I consider Fox News to be a neurotoxin. Watching the network actually damages your brain and makes it harder to think clearly. This is mainly because it is designed to trigger emotional responses and to force you to make logical connections that don’t exist. It actively misinforms, but that’s not what does the brain damage. The damage is done by essentially un-teaching you how to think. However, it may be going too far to say that Fox News is killing the Republican Party. In some ways, the network is necessary to make the modern GOP possible. What would the Tea Party eruption have been without Fox News? And the 2010 midterms were the best election cycle for the Republicans in history.
More than anything else, Fox News acts as a gathering place for people of like mind. And those people are older, whiter, and more exurban and rural than the population as a whole. Fox helps them feel solidarity and gives them the sense that they are part of a movement. It gives them sources of outrage to organize around. And it has more legitimacy than talk radio both because it is on television and because it is treated no differently than CBS or ABC or CNN.
Of course, there are downsides to Fox News for the Republican Party. But I think those downsides are longer term. The network contributes to the radicalization of the GOP and makes it harder for moderates to cross the aisle and work constructively with Democrats. The way the network uses images of minorities to strike fear into their white audience contributes to the alienation of people of color from the Republican Party. And, ultimately, there has to be a price to be paid for making a huge segment of the American population stupid and misinformed. It’s a deal with the devil. You win an election today but you can’t govern effectively and wind up losing elections tomorrow.
Yet, on the whole, I don’t think the modern GOP could exist without Fox News. They couldn’t mobilize the support they have without the network.
