Fox News is a firebreak

Like many men and women of the right, I was absolutely delighted when Fox News first came on the scene. It was so refreshing to hear someone in front of a camera criticizing Democrats and left-liberal policies that I seldom paid attention to what was actually being said in between all the car chases.

Unfortunately, while Fox News is certainly to the right of the ABCNNBCBS cabal, this is rather like saying that Sweden is to the right of the People’s Republic of China, North Korea and the defunct Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. It may be true, but it’s not exactly significant.

Like its mainstream rivals, Fox News does its best to avoid overt ideology or other overly intellectual matters. The horserace is all, never mind that regardless of who wins the upcoming election, the governance of the nation will be identical. The Republican argument that John Kerry will not enthusiastically wage war is blown away by 20th-century American military history (World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Somalia and Yugoslavia = Democrats, Grenada, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq = Republicans.)

Meanwhile, the Democratic case against Bush is characteristically insane. George Delano has governed to the left of Bill Clinton, JFK and Harry Truman, so if Democrats were as interested in their principles as they are in the naked pursuit of power, they’d celebrate the man, not denigrate him. As I’ve said before, modern American liberalism is nothing but the socialism too stupid to recognize itself in the mirror.

The success of Fox should come as no surprise. When all three traditional networks, plus one public network and two cable networks lean left in a country that is split roughly down the middle into “liberal” and “conservative” camps, logic dictates that any network which so much as throws a bone to the tens of millions of ignored conservatives, Republicans, libertarians and various and sundry other right-leaning individuals will thoroughly trounce the opposition in the ratings. And yet, it is Fox’s very success that contains within it the seeds of conservatism’s media demise.

As Fox News has grown, so too has its appeal to the unprincipled media whores who care nothing for anything but personal fame, money and power. They creep in from CNN, from the Columbia School of Journalism and the Ivy League. Even those who found their success in an iconoclastic approach now find themselves under pressure from their newfound friends to abandon their foolish pretensions to ideological purity and be pragmatic about the political realities.

What was a voice of opposition to the ever-expanding federal bureaucracy and moral sewer that was the Clinton administration has become what amounts to a firebreak for the present anti-conservative Republican administration. Even a casual observer can easily see the line that has been drawn between what is considered acceptable opposition to the statist agenda and what is genuinely dangerous to it.

For example, it is acceptable to advocate lower tax rates, but you’ll never hear a whisper of the truth that the IRS is an utter fraud and that 667 IRS employees – who are obviously in a position to realize this – were recently investigated and confirmed to be noncompliant by the IRS itself. Those 667 employees equate to 60 PERCENT of the total number of cases successfully prosecuted on an annual basis by the Department of Justice at the recommendation of the IRS. The Government Accountability Office even reports that since 1998 “the number of tax service employees accused of “noncompliance with tax filing and reporting laws steadily increased.”

And who can forget the image of the unborn Samuel Armas’ arm reaching out of his mother’s womb, which Matt Drudge wanted to show America to demonstrate the appalling evil of the national atrocity, abortion? But that was an image he was forbidden to show his viewers – forbidden by the supposedly conservative (and, you would think, anti-abortion) management of Fox News.

Such a mystery, such an intriguing dichotomy. But the truth is that any time a genuine conservative dares to raise an issue that threatens to strike too hard at the heart of the government and the nation’s ongoing centralization, Fox’s attack dogs and killer vamps will be there at the command of their masters to belittle, to marginalize and to defang.

Not too terribly long ago, the word “liberal” meant an advocate of individual liberty and human freedom. It is not unthinkable to suggest historians may one day look back to the inception of Fox News to mark when the word “conservative” was similarly redefined.