I would adjust that slightly:

For Benghazi, the reality is that these guys are trying to argue about the Talking Points Susan Rice had when she went on news shows. I mean, for crying out loud, Talking Points. Meaning they’re arguing about how the Obama people were spinning the attack. If what she did is somehow wrong, then how do they explain about a thousand appearances on news shows as well as speeches where the Bush people flat-out lied? How do they explain not a spin but an outright lie about warfare that hadn’t happened yet? It’s the height of hypocrisy for them to be dwelling on this – or maybe I should say, the depth of hypocrisy. If this situation had happened under Bush, the response by his team would have been to play up the terrorism angle even if it hadn’t been proven, just to use it as a campaign wedge.

For the IRS, the situation was that the 501 c4 classification has resulted in a pile of new applicants, many of whom don’t qualify because what they’re doing is really just rah-rah for one party or the other. What the Ohio employees were trying to do was separate out the ones that were clearly political from the ones who were focused on various social issues. Note that nothing in this stopped those groups from getting their message out – it just delayed when or whether they got their tax exemption. Had this happened under Bush, the Fox News guys would be saying that the IRS was just doing its job under the law.

For the AP Story, this one is the absolute ultimate in hypocrisy. The right wing is actually taking a principled position here, but it’s for the wrong reason. They see this idea as another way to attack Obama. But the thing is – what DOJ did was legal under the Patriot Act. And the right wing totally supported that Act – when it was being handled under Bush. Now they want to oppose it because it’s being used by Obama. Personally, I find the tracking of the phone records distasteful, but then I opposed the Patriot Act from the beginning. People on the left are appropriately outraged about this for that reason. Fox News pundits don’t get to adopt that outrage when they supported the Act that makes the situation possible and legal.

The right wing has been attacking Eric Holder since President Obama announced his appointment. I’ve simply lost count of the number of times the GOP has announced that Holder’s resignation/impeachment/imprisonment/firing was “just about to happen”. Their pursuit of Holder has been interesting just in terms of their obsessivness about him. The result? Holder continues to be our Attorney General and likely will do so until he, not they, decides he’s done.

I totally missed Denny’s contribution. Shame.

He very quickly took about five uninformed shots and then ran away. I do wish he would have actually provided examples of what he was alleging. As it was, I could only see a reiteration of the usual Fox News talking points.

The primary discussion of the thread stands – it’s truly bizarre to see Donald Rumsfeld being held up as a standard of truth and integrity. His entire tenure in the George W. Bush presidency was marked by his contempt for the press and his arrogance when it came to telling anyone what was going on. Rush Limbaugh used to celebrate Rumsfeld’s obfuscations as some kind of victory. Which would indeed have been a victory over journalism and the principles behind it.

The reality these days is that it’s very difficult for various Bush Administration figures to travel abroad, due to the various war crimes charges that have been levied against them. This doesn’t get spoken about much, and Fox News pretends it doesn’t happen. But there’s a very real possibility that you could see one of these guys getting pulled into court if they slip up and walk into a subpoena overseas.

I agree with part of what Phillip said. I agree that both sides of any issue will tend to use any public case about it to promote their own beliefs. I also believe that it is up to the women involved to make their own choices and decisions about their bodies and their health.

I disagree with the part where somehow Fox News is thought to have a record of “reporting facts, as well as conflicting beliefs and opinions from both different sides.” That’s simply not what Fox News does, and that’s never been its mission. Fox News was created to promote a right wing belief system. This is done, as has been proven on this site countless times, by carefully cherry picking which facts are presented in a case so that they appear to reinforce a right wing opinion. In many cases, outright opinion is stated as fact. This happens both on the “straight news” shows where questions are framed from an ideological perspective and more openly on the pundit shows where the guys really let it fly.

Fox News is also careful not to bring in a left wing perspective if they can help it. Aside from an occasional visit by Tavis Smiley, their “opposing” commentators are moderate liberals who are usually willing to echo the right wing talking points or accept them as worthy of discussion. Occasionally, one of them, like Kirsten Powers, will finally get fed up and raise her voice a little. But usually you just get someone very genial, like Alan Colmes in his notorious situation on Hannity’s show. Or you get Dennis Kucinich, a liberal Dem who swung a little to the left to try to get the Nader Dems back in the fold in 2004 and now is shilling whatever line Fox News hands him. Or you get Juan Williams, who normally begins a response to a completely ridiculous Hannity screed with “Yeah, Sean, I agree with you. But let me add this too…” At which point Williams has conceded the argument. I would love to see a situation where Fox News actually did include left wingers to counter the untruths. I would love to see Amy Goodman explain issues to Bill O’Reilly. I would love to see Dean Baker correct Stuart Varney on economics. I would love to see Doug Henwood debate Lou Dobbs on the air. But we’re never going to get that on Fox News.

