When David Brat’s victory over Eric Cantor was announced last night, less than halfway into The O’Reilly Factor, Fox spent the rest of its prime time coverage discussing the stunning upset. Yet there was a gaping hole in its more than 2 ½ hours of coverage: the Cantor perspective.
Joe Williams, at Blue Nation Review, notes:
Shortly after the Associated Press called the race for Brat in a runaway, the candidate and two of his key supporters, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham and right-wing gad-gnat Ann Coulter, all showed up on “Fox” News. In live phone interviews, they took turns throwing dirt on the political grave of Eric Cantor’s career.
…No interviews were given, phone or otherwise, with Cantor or his campaign staff…
In addition to Coulter and Ingraham, supporter Mark Levin took a victory lap on Hannity, in addition to the more than 21 minutes given to Brat, himself.
I heard no mention of any attempt to get a spokesman for Cantor to appear.
Even when it comes to covering their own Republican side, Fox promotes its political agenda.
The reality of Eric Cantor’s humiliating loss this week has partly to do with the GOP base moving so far to the right that it’s difficult to see how they think they’ll win a national election again. If the GOP goes through another painful primary season in 2016, one has to wonder WHO they think they could nominate as a party. Here in California, we just had the spectacle of Tim Donnelly vs Neel Kashkari, with Kashkari winning as simply a right wing GOP candidate and former Bush Administration staffer. Donnelly is a far right wing ideologue, and he had hoped the “Tea Party” would allow him a statewide berth to spout nonsense at Jerry Brown. Didn’t work out for him, and I don’t see how it will work out on a national scale in 2016.
The other part of Cantor’s fall is that he was known for really enjoying his position in the House and for his obvious thinking that he could challenge the leadership of not only John Boehner but also President Obama. Even his own constituents look like they’d had enough of his behavior. It’s telling that even Bill O’Reilly is mentioning the stat about Cantor’s dinners adding up to most of the announced entire campaign budget of Dave Brat. Of course, they’re also not mentioning that Brat was heavily supported by the right wing radio hosts in his area as well as names like Ann Coulter and Mark Levin.
It is indeed interesting that Cantor is not being interviewed by the Fox News machine. Instead, he’s clearly being treated as yesterday’s news. Adding to his humiliation was the mandate that he step down from his power position as soon as possible, so as to allow the GOP to have an existing Majority Leader through the fall that can most likely hang on to the position next January. I had expected Cantor to try to run at Boehner’s position. Instead, he’ll be looking for private sector right wing think tank positions. (This is similar to what happened when Newt Gingrich was forced to leave the House in disgrace.)
In the end, I believe history will show that it wasn’t immigration reform that ended Eric Cantor’s career. It was Eric Cantor that ended his own career.
I always believe the Tea Party represented nothing more than a marketing gimmick for Fox. The Republican Party was in ashes after the ’08 elections and they needed something to energize and most importantly continue to raise money from their dishearten supporters to keep the party afloat.
I’m not sure if poetic justice is the right term to descript Cantor’s defeat, but I really do believe without the Tea Party the R’s would have control of the Senate today. Nominating crazies like Sharron Angle from Nevada cost them that seat when Harry Reid would have been easily defeated along with Christine O’Donnell in Connecticut and the two candidates from Indiana and Missouri with their asinine comments on rape.
They’ll pick up some victories here and there but they’ll never win nationally.
And “Cantor’s people said no press!” is not an excuse- They could have had political strategists from an outside view talk. But they didn’t, at least not loud enough to be heard over the slurping.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/06/dark-money-machine-beat-eric-cantor
And you might want to note that the article’s suggestion is “that Fox didn’t try to talk to Cantor directly” and “Cantor . . . refused all media requests” are NOT mutually exclusive points. DID Fox try to talk to Cantor? I’m not seeing anything from the article OR from your “defense” suggesting that Fox did actually attempt to contact Cantor. If they didn’t, then they’re guilty of what they’ve been accused of.