little and has never wanted to learn much.

And my favorite quote from the article:

When MSNBC emerged in 1996, he mocked it not because of its political identity (it hadn’t chosen one yet) but because of its connection to Microsoft; he wisecracked that Fox News was not in business to “tell people to turn off their television set and go to their computer to get more information.”

Rich closes with some advice for Democrats:

Without Ailes and his Fox News to kick around anymore, the left may feel a bit disoriented—much as the right most certainly will once its unifying bête noire (literal and figurative), Obama, is gone from the White House. But while the right remains obsessed with fighting its unending war against a nearly lame-duck president, it behooves liberals to move on and start transitioning out of their Fox fixation. Paradoxically enough, the most powerful right-wing movement in the country, the insurgency in the Republican grassroots, loathes the Boehner-Christie-Rove-centric Fox News nearly as much as the left does. The more liberals keep fighting the last war against the more and more irrelevant Ailes, the less prepared they’ll be for the political war to come.