The more pragmatic on the hard right know that they will never be able to repeal Roe v Wade. If they ever succeeded in doing so, they’d kill the GOP as an effective political group for decades, given how big that backlash would be. So they just continue to chip away at it, and they try to use things like the Gosnell case to rile up their most ardent followers.

The reality of the Gosnell case is about what happens when poor women either have no options for reproductive choice, or don’t know what those options are. It’s a case about a man who was preying on poor and non-white women, pure and simple. That’s what came out in 2011, when the story really was news and when everyone but Fox News covered it as news. The right wing should be ashamed of itself for trying in 2013 to rewrite the narrative of this case, and “The Five” should be ashamed of trying to misrepresent Gosnell as a typical abortion provider. And Fox News should be further ashamed of their continued association with Lila Rose and her brand of “gotcha” ambushes. Rose can bloviate all she wants about abortion, but it’s deeply offensive for her to be touting videos in which she sends people to clinics to deliberately lie so that she can hopefully get someone saying the wrong soundbite here or there.

Granted that there are plenty of political groups trying to game the system – on both sides. The IRS shouldn’t be targeting one side or the other. And yes, they adjusted their flagging after it was initially caught, but that doesn’t make it a good practice by any means.

All that said, this was not something that somehow allowed President Obama to somehow alter the election outcome in Ohio, or anywhere else. The fact is that he was always ahead there by all measures other than pollers like Rasmussen, who was desperately trying to prop up the failing Romney campaign.

The right wing seems to want people to believe that these fringe tea party groups could have somehow mobilized a million voters in Ohio – except this forgets that there was already a deafening cacaphony of political ads flooding Ohio for the whole year before the election. Ohio was one of the most heavily lobbied states in the country, if not THE most heavily lobbied one. Romney spent plenty of money there, as did many, many Tea Party groups and other conservative PACs. It made no difference. Obama had a better ground game there and in the end, that was what made the difference.

Notice that none of these people is bringing up the real reasons that several million hardcore GOP didn’t vote for Romney. Romney got the predictable votes of many GOP members who hated Obama on sight, and he got the predictable votes of moderate GOP members who didn’t swing all the way over to the hard right. But he never sold the serious right wingers. They never believed his statements of being a severe conservative and they couldn’t deal with his religion. Past that, Romney badly hurt himself by constantly swinging to the far right and thus alienating some of the moderates as well. And past even that, Romney never appealed to crossover Democrats in any significant manner. But the big wound for Romney was that so many of the “true believers” just wouldn’t vote for him. Which is why you heard all those cries that the GOP voters wanted a “real conservative” rather than Romney. Translation: Romney didn’t appeal to enough people to win – so he lost. End of election, and end of the political trajectory for Mitt Romney, a man who had been groomed since grade school to run for higher office. His epitaph will show that he rose as far as being a Governor, but that he abandoned his duties in search of an even better office he could never achieve.

It’s interesting that the right wing wants to play these items up as much as possible, when they were desperately tamping down much more serious material during the Bush Administration. Further, when people brought up the very real criminality of the George W. Bush presidency, Fox News was on the front lines calling those people treasonous and every other name in the book. Am I the only one who remembers the right wing wagging their fingers and saying “You must not criticize the President during a time of war!” or saying “You don’t support the troops if you criticize our policies!” or best yet, “Americans need to watch what they do, watch what they say!” Of course, now that we have a Democrat president, and one who is not someone these pundits like, all those rules suddenly don’t apply anymore. Now the President is fair game because the right wing “just has some questions”. Right, just a few leading questions that are clearly intended to continue a pattern of disruption, obstruction and harassment that’s been going on since Obama began his 2008 campaign.

