A fascinating study by conservative Bruce Bartlett explains how, at the very same time that Fox promotes all things Republican, it also hurts them.

First, let me point out that Bartlett is no “liberal media” operative. As James Fallows in The Atlantic notes, he’s a “veteran of the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations and was an influential early proponent of supply-side / tax-cut economics. He also worked for Ron Paul.”

In his article, Bartlett presents a lot of data showing that Fox News viewers are consistently less informed – and often misinformed – in comparison to those who get their news from elsewhere. Yet, Republicans are also especially devoted to Fox. This is something we have previously reported but Bartlett’s collection of data is eye-opening, even for me.

Bartlett sees this as, ultimately, a big problem for Republicans.

First of all, Fox exercises a disturbing amount of control over the party:

...Fox now exercises such powerful control over the GOP that it has become the party’s kingmaker in presidential primaries. Indeed, during the 2012 election cycle, a number of aspirants for the Republican nomination had been paid Fox commentators, including Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. And woe to the Republican who runs afoul of Fox’s top brass or ignores their advice, as Mitt Romney did on one occasion in 2012. Fox is now so important in GOP primaries that candidates must put aside pressing campaign concerns when summoned to a Fox interview, where any error is magnified within the Republican bubble.

(Former Fox News contributor Newt) Gingrich complained that Fox opted in favor of Mitt Romney early on. “I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said behind closed doors in April 2012. “In our experience, Callista [Newt’s wife] and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That’s just a fact.”

Bartlett goes on to theorize that “Republican voters get so much of their news from Fox, which cheerleads whatever their candidates are doing or saying, that they suffer from wishful thinking and fail to see that they may not be doing as well as they imagine, or that their ideas are not connecting outside the narrow party base.”

This was certainly true in 2012 when, for example, Karl Rove had his famous meltdown after Mitt Romney’s loss was announced (when Fox could no longer disregard the truth). The stage may have been set when regular guest Dick Morris wrongly predicted a Romney landslide. But Fox’s grip on the American political landscape is so strong that I would not be counting out its ability to help the GOP nominee in 2016 just yet. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Fox helped propel George W. Bush into the White House in 2000, when it prematurely declared him the winner – and helped keep him there with the Swift Boat Veterans' attacks on John Kerry.

But electoral victory is different from political health. And in that regard, I completely agree with Bartlett. It’s not healthy to have a TV network running a major political party.

Bartlett’s final paragraph states:

… Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum perhaps put the complicated, double-edged relationship between Fox and the GOP best when he said, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.”

I couldn’t agree more. But the question is, whether the rank and file Republicans will see it that way, too.

Screen grab via Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.