The real Fox News Democrats
How the "Fair and Balanced" network pits Democrats against their own party.
By Alex Koppelman
Read more: George W. Bush, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Joseph Lieberman, Al Sharpton, Fox News, Opinion, John Kerry, John Edwards, Bill O'Reilly, Alex Koppelman
April 3, 2007 | So far the lefty blogosphere is one for two in its campaign to keep Democratic presidential candidates from debating on Fox News. On March 9, after both John Edwards and Bill Richardson announced that they would not participate, the Nevada Democratic Party dropped plans for a debate to be broadcast by Fox. On March 29, the Congressional Black Caucus announced that it would go forward with its own Fox-sponsored Democratic presidential debate in the fall.
But boycotting debates is not the same as boycotting a network. Most of those national Democrats who've criticized Fox, like former Clinton advisor Paul Begala and pollster Mark Mellman, have stopped short of calling for the party to avoid Fox altogether. They would just like Democrats to realize what they're getting into. "As long as you're willing to treat Fox News as a political adversary, and you think you can use Fox News to further your arguments, you should do it," says Matt Stoller, a blogger at MyDD.com and a leader of the charge against the debates. "But don't go on there assuming that Fox News is a neutral news outlet."
Plenty of Democrats do appear on Fox. In fact, John Edwards, the first of the announced presidential candidates to drop out of the Nevada debate, has appeared on the network more than 30 times, most recently in late January of this year, and Mark Mellman has appeared more than 80 times.
But Fox also has a stable of regular commentators, some under contract to the network, who pop up frequently as representatives of the Democratic or progressive viewpoint. They do not appear to know what they have gotten into. Though these Democrats tell Salon they are doing their best to reach out and sway potential voters, they often seem to be used to further a conservative political agenda, fulfilling one of several roles that ultimately just helps the network's right-of-center hosts make their arguments against liberals.
Those Fox-friendly Democrats who agreed to speak with Salon say they're doing their best to help the party, arguing that Democrats can't afford to ignore the nation's most watched cable news network. They insist that when they've appeared on Fox they've scored points for progressives and swayed some viewers. "I think there are some liberals who are extremely biased about Fox News," says Alan Colmes, the liberal half of "Hannity & Colmes," "and wish to shun it or wish to criticize any liberal who appears on Fox News. That, to me, is not a particularly liberal attitude."
"What do they think would happen if I weren't there?" asks Colmes. "Either Sean Hannity would be by himself, which wouldn't serve the purposes of liberals, or they'd have another liberal on with Sean Hannity, and then they'd criticize that liberal for being at Fox News."
Kirsten Powers, a Democratic strategist who is a Fox News political analyst (and who has written for Salon), says she thinks that "If you're going to follow Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, which, last time I checked, most of the bloggers supported, then it seems sort of strange to me to be disregarding the top cable news network. From a strategic standpoint, it doesn't really make sense to me."
But if one actually watches a lot of Fox News, the in-house Democrats don't come off as effective evangelists for their party or for liberal politics in general. It sounds harsh, but think of most of the Fox Democrats, at least those who appear on the opinion shows, which take up half the network's airtime, as one of three types. They are either scary liberals, losers or enablers. Representatives of each type may score some points for Democrats when they appear on-air, but ultimately they help further Fox's larger narrative about Democrats and liberals and what they stand for.
Take, for example, the scary Democrats. Think about frequent guests like the Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., both big-city liberals, or Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Vegan Peacenik. Then consider Fox's audience. Besides being rather elderly -- the median age of a Fox viewer tops 60 -- it is disproportionately conservative and Republican. In the 2004 election, according to Mark Mellman, Fox viewers preferred President Bush over John Kerry by an astonishing 88 percent to 7 percent. Bush's backing among Fox viewers was more solid than his support among white evangelicals, gun owners or supporters of the Iraq war. Sharpton, Rangel and Kucinich help confirm the worst fears of such a homogenous audience, even before the occasional cameo appearance by someone like Minister Hashim Nzinga, national chief of staff of the New Black Panther Party. Nzinga has been a repeat guest on "Hannity & Colmes." Host Sean Hannity once told Nzinga that he needed to seek mental help, only to bring him back on the show several months later.
Then there are the losers, the strategists and politicians who are no longer players in the Democratic Party, at least partially because of their electoral failures. There's former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who also twice failed to win election to the U.S. Senate, and Susan Estrich, who managed Michael Dukakis' star-crossed 1988 presidential campaign. Another is Bob Beckel, a Fox News contributor who, along with Ferraro, is a survivor of the Democrats' disastrous 1984 presidential ticket -- he managed the campaign. As Beckel himself laughingly, and without prompting, told Salon, he "manage[d] Walter Mondale to the largest loss in the history of American politics, then got on TV as a political expert -- only in America."
Beckel bristles, however, at any suggestion that being on Fox makes him somehow less liberal, and in an interview with Salon, he continually said his time and effort as a liberal and activist would stack up with anyone else in the party.