Let’s look at these three “huge scandals” and see if there’s any “there there”, as Obama put it this week. There’s Benghazi, which is a situation where our consulate was attacked and where the right wing wants to try to blame Obama for it somehow. So they’re disputing the military assessments (which is a new wrinkle for the right wing – previously they’ve always hid behind the military officers) and they’ve decided on their own that somehow a military force could have magically appeared in this area of Libya at a moment when the entire region was engulfed by rioting over the “Innocence of Muslims” video. As a fallback for that, they want to carp about what “talking points” were given to Susan Rice before she discussed the matter on Sunday talk shows. Which assumes that the right wing wasn’t already disputing anything Rice or Obama said at the time. The “talking points” discussion is flat out ridiculous – if this was a huge cover-up, then why is it that everyone was able to discuss every aspect of the matter openly for the two months up to the election? The answer is that it’s a ruse. Romney and the GOP tried this tack last fall, and it resulted in two humiliating debate defeats for Romney. But for some reason, these guys want to pull the zombie back up off the mat, dust it off, and try it out again.

The IRS matter is one where local guys in Ohio clearly got irritated at the pile of “Tea Party” groups trying to game the system to cheerlead for Romney on the public dime. But the reality is that if they followed the law, those groups do have the right to do this. So the supervisor who caught their behavior made them change the guidelines to include other political groups. And that’s pretty much the story. The “Tea Party” wants to continue to cry foul over this, but there really isn’t any more to discuss. The notion that President Obama was discussing a Cincinatti IRS flagging guideline, much less orchestrating it, is laughable on its face. The fact is that some IRS guys acted inappropriately and were disciplined. And now the Acting Director has resigned as well, showing that there are consequences for this stuff. If that’s a scandal that’s going to bring down an Administration, I’d like to know where it is.

Finally, there’s the AP matter. In this case, you have a serious security leak regarding a terrorism investigation. And yes, it’s pretty scary to have the DOJ getting access to the home phone records of reporters involved in the story. I would absolutely agree that this is one of those things that should cross party lines in terms of people being concerned about it. BUT, and here’s the kicker, this was actually legal. Because the Patriot Act championed by the right wing specifically allows for this kind of surveillance. And the Patriot Act was opposed by the left specifically for things like that. The left said consistently that the Patriot Act was an overreach that could do terrible things to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and all through that time, Fox News shouted the left down and said this was necessary to protect the USA and “either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.” Had such a case come up during the George W. Bush Admin, you would have heard Fox News trumpeting that this was totallly necessary and that the reporters shouldn’t be worried if they have nothing to hide. Since this is happening on Obama’s watch, Fox News wants to pretend that they’re now concerned about people’s free speech rights. Once again, is this a serious “scandal” that will bring down a presidency? No. It’s the DOJ conducting an investigation and ticking off a bunch of people, including reporters – but it’s legal conduct whether we like it or not until we do the right thing and repeal the Patriot Act. I would ask the pundits of Fox News if they are now prepared to support such a repeal, and if they have their apology ready for those of us on the left who have asked for this for over a decade. This doesn’t have to be a big deal for Fox News. Just a humble little one, like “We at Fox News are very, very sorry that we supported the Patriot Act. We were wrong to do so and we acknowledge our error. We at Fox News are very, very sorry that we doubted the integrity and good intentions of the people of the USA and we promise not to do it anymore.” Something tells me this apology may not be coming soon.

In the end, will any of these “huge scandals” resonate with history? Will anyone outside of Fox News pundits be bringing this up in a year? Even James Rosen at Fox doesn’t think so. The reality is that none of this will matter in 2016. Fox News will continue to wave Benghazi around for a while, until they find a new “smoking gun” in some other matter to point at. It’s funny that the Fox News pundits accuse the American people of being distracted by “shiny objects”. (And this was clearly another one of those notorious “daily memos”, since the meme was echoed all over the channel) The fact is that Fox News is dedicated to presenting “shiny objects” to its viewers every day – objects that always seem to play to their lowest instincts and their angriest prejudices.

I’m actually glad to know that Dick Cheney is concerned about what he calls egregious abuses when it comes to things like the Benghazi consulate attack or the IRS matter.

Because this means he’s finally ready to accept some responsibility for his own conduct in the Valerie Plame matter, when he and Karl Rove decided to punish Joe Wilson for publicly defying them about Iraq and WMDs by exposing Wilson’s wife Valerie’s CIA status to the press. I’m glad to know that Cheney is finally going to step up and admit his involvement in this national security matter and stop hiding behind his chief of staff Scooter Libby. This is great news and people should let Cheney know they’re happy to hear it.

