I’ve been enjoying the carnage: Breitbart is imploding. Hate radio hosts are complaining they don't know who to rant against. The National Review, as has been the case for years, has lost millions. Rush Limbaugh is bankrupting iHeart Media.
To be blunt, it's not a good time to be in right-wing media.
Yet, I'm most pleased by what's going down at Fox News. Internal strife is ripping through the GOP’s media arm.
Oh, please don’t take my word from it. Take it from someone at Fox News who didn’t have enough good sense to keep his mouth shut.
(And please enjoy the silent reaction that begins at the :33 second mark)
What we're doing is we're pointing out this fractured strife among the Republican Party. But us pointing that out is like Charlie Sheen pointing out your drug habit. We, as a show, are facing internal strife. From a micro-level to a macro-level. You can look at conservative websites like Breitbart, how much that has fallen apart since the Trump nomination. You can look at The Five. On any given day, we have tension over this nomination, over this candidate. You can look at our network as a whole, which is -- don't look at me. But you can look at this network, where we are having issues within a family of anchors over this stuff. You can look at the Party. So at every area where there is conservatism, there is strife. And I just remember the good old days where we could all unite against the hatred for Obama. When it was so easy.
Can’t we all just hate Obama again?
Fox has absolutely no idea what to do about Donald Trump. Fox has always been a mouthpiece for the GOP Establishment. The Establishment hates Trump, but Fox also loves ratings. So Fox has given Trump an inordinate amount of airtime.
They try to make up for this by giving more airtime to people bashing Trump. However, this strategy has only managed to piss everyone off. Fox has really, REALLY angered a good portion of their base, which has now turned on them. (When Ann Coulter calls for her followers to turn on Fox, it’s not a good sign.)
Roger Ailes has his hands quite full: the stars have openly turned on each other. Hannity and O'Reilly have hated each other quite some time now, but Hannity’s open love affair for Trump has made things difficult for Megyn Kelly. Yet Kelly and Billbo are also fighting each other. Megyn Kelly, apparently quite outraged that Bill didn’t bother to stick up for her in his interview with Drumpf, took a lot of glee in smacking him around on Colbert:
O'Reilly is said to be outraged that Kelly went on Stephen Colbert's post-Super Bowl show and seemed to criticize his program because it's taped at 5 p.m. and airs at 8 p.m." If you're not live at night -- because the show before me and the show after me are taped -- you lose a lot," she told Colbert, the comedian famous for playing a buffoonish version of O'Reilly for years. O'Reilly has also told people he's furious that Kelly hasn't shown him respect for helping make her Fox's brightest light.
Bill apparently hates that Kelly has replaced him as the face of Fox (thanks in no small part to Trump’s attention to her). Ironically, Hannity and O’Reilly are drawn to Trump for different reasons: Hannity seems to like Trump's unapologetic bigotry, but O'Reilly admires Trump's misogyny. All of them bond over being assholes, and none of them conceal their hate for each other.
It’s not surprising: all of them have built their entire careers around hating other people. It was only a matter of time before they turned their hate on their fellow co-workers. (Hate is like a disease. It’s hard to contain.)
Fox has enjoyed a lot of good ratings thanks to the Trump debates; but by the end of this year, he’ll be gone. Trump will go down in flames as the worst nominee in modern history. (For crying out loud, UTAH is now a presidential swing state thanks to Trump!) The silver lining to all the Trump madness that we are enduring now is that he has managed to do what no liberal organization could ever have done—make Fox lose credibility with their own base. Unlike other rightwing media outlets, Fox will likely survive the carnage, but it's heyday among conservatives is over.
And for that alone, I smile.