Does the election spell the end of FOX News dominance

I'm not going to defend Dowd -- or worse, the hundreds of mini-Dowds her style has helped spawn, but you're giving O'Reilly the benefit of an awfully big doubt here. Let us leave aside the personal hypocrisy of a serial sexual stalker lecturing the country on values. The guy has been truthless on so many topics --starting with his own damn biography, for pity's sake -- that I can't make the popularity=wisdom thing work in his case. He's educated, and pretends he's not, except when it serves his purpose to mention that he went to Harvard, so the rest of us should shut up. His phony proletarian outrage pretty much got taken apart by Michael Kinsley a few years back, and that whole business about the malmedy massacre a couple of months ago was a perfect metric to measure the depths to which he's sunk.
Is he popular?
Yes.
Influential?
Probably, but less than he thinks.
The person on whom Fox depends?
That's still the Big Aussie, but I take your point.

 

Fenian,

O'Reilly is as elitest as they come. A total fake. He'd love to be a rock star among Democrats. Which is why Democrats should dilute his influence by courting him and playing nice. His ego will listen. It would be much better to have 20 percent of O'Reilly than 1000% of Janeane Garofalo.

Why is that so hard for Democrats to understand? Why are so many things hard for them to understand?

 

Of course, Dowd won her Pulitzer because of her criticism of . . . Bill Clinton.

Amazing how many people don't know that.

The question was whether Fox News "dominance" would end, not whether the network would "go away."

Please try to keep up.

 

I think they managed to understand the national mood pretty well last week.
O'Reilly's too far gone for a Road To Damascus moment politically. I agree that he thinks largely with his ego, but I disagree that his influence is as great as you say it is beyond the core Fox viewers simply because it might be greater than that of other cable yakkers and, because of that, there's no political profit to be made by courting him now, given the fact that the latest demographics I saw put his audience in pretty much the same age-range as the one to which people aim commercials for The Clapper.

 

Zing!

 

I like Dowd's work, but I'm not above admitting that she spouts a fair amount of rhetoric. It should be noted, however, that Dowd's following is probably far less than is O'Reilly's. For some folks, he's the face of the Republican Party. I'd bet money that a fair number of Democrats couldn't identify Dowd. And that's really the key difference.

 

Fenian,

At the nadir of American government, it was the Democrats' election to throw away.

 

I'm not exactly old enough to remember the brilliant days of Mo Dowd, but to be honest, I don't see how anyone can read her now and feel like she's anything other than a self parody. Every column is the same. It's got he same cutsey nicknames, the same smarminess, the same haughty disgust, the same thinly-veiled classism. Her opinion, when even she expresses one, gets so bogged down by forced cleverness, I find myself getting to the end of her columns and wondering if she even HAS a point. When she was on book leave earlier this year and Sarah Vowell was pinch-hitting, it was far more interesting and insightful. I know some people can't stand Molly Ivins, but for my money, even if you disgree with her politics, she's far more interesting and authoritative than Dowd. I suppose that might be the point, that Dowd is sort of politicial critcism for the Upper East side liberal tea clubs, but I'll be damned if I've felt like she's ever helped me form an opinion on something or told me something I didn't already know. At least not in the last five years. When Krugman preaches to the converted, at least he informs and educates while he's doing it.

If anyone has a Dowd column they're particularly fond of, please mention it, even if it's from a decade ago, because lately, I'm becoming less and less inclined to even bother with reading her.

 

There are columnists who no longer need to be read , Dowd, Will, Krauthammer & Bob Herbert. If you read their name, headline and lede sentence you know what they are going to say. They've become either so entrenched in their own infallibility and beliefs that they've become, as someone wrote above, self parodies

 

For starters, her "Bushworld" column was pretty sweet.

 

I love how she always calls him W. That's almost as exciting as when people call Terrell Owens TO.

 

I caught the beginning of O'Reilly the other night, in time to hear his "talking points" on how the "secular progressives" were ruining the world.

He then segued into a story about how the Vatican opposes building a wall on the Mexican border.

When the lady who was on to represent the Vatican viewpoint tried pointing out that his entire schtick was meaningless, because he had insisted that it was "sp's" who were against "border security" and it was, in fact, the catholic church, he just ignored her.

It was priceless.