It’s also nice to know that Cheney has not taken the time to actually review the Benghazi matter, seeing as how the ARB report has been available for several months already. Maybe if he actually read these materials, he might learn a thing or two about what was going on at the time he thinks that a military team was going to magically appear at one consulate in a region where there were riots and embassy attacks breaking out everywhere. I’m sure that Cheney wasn’t advocating telling all those other embassies that they were on their own while we devoted ourselves to a mop-up effort after the attack had been concluded. Or was he?

And it’s quite relevant how Cheney dealt with the multiple embassy and consulate attacks that happened on the Bush Administration’s watch. Perhaps Cheney would like to explain the loss of life in each of those cases and why he didn’t provide better security.

The thing about Cheney is that he’s always been good about speaking with assurance, usually about subjects of which he knows not much.

Bolling has said too many things about this to back off now, so he’s doubling down. The saddest part of this for him is that he’s going to have nowhere to go when he wants people to not remember his conduct here. In a year or so, when this entire story is remembered in a much different light, what will he be able to say to explain himself?

I don’t know which is more ludicrous: the inflammatory and offensive charge that Allen West is making without challenge, or the fact that anyone thinks he is a credible interview subject on this matter.

Car, you didn’t just repost a petition from WORLD NET DAILY did you? You do realize that’s a completely discredited and unreliable rumor mill operated by Jerome Corsi, right? Or is your post a bit of parody?

Both Dennis Kucinich and Kirsten Powers have been showing this tendency for the last few months. Initially I believed this might just be them showing that they were more independently minded, thus able to entertain some Democrat positions and some GOP positions. But this has gotten to the point where their usual response to a Hannity or O’Reilly attack on Obama is “Well, I’m a Democrat and I don’t like this either!” So one has to conclude that Ailes or someone talked to them and reminded them where the paycheck is coming from.

Just once I’d love to see Amy Goodman, Larry Bensky, Joshua Frank or Norman Solomon get brought on one of these shows. But you’ll never get to hear them on Fox News now – they’re actual left wing people who are intelligent enough to make solid arguments. (Jeff Cohen did appear on Fox News back in 2000 on “Fox News Watch”, but that was the last time I saw a real left winger show up on the network more than maybe once in a blue moon. Granted, Tavis Smiley and Cornel West have popped up here and there, but not nearly to any level of regularity.)

I also agree that Fox News and AM radio have been doing their darndest to keep this Benghazi hunt alive. Even in the face of not having a real story here, even in the face of a completed investigation that Congress already has in hand, even in the face of knowing that this is a hunt about finger pointing and not anything substantive, Fox News keeps at it. I can only think that they just want to have some dirt to throw at the Democrats, and they need this one until they can find a new idea. One has to wonder if this is how they intend to conduct the 2014 midterm campaigns or the 2016 Presidential race.

Dave, you may be right. I’m not sure I was posting here when Ralph did, or if maybe he’s using new identities now. There is a real Mark Traina out there, and this post is referencing his websites.

Whoever he is, this is a really strange post.

Gregory, your post does not make much sense.

If you’re saying that Charles Krauthamer is more fair and balanced than other pundits, I’m not sure if you can be serious about this. Krauthammer has unabashedly supported Fox News’ issue positions on multiple occasions. He was a cheerleader for Mitt Romney last year and showed genuine anger on election night after he was surprised with the defeat. He tried to make an issue out of the “Churchill’s Bust” nonsense that had been debunked a year earlier. And now he’s trumpeting the nonsense about a very serious criminal trial that Fox News has been trying to politicize and distort. If anyone thinks this conduct is somehow “fair and balanced”, I’d wonder what the standard for judgment was.

And while I can appreciate someone trying to use a libertarian approach, I frankly don’t agree that this is a matter of just “objectively perceiving the universe”. Libertarian philosophy, in a nutshell, posits that we’re all in it for ourselves and that’s the way it should be. It’s been summarized quite well by Doug Henwood as IGMFU. The idea is “Why should I pay for my neighbors’ kids to go to school or get health care? Let them take care of theirs and I’ll take care of mine. Why should I pay taxes for everyone else to have a fire department or a police department? Why should I pay for a public school if I have my kids in private school? Why not just have everyone take care of themselves?”

