When Sarah Palin talks about media bias, she’s worth listening to.
The former Alaska governor, former Republican vice presidential candidate and current conservative commentator has been on the receiving end of establishment media attacks as much as any American besides former President Donald Trump.
And now, apparently, it’s Fox News’ turn to turn on her.
In an interview Friday with Newsmax host Eric Bolling (himself a former Fox News fixture) Palin described how her criticisms of Fox had reached a point where the “fair and balanced” network had simply decided not to have her around.
“As a matter of fact, Eric, thanks to you, I’ve lost another gig,” Palin said.
“It was just about a week or so ago, I was on your show … I told you what I thought about what Fox was doing.
“I had been booked by Fox for the next day, and a mutual friend of ours … had been listening. He texted right after my interview and he said, ‘OK, watch. In 3, 2, 1 … You’re gonna get canceled.’
“Yep! I got canceled from Fox and haven’t been invited back.”
Check out the whole interview here:
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Palin didn’t specify exactly what she said, but the liberal news site The Daily Beast speculated that it might have been comments she made on May 1 on Bollings’ program “The Balance.”
On that episode, Palin said Fox is no longer the outlet for conservatives it used to be, The Daily Beast reported, but was just one of “these corporate-owned, woke disconnected elites who call the shots in lamestream media and they look at us as just the peons, just the subjects.”
The network appears to be publicly shedding its conservative image — most notoriously by the still-unexplained termination of former Fox host Tucker Carlson on April 26.
The network has been in a decline ever since — and while a television audience can be a fluctuating matter, Palin said Fox is reaping the consequences it deserves.
“It’s not even economically smart, what they are doing. They’re losing audience, night after night after night …. People just want truth. They want facts,” she told Bolling.
“They don’t want that rehearsed [network] narrative via the talking points sent out by the Democrat Party. We know how this works, Eric.
Are you still watching Fox News?
Yes: 16% (58 Votes)
No: 84% (294 Votes)
“People just want who, what, where, when and why of journalism. I have a journalism degree. I started off my career as a reporter and as a sports reporter. I know how it’s supposed to work.”
Palin knows how it’s supposed to work, but she also knows first-hand how it actually does work. And thanks to her experience as GOP nominee Sen. John McCain’s running mate in 2008, the rest of the country does, too.
McCain and Palin were campaigning against then-Sen. Barack Obama and his running mate, then-Sen. Joe Biden.
Obama’s campaign had the wind at its back throughout, powered by established news media and celebrity culture that thirsted for a historic “first” in the presidency — the first black president.
That meant McCain and Palin had to be savaged in every way and on every front. Palin, paradoxically, a much smaller public figure than McCain, made a much bigger target, as the establishment media mocked her folksy way of talking and presumed ignorance on foreign affairs. Entertainment bastions like “Saturday Night Live” made a virtual running joke out of her personally.
(Actress-comedian Tina Fey was particularly scathing in her impersonations. The show tried the same method with Alec Baldwin and Trump, but didn’t have the same impact.)
So, Palin got a better-than-ringside seat for the metamorphosis of the American establishment media from simply left-leaning (as it has been since at least the end of World War II) into the dishonest propaganda machine for left-wing causes that it is today.
After Trump’s upset defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton — the establishment media’s favorite — attacking Trump and his presidency became a virtual job requirement for work in the major networks not named Fox.
Fox is still not nearly as far gone as the rest of the media, of course — it still boasts conservative figures like Dana Perino, Jesse Watters, and Greg Gutfeld — but it has been losing its edge — and its audience share.
Of course, as a private corporation, Fox has every right to employ — or not employ — whomever it chooses. Those who believe in common decency might assume the network would owe its viewers some degree of loyalty for years of choosing Fox over all others, but common decency has been on the decline for decades.
That is true in politics, where partisan rage fueled by aggression from the left has turned elections from school boards to statehouses to the U.S. House and Senate into scorched-earth battles.
It’s true in show business. (There’s a real argument to be made that the advent of the television show “America’s Funniest Home Videos” speeded up that decline considerably — with the crassness of “Candid Camera” without a hint of that show’s good-natured, redemptive humor.)
And for Fox executives clearly, loyalty is a one-way street. They think they can shrug off major conservative figures like Carlson and Palin and keep the market cornered on the American conservative audience.
But Carlson’s social media program “Tucker on Twitter,” and the growth of other conservative networks like Newsmax, show that free markets work in television the way they work in real life.
Customers want what they want. When they find it, they’ll stick.
As Palin pointed out, Fox is losing its audience, “night after night after night.” The real question is whether the network will get it back.
Or even wants to.
