memes and mediaby Mischief Maker 06/06/2012, 2:54pm PDT
I had an epiphany a couple weeks ago. I saw a TV turned to msnbc in the early afternoon and the host had the former campaign manager for the now-defunct Newt Gingrich presidential campaign on. The host's opening question was whether Newt Gingrich had narcissistic personality disorder as outlined in the DSM-IV. In other words, the host was trying to pick a fight to make good television, the exact bullshit I hated about Fox news. I had been reading a bunch of books on starting your own business and suddenly it hit me. I understood why Fox news was such a hit and why all the other networks are now emulating them.
There's a business truism that trying to create a product that appeals to everyone will doom you to failure. You have to identify a target demographic, then give that small slice of the market exactly what they want to succeed.
That's what Fox News does. It seeks out grumpy old white people and tells them exactly what they want to hear. Those little "mistakes" like calling the first lady "Obama's baby mama?" Catnip for old farts sick of feeling guilty for their racist views. There's no hypocrisy with Fox News decrying the moral decay of our world and Murdoch's Sun Times having nudie pictures in every issue, the Sun times caters to a different demographic. MSNBC is doing the same shit, different demographic.
Case in point, the fact that the word "Crazy" gets thrown around so much on Fox and MSNBC. What does crazy mean in this context. It means that you don't have to consider the issue from the other side's perspective. People who contradict you can be dismissed out of hand because they're mentally incompetent.
I'm beginning to wonder if the failure of the 4th branch really has been planned by sinister masterminds, or if it's just the invisible hand of the marketplace leading us down the primrose path by our dicks.
