Book Club: Fox News’ Election Night Fail
DAVID FOLKENFLIK – DECEMBER 6, 2013, 6:00 AM EST
On election night Fox analysts and reporters rightly noted that 2012 had not inspired the kind of captivating campaign that Obama ginned up for victory in 2008. At the start of the night, the Fox News chairman warned commentators participating in his channel’s election coverage: “If things don’t go your way tonight, don’t go out there looking like someone ran over your dog.” Yet the coverage on Fox proved largely dour and depressive. “President Obama will win because he ran a good campaign,” political anchor Bret Baier said early in the evening. “He will not win because of the state of the economy.”
Viewers would find it hard to believe that the final tally showed Obama had won by nearly four percentage points in the popular vote. Several pundits, including Bill O’Reilly and Stephen Hayes, circled back to Superstorm Sandy as a stroke of good fortune for the incumbent. “While Governor Romney was talking about bipartisanship,” Brit Hume said, “the president gave an image to Americans on television of him practicing it. That’s pretty strong medicine.”
O’Reilly said Republicans had failed to grapple with the changing demographic face of the American electorate. But there was a thread of melancholy woven into his analysis. The day of the traditional white American was done, he said. The U.S. was becoming more like Western Europe, he went on, as Americans wanted others to bear their every burden—turning President John F. Kennedy’s famed admonition on its head. O’Reilly ascribed Obama’s victory to the desire for handouts, especially among people of color, though O’Reilly very explicitly said such indolence cut across racial lines.
Fox analyst and host Dana Perino, the former George W. Bush press secretary, noted that women favored Obama heavily, suggesting that Democrats used abortion to scare them into entering voting booths.
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