Six Times More People Tuned in For Clinton/Obama Interview than Watch Faux News

Another blow to the repugican fantasy that America is a wingnut nation was delivered when over six times more people watched the Obama/Clinton 60 Minutes interview than watch Faux News.
According to Nielson, the Obama/Clinton joint interview was watched by 11.65 million Americans. On average 1.6-2 million people in the United States watch Faux News each day. In a non-election year the political audience is smaller across the board, and there is a huge difference between broadcast and cable television ratings, but the belief that is held by both the mainstream media and the repugicans that there is some huge outcry for wingnut programming is flat out wrong.
The ratings for the Clinton/Obama interview are both a tribute to the star power of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and a reminder that there really is no one in the wingnut delusion who can match the country’s top Democrats in terms of the ability to draw an audience. The mainstream media and the repugican cabal both pushed hard for Sarah Palin to be their answer, but we all know how that turned out.
The reality is that the political landscape is shifting. The myth of a vast wingnut America goes back to Nixon’s “silent majority,” and it has fed the wingnut persecution complex about the media for decades. The reality is that wingnuts control talk radio, and the top cable television network. This messaging apparatus has worked tirelessly day and night to diminish the popularity of top Democrats like Clinton and Obama, and they have resoundingly failed.
Faux News is supposedly the giant among cable news, but they are dwarfed by the power and popularity of the current president and the outgoing secretary of state. The influence and power of Faux News are both overstated and overrated. If Faux News was effective in any way, President Obama’s job approval rating wouldn’t be touching record highs, and Hillary Clinton would not be the most popular political figure in the country.
The Cult of Faux is a tiny, but loud, segment of the political landscape. Election results and television ratings are making it more difficult for the right to deny that wingnuttery is on run. The 2012 election was the first sign of a generational change, and a shift away from the Reagan dominated wingnuttery of the past three plus decades.
As the ratings for the Clinton/Obama interview demonstrate, Faux News represents the rumblings of a lunatic fringe, not the voice of America.