The problem with this philosophy is that it assumes not only that everyone will equally be able to take care of themselves but also that we have no civic duty to each other as part of a society. It’s also in direct contradiction to the spiritual traditions many “family values” conservatives claim to uphold. It’s an appealing philosophy if the perspective is that someone wants to achieve on their own and keep their spoils – and this of course lives on the dreams that most people have of becoming wealthy on their own. But the reality is that most people don’t, and many pundits who present this idea to their radio and TV audiences never deal with that reality. They just play the game of “Isn’t it ridiculous that we’re paying taxes for this idea or that idea? Isn’t it ridiculous that there are unions for government workers? Isn’t it ridiculous that we don’t just cut all the taxes and do away with as much of the government as possible?” It’s this philosophy that leads to false stories like O’Reilly’s infamous 15 dollar muffin or accounts of the salaries of various government employees being too high. (I exempt the City of Bell situation from this discussion as that was one of clear abuse of the system.)

The point is that the Libertarian ideology runs counter to the idea of a mutually cooperative society as we have developed it over thousands of years. We have strived to create a society where a rising tide lifts all boats and we all work together at some level to help each other. The Libertarian response would be to say that those people who have the strength to build or the means to acquire one can have a boat, while anyone without the means can just struggle along in the water on their own. As history has repeatedly shown us, this results in the well-to-do doing well and the majority going underwater quickly.

Doors makes a good point, with which I concur.

It’s odd that Eric Bolling, a man who presents himself as a good, decent Christian family man, has no problem saying things like this about someone else’s family. There’s a basic contradiction, and it’s interesting that he can’t see it.

At the same time, the right wing obsession with this story may be simply blinding him and others to the reality of what they are saying. We heard some of this stuff over the last two years about Fast & Furious, during the last big witch hunt. And we’ll no doubt hear more about this one from the right wing. But I still have yet to hear anything that’s news. No outrageous revelations. No smoking guns. Just a disagreement over policy and a lot of finger pointing about how the security level was low enough to allow the attack to happen.

And now they’re going back to Susan Rice’s talking points before going on news shows. (As we heard Trey Gowdy solemnly intone “Five. Different. Times!”) Here’s a news flash to Fox News on this. It’s not a major issue to have the State Department and the intelligence analysts go over such talking points before one of their people goes to the media. It’s actually an everyday thing. It’s also understandable if they decided to remove al Qaeda discussion from these appearances – particularly while they were in the first stages of investigating it and the only possible result would be the GOP witch hunt in the offing. So Susan Rice was told to go with just the facts that they could definitively state – that there were riots happening all across the region, that State (not Gregory Hicks) believed the attack may have started from a spontaneous riot which then went violent. As it turns out, this particular attack was just an opportunistic move by the local al Qaeda sect, taking advantage of all the rioting going on in the area for their cover. And that’s what was discussed in the ARB report that was released later.

But Fox News and Rush Limbaugh want to make Susan Rice an issue again. Let’s remember the difference between her appearances and the Bush Administration conduct they’re trying to throw into the same hopper. Susan Rice was discussing attacks that had already happened and were under investigation. The murders had already occurred and we were working on dealing with the aftermath. The GOP at that time was hoping to use those murders as a campaign talking point in any way it could. They bumbled this, since President Obama had been careful enough in his discussions to cover all the bases. When Mitt Romney tried for a Hail Mary “Gotcha!” at the second debate, he fell flat on his face and was humiliated in a manner I haven’t seen since Lloyd Bentsen dealt with Dan Quayle. After the GOP lost the election, they continued trying to use Benghazi, only to be publicly humiliated again, this time by Hillary Clinton. And they’re still going at it. But again, we’re talking about parsing statements AFTER the attacks. We’re talking about a lot of policy wonking that’s less about protecting anyone than pointing fingers. If Fox News or Rush Limbaugh had anything that indicated that President Obama or his cabinet deliberately endangered their ambassador, they would have been trumpeting that. It would be the headline at Fox News for a month. So what they’ve done instead is try to hint that they have something. But they don’t – it’s all just politicians arguing over the minute details of policy. And it’s funny that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh don’t understand why most people don’t care about that.

