There is something almost touching about Fox News’s predicament. Its audience is reportedly shrinking while those of CNN and MSNBC are growing. One might suppose that a network devoted to the virtues of free enterprise would respond by reconsidering its product.
Instead, it continues manufacturing the same product, apparently confident that the market has misunderstood its own preferences.
I have been watching Fox with some regularity, particularly through the Republican electoral debacle, partly out of curiosity about how a network so thoroughly invested in one political enterprise would explain its difficulties. The experience has been instructive, if not repetitive.
Democrats are communists. Republicans are patriots. Disagreement is treachery. Apprehension is wisdom. Fear is a public service. The panels assemble, the verdicts are delivered, and the republic is once again rescued from the imminent catastrophe of an opposition party.
Even the schoolyard nicknames have their place. Politics has never been an undertaking for the excessively delicate. A clever insult can illuminate a political weakness. An unclever one can at least reveal something about its author.
But there is a difference between deploying an insult and institutionalizing it.
On Fox, Senator Elizabeth Warren has apparently ceased to be Elizabeth Warren. Her photograph appears on the screen while the commentators discuss someone called Pocahontas. No explanation is offered. No acknowledgement that the name is intended as a slur. No suggestion that the person being discussed has an actual name. No reveal or interest in who Pocahontas actually was, her tragic life and her death at age 21 in 1617.
The insult has been laundered into ordinary usage.
This is a rather remarkable achievement for an organization that purports to defend Western civilization. One of civilization’s modest accomplishments is the convention that people are entitled to their own names.
The history of political degradation offers many examples of what happens when opponents are systematically renamed, reduced to caricatures or stripped of their individuality. The most sinister examples involve the language of vermin and infestation.
Calling a senator Pocahontas is not genocide, and suggesting otherwise would trivialize genocide. But the underlying linguistic mechanism—making degradation so familiar that it ceases to register as degradation—deserves attention well before it reaches its most malignant forms.
What interests me is not that Fox commentators insult Elizabeth Warren. It is that they no longer appear to know they are doing so.
There is no wink, no recognition of the breach, no moment when the commentator steps outside the performance to acknowledge that a political opponent has been assigned a derisive identity. The audience is simply expected to accept the substitution.
And perhaps that is where the ratings question becomes interesting.
A network can attract an audience by offering a distinctive interpretation of events. It can even attract an audience through relentless partisanship. But when interpretation gives way to ritualized contempt, the educational value of watching begins to approach zero.
I could listen to Fox all day as an exercise in understanding the political right. Indeed, that was the point of watching before and after the election. But there comes a moment when I could no longer recommend that anyone else watch for the purpose of learning something. Not because the opinions are conservative, but because the language has become so corrupted that the distinction between describing an opponent and degrading one has disappeared.
Perhaps Fox’s ratings difficulties have nothing to do with this. Audience movements have many causes, and correlation is not causation.
Still, the irony is exquisite.
A network that spends so much time explaining the failures of everyone else might consider the possibility that its own product has become tiresome. There are only so many evenings one can spend being told whom to despise before the instruction loses its novelty.
Fox may discover that contempt, like any other commodity, eventually encounters diminishing marginal returns.
And unlike Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ratings cannot simply be given another name.