gisambards wrote:When did the question turn from "I don't know why Fox News isn't considered mainstream despite being popular? it should be" which I answered with "It's more like alternative media than not and has a much different effect on culture" to "is republicanism mainstream"?
It happened just before everyone in the forum clapped.
Personally, I would disagree that Fox being "more like alternative media than not and [having] a much different effect on culture" means it can't be considered mainstream, and I would be happy to discuss it with whoever made that argument, but unfortunately in this timeline he seems not to exist and we got someone gibbering about how we're all libtards instead.
Just my two cents, I've always wondered this, and I think Fox itself embraces and tries to reinforce the 'not mainstream' image despite having the largest audience of cable news (a bit of an asterisk is that Fox news is the ONLY conservative cable news source, while other viewers are split between like...twenty different options, but still). It's kind of a chicken-egg thing, because I think Fox News really created this narrative, which conservatives latch onto, which fed into Fox News, etc...
See, it kinda feeds into this attitude conservatives have these days. To them, they're the rebels gloriously fighting for freedom against liberal chauvinism (and more baldly, fighting to save this country from itself) when the reality is that they've dominated our politics since Reagan, are slowly losing that power, and are as much the underdogs as the Galactic Empire. It's why Trump can say with a straight face that he's an underdog, because sure, he's a silver-spoon fed crook, but he's 'fighting' the establishment. It gives this certain class of conservatives the feeling that the other side is always worse, that they're the good guys against the bad guys rather than an old political order that's decaying as old political orders do. Fox kinda plays this narrative up, and it makes conservatives feel good about themselves in this bitterly polarized era.
To put it another way, it's kinda like how the New England Patriots kept calling themselves underdogs before the last Superbowl when literally nobody ever counts them out, because just calling themselves the perennial champions nobody outside the northeast likes just doesn't have the same self-motivating effect.