If you’d never watched Fox News, the 24-hour cable network that caters to Americans who self-identify as conservatives, you might expect its entertainment coverage to focus on culturally conservative, family-friendly matters — fare some conservatives feel is ignored in a media run by social liberals. Where else to turn for such news if you’re a Republican grandparent who wistfully remembers the days when network TV put married couples in separate beds, or a red-state dad who wrote a letter to the FCC when Janet Jackson’s nipple emerged from her Superbowl costume, or a megachurch or Christian college attendee who shares the lament that our culture is hyper-sexualized?
But tune into the network’s actual entertainment coverage and one quickly realizes how far it is from being the change cultural conservatives want to see in the world…
But when it comes to mass broadcast outlets, consider the fact that a staunch cultural conservative like Rod Dreher, who homeschools his family with his wife, would be far more comfortable exposing his children to the entertainment coverage of NPR than Fox News. The former dips a toe in low culture, as do we all, and doesn’t entirely protect its listeners from the drift toward a hyper-sexualized America. But Fox News entertainment coverage focuses obsessively on sex, and has a weirdly symbiotic relationship with it: scantily clad women become an excuse to show breasts and butts in the guise of expressing disapproval…
Fox is, of course, not so different from other gigantic broadcast media corporations in shamelessly exploiting the fact that sex sells. Its behavior is noteworthy only insofar as it underscores the fact that the ideological mission it purports to have and the cultural critiques it purports to believe in are at odds with its actual programming. More than other broadcasters, it pretends to flatter cultural conservatives, and to disdain the decadence of liberals in their coastal enclaves. But that’s just a pose helping it sell ads against its own libertine cultural offerings.
—Conor Friedersdorf
How Fox News Fails Cultural Conservatives
