Crossposted with theCenter for American Progress. With Mickey Ehrlich
Success has many fathers, and few successes have enjoyed more fathers than Scott Brown's shocking victory in the race for Ted Kennedy's--and before that Jack Kennedy's--Senate seat in Massachusetts. While many have focused on Brown's "Tea Party" base, one proud papa whose work has gone relatively unnoticed so far is Fox News.
The network repeatedly gave Brown a platform on its shows for him to promote his campaign website and to solicit funds for his campaign. Dick Morris told "Hannity" viewers to go to his website to help elect Brown. "Fox and Friends" produced a segment entitled "What Can Brown Do For You? A boost in your 401k may be in the cards. " Indeed, it's hard to imagine Brown and his Tea Party supporters pulling off his historic upset without them.
This is a piece of Fox's philosophy and day-to-day operations. As Howard Fineman of Newsweek observed, "In a relentless (and spectacularly successful) hunt for cable ratings, [Fox President Roger] Ailes has given invaluable publicity to the tea partiers, furnished tryout platforms to GOP candidates, and trained a fire hose of populist anger at the president and his allies in Congress."
Can Fox do for a Sarah Palin-for-president campaign what it helped do for Brown's successful Senate effort? On January 13, Palin made her debut as a Fox analyst (The announcement came just days after the world learned that she would also deliver the keynote address at the first Tea Party Convention to be held in Nashville in February). Rather than appear on panels to discuss issues other than herself, Palin instead began her tenure as a "political analyst" with two extended interview segments with Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck...
You can read the rest of Eric Alterman and Mickey Ehrlich's analysis in their recent article, "Think Again: Tea Party/Fox Party"
Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He is also a Nation columnist and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His seventh book, Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Most Important Ideals, was recently published in paperback. He occasionally blogs at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/altercation and is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast.
Mickey Ehrlich is a freelance writer based in New York.