[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]The most beguiling question in contemporary journalism, I posit, is:
Why has the Fox News Channel, especially in the last three months, become — by a wild margin — the hottest, the most criticized, the most talked about media organization on the planet?
A satisfactory answer is so slippery I don’t think I can corner it.
If you think a comeback response is so obvious, tell me. My face is blank.
Part of the explanation:
The Left is obsessed to their death beds with certain personalities on the Right — Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Rush, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly.
Like a man falling down the side of a skyscraper, the Left clings to every breath they utter and every thought they spawn.
If Mr. Limbaugh drives a green car, the Left has a comment: Must mean he is mocking their environmental crusade. If Sean Hannity comments on a development in Washington, the Left has a wisecrack rejoinder — but never have they offered a cerebral response. Mocking seems to be their whole mission.
Fox Is No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 — Keep Going
Fox News buries its cable competition so deeply that the only way the unbalanced commentators can catch up is if Mr. O’Reilly, Mr. Beck or Mr. Hannity retires.
In the latest quarterly ratings issued this morning, Fox has the Top 10 programs because, I believe, they report news through a straight prism, and they comment on the news, mostly not always, like rational adults.
Fox’s amateurish competition, CNN, whose image is as inflated as President Obama’s, and clownish MSNBC are failing because they are obsessed with talking about personalities on the Right instead of evaluating the news.
Another section of the answer is that Glenn Beck, not a likely candidate, has emerged as the shrewdest journalist/commentator in the electronic or print media.
Sometimes, watching Fox is like seeing Playboy come to life, the ravingly beautiful anchors and commentators who are even smarter than they are attractive.
As for the most charismatic commentator in media today, schoolchildren in the farthest corners of the land know “Glenn Beck” even if they are not positive whether 2 plus 2 equals 4 or 4 1/2.
Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You
Listening to Mr. Beck’s captivating conclusions about the self-proclaimed most mesmerizing profile in the universe, President Obama, is like watching a gorgeous girl sashay down the boardwalk.
Doesn’t matter how many times your wife elbows you in the ribs. You utterly cannot unhinge your eyes from her, even after she vanishes.
In early summer, Mr. Beck said that Mr. Obama is a racist who is uncomfortable around white people. The Left burbled and erupted because that is frequently its mission.
Back in July, the Left started calling Mr. Beck nasty names for making such an unsettling claim about their messiah. However, not one of the hotheaded commentators even attempted to prove Mr. Beck wrong.
Mr. Beck said that Van Jones, a much-loved, edgy, coarse-tongued obscurity in the White House — one of the several dozen czars Mr. Obama bizarrely has collected — was a rotten egg, a slick, handsome black anti-racist who poured outrageous venom as comfortably as a housewife pours breakfast coffee for her hubby.
Shortly, the amazingly inflated Mr. Obama knew he had been had.
So did Mr. Jones. Last March, the green czar thought he was set for life. He had carved a niche as the world’s snappiest dressing black environmentalist. Never thought his racist rantings would be exposed. His late career was measured in weeks.
Therefore, after weeks of scream-level public discourse driven by the permanently furious Left, Mr. Obama fired him.
In almost blinding succession, with the deftness of a genius, Mr. Beck has uncovered and nurtured topics that will resonate with the sensible center of this country, where most Americans reside, whether the subject is tea parties, public health or the latest Obamaism.
If, let’s say, Mr. Eisenhower or Mr. Ford were President these days, you never would have heard of Mr. Beck or Fox News. When they arrived in the White House, they had a grip on how to conduct themselves.
Nearly daily, Mr. Obama dissembles in the manner of a shoeless, clueless, gap-toothed, straw-chewing hayseed who accidentally wandered off the farm for the first time. He is bewildered and overwhelmed.
With a made-for-media, embarrassingly over-rated President in charge of the country, such a prissy, obvious foil has been too tempting for an even vaguely aware commentator to ignore. Doesn’t matter that Mr. Beck screams and is a loudmouth. Perhaps the Left’s dumbest mistake has been obsessing over his style instead of his insightful messages — and that is without touching the mushrooming Acorn scandals that would form a nifty Greyhound bus tour.
