I've got no use for Fox News, but I guess it's soft and safe enough for liberal New Yorkers looking for an alternative to the fever swamps of MSNBC.
Fox News, long a preferred source of news for the right, has lately become an information refuge for American Jews who believe that the mainstream media has been too hostile to Israel.
It's somewhat of an improbable alliance. Jews overwhelmingly identify as Democrats. And as the Republican Party came to embrace a more populist brand of politics that vilifies "globalist" corporate interests and wealthy liberal businessmen like George Soros -- something many see as coded antisemitism -- Fox News hosts and guests promoted those views.
George Soros is not a "liberal," he is a leftwing radical, and he is not code for Jews. He is not code for anything other than what he is: a radical, America-hating billionaire on a mad quest to destroy this country.
My friend, Dave Reaboi, is Jewish, and knocks leftwing Jewish discourse for its tendency to demonize what they call "tropes of antisemitism." What he means is, there is not enough antisemitism on the right (liberal Jews tend to ignore antisemitism on the left, of course), and so they move away from fighting actual antisemitism to fighting the "tropes of antisemitism."
Not actual antisemitism, but stuff that is kinda-sorta antisemitic adjacent, if you squint hard enough.
Is it antisemitic to oppose a leftwing billionaire's mad crusade to make every city unlivable by decriminalizing crime? No, of course not, but the Jewish left decides that to even talk negatively about someone who was born Jewish (he later converted, and is now atheist) is a "trope" of antisemitism.
This is much like the observation that the demand for anti-black racism exceeds the supply, so they have to invent fake hate crimes. Similarly, there is not enough antisemitism on the right (there's plenty on the left, though, boys, if you really want your fill!), so they shift the game from looking for antisemitism to things that merely remind them of antisemitism.
Claiming that everything is "code for antisemitism" is a kind of ethnic narcissism. We're not always talking about your or thinking about you, guys. It's not healthy and it's not attractive to always suspect other people are secretly passing messages about you. We are allowed to criticize people who selectively claim to be Jews when rhetorically convenient. We are also allowed to criticize leftwing radical billionaires. This is not antisemitism. Knock it off before you reduce the impact of the term "antisemitism" down to the level that "racist" and "transphobe" now enjoy.
But more than any of the major cable news channels -- and perhaps more than any other major American media outlet -- Fox News has wrapped itself in the Israeli flag in the weeks since the Hamas attack. Its coverage tends to emphasize the radical and antisemitic elements of the pro-Palestinian opposition, particularly on college campuses, while playing down the civilian casualties from Israeli strikes.
Is there any other element to the pro-Palestinian opposition, apart from the radical and antisemitic elements?
...
As CNN and MSNBC went live on Tuesday with breaking news that Israel had bombed the Jabaliya neighborhood, the site of the largest refugee camp in Gaza, an entirely different scene was playing on Fox News: a segment from southern Israel reporting that two Israeli soldiers had been killed in battle and two others wounded.
There are no specific metrics available on the religious affiliation of Fox's audience since Oct. 7, the day Hamas first attacked Israel. But ratings data from major metropolitan areas with large Jewish populations including New York, Miami and Los Angeles, show a spike in viewership that outpaces its rivals.
Since September, Fox News's audience has grown by a larger percentage than CNN and MSNBC in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami. And in the New York market -- the nation's largest -- Fox has lately beaten its left-leaning rival, MSNBC, by a few percentage points. In September, Fox was drawing 16 percent fewer viewers than MSNBC in New York.
As I said, I have no use for Fox, but I guess it could be Baby's First Non-Liberal Media Organization.