Like a lot of people in the Valley—and, if TV ratings are to be believed, a lot of people around the nation—I've been getting a lot of my news lately from Rachel Maddow and her colleagues at MSNBC.
As uplifting as MSNBC's coverage has been for anyone rooting for Obama, it occurs to me often that I can't count on all media to be so diligent in exposing the ugliness and deception of the increasingly desperate McCain-Palin campaign. When I get too high on the prospect of the GOP finally getting its just deserts, I flip to the cable network known to Keith Olbermann fans alternately as Fixed News or Fox Noise. There I find nothing that remotely resembles MSNBC's coverage, nor the coverage on NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS or CNN. Quite often, in fact, Fox does away with its primetime election coverage altogether, focusing instead on, say, the recent O.J. trial—though this has happened less often since McCain-Palin latched on to the Bill Ayers story.
Similarly, as the results of Fox's own polls show Obama's lead growing both nationally and in key battleground states, you won't see much about it on Fox. After a recent saturation with polling data at www.fivethirtyeight.com and www.pollster.com that show Obama's lead widening, I visited Fox's website to get the counter-spin. It was there, not on Fox's cable network, that I saw the headline, "FOX News/Rasmussen Reports Poll: Obama Widens Lead in Three Battleground States." The fairly straightforward report makes little effort to spin the news in McCain's direction—if that's even possible—except to offer an implicit explanation: "Before Lehman Brothers collapsed, McCain was up three percentage points nationally. Today, Obama has an eight-point advantage nationally."
Unlike its TV incarnation, FoxNews.com has the virtue of drawing direct feedback from its audience. In the comment section of every story, you'll find a disproportionate number of voices raised not so much to support Obama as to condemn the McCain-Palin campaign. Most palpable is the sense of incredulity on the parts of voters who accept the pro-McCain spin that the race is closer than the polls show but can't for the life of them understand why.
"What if things were switched around?" writes njvoter13. "Would the country's point of view be different? What if the Obamas paraded 5 kids across the stage, with a 3 month old and an unwed, pregnant teen? What if McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review? What if Obama finished 5th from the bottom of his class? What if McCain had only married once and Obama was a divorcee? What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident…? What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while still married? & What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker? … What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem? You could easily add to this list. Do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?"
But the polls aren't close. Anyone who believes they are must be either completely out of touch or living on a steady diet of Fox Cable News—which may be one and the same. Yet even among its audience, Fox—the network that helped to sell us G.W. Bush, a 1980s cocaine cowboy and ne'er-do-well—can't seem to overcome the truth.
While Maddow's new show on MSNBC won huge ratings this fall, Fox's Hannity and Colmes remains the top-rated cable news show in the 9 p.m. slot. Despite its ratings, however, Fox has been no more adroit than McCain in stitching together lies and half-truths into a believable narrative. In the long run, that may be more damaging to Fox than to McCain, who can quietly exit public life after losing the election, while Fox lives to fight and lose another day.