Now, when the Bush Administration was engaged in cover-ups, those were about statements that were made BEFORE we invaded Iraq. That was about lies that were told that resulted in thousands upon thousands of deaths, and trillions of dollars of debt for the U.S. And when Joe Wilson publicly discussed some of those lies, the Bush Administration response was to publicly expose his wife as an undercover CIA agent, thus endangering her life and the lives of anyone with whom she had been working. See the difference? THAT is a situation of lies with consequences and reprisals by an Administration trying to cover things up. THAT is a matter of criminal behavior – and the only thing that saved people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove from prison terms is the fact that Scooter Libby was a good soldier for them. His lies to the investigators of the matter shielded his bosses, and the commutation of his prison sentence left him able to keep silent about the matter while continuing to enjoy the perks of his position at the Hudson Institute. The witch hunt about Benghazi is a matter of finger pointing AFTER the events occurred and is simply a question of petty politics. The fact that the right wing cannot comprehend this simple truth speaks volumes about the trouble they are currently having.

I’m trying to figure out the meaning of Kortez’s post. If Kortez is talking about politicians like Darrell Issa and Trey Gowdy using any opportunity to grandstand, and pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity deliberately lying about basic facts of history, I would actually agree. But I can’t tell from the post.

The most telling indicator came today, when Fox News decided the story was about the fact that Fox News was the network that spent the most time covering the hearing. Or to be more precise, Fox News wants people to think that the story is that the other networks aren’t covering such an important matter. No matter that there actually was a fair amount of coverage – Fox News wanted it to be LIVE coverage, and was somehow hoping all the other networks would preempt their programming to spend their day on it.

And no matter that there wasn’t any news that came out of the hearing. Just the same intra-agency disputes we’ve already been hearing about, and which have been clear since Gregory Hicks’ unhappiness was voiced at a much earlier time. I didn’t hear any new information, although they did try to play up the idea that having a State Department Counselor present while Jason Chaffetz was on his fishing expedition was somehow an unheard of idea.

After more than a week of discussions about how this was going to blow the dam wide open, and how these were serious whistleblowers with a huge story to tell, all we got was a repetition of the same criticisms we’ve already heard regarding Benghazi, coupled with some truly unpleasant grandstanding by Trey Gowdy and Darrell Issa. If anything, it appears that the GOP are disappointed that their guys didn’t get their carefully rehearsed soundbites plastered over multiple networks in a live simulcast.

Thanks guys.

Fox News did a sly move in defending the “Innocence of Muslims” video. They didn’t defend the video itself, but they tried to say that it was a free speech issue. Except that they forgot the part where hate speech isn’t exactly free speech. The argument becomes whether a hateful person has the right not only to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater but also to yell something that s/he knows will generate a riot. In this case, that video caused riots across an entire region of the world and resulted in 75 deaths that we know of, not to mention hundreds of injuries.

I agree with Aria that the people who attacked the Benghazi consulate were happy to piggy back on the riots breaking out all over the region. And while the attack was going on, Fox News was spending that time to use the riots as a way to denigrate President Obama. (“The entire Middle East is on fire today! Where’s President Obama?”) It was only after the consulate attack became clearer that Fox News switched up their attacks to say that the video was unimportant and somehow just a free speech matter.

Fox News’ ratings have recovered a bit in the past month. Some of this is due to the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, some of it due to the usual publicity gambits. We’ll have to see if it holds. Fox News actually lost a fair amount of its audience after the 2012 election cycle, and not just because of the usual fall-off after a major election. Because CNN and MSNBC weren’t showing anywhere near the same percentage or numbers of drop-off. For the first quarter of 2013, MSNBC was actually improving, and apparently taking some of Fox’s audience.

Much of the drop-off from Fox News was clearly due to their viewers feeling they’d been misled last fall. It’s bad enough to watch their candidate lose, but to be told that the pundits knew this would happen and deliberately spun the numbers another way is depressing for anyone to hear. Things changed a bit when people wanted to see how the right wing would present the Boston Marathon materials.

The current numbers for Fox News reflect the fact that they do have a loyal base of right wing viewers, augmented usually by viewers of more moderate or left wing sensibilities who want to know what the GOP positions are on a variety of issues. There is an inherent curiosity on the left toward points of view that differ from one’s own. I have not noticed a similar curiosity on the right – usually, they’re happy to hear their own opinions presented back to them either on AM radio or on Fox News. Which is why you don’t see right wingers watching liberal stations like MSNBC or listening to truly left wing sources like the Pacifica Network.