Fox News is warping Republican incentives

BloombergOpinion Early Returns

Jonathan Bernstein

Let's talk a little about Fox News and the Republican Party. Political parties in the U.S. are made up of both formal organizations (such as the Republican National Committee) and informal networks. Or, to look at it another way, each party has thousands and thousands of actors who can be grouped by what they do: politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, donors and activists, party-aligned interest groups, and the partisan press. Sometimes when we think of shifts in a party it's about which people or groups get more influence, like when conservatives began dominating the Republican Party in the 1960s or the way newly politicized and organized women have been important in the Democratic Party during Donald Trump's presidency. Sometimes, however, there are shifts in influence among those various roles within the party. So for example a lot of party scholars believe that campaign professionals became more important in the 1970s in both parties, while Seth Masket argues that presidential debates have recently empowered formal party organizations.  Which brings us to Fox News, and the central importance of partisan media within today's Republican Party. There's nothing wrong with party-aligned media per se; sure, neutral news values have their advantages, but partisan newspapers go back to the earliest days of the republic, so it's hard to say that their 21st-century successors are inherently incompatible with democracy. At the voter level, I tend to think that worries about people only getting party-based information are overblown. The problem comes when partisan media becomes extremely strong within the party, as seems to be the case among Republicans. That's because the partisan press is also a business – and one that may have incentives that are, from a political perspective, perverse.  After all, democratic parties work best when they have strong incentives to win, and most party actors do in fact have good reasons to try to win elections. Politicians and governing professionals want to win because they want to have jobs in government. Campaign staffers know that their careers will thrive if they work on winning campaigns. Party-aligned interest groups want their policy preferences enacted. These incentives push parties to try to make the nation better and to make voters happy. Of course, politicians may have altruistic reasons for doing the same. But personal incentives may be more reliable in the long run than counting on politicians to be good people. Healthy incentives push governments to care about voters, parties to adopt popular ideas, politicians to be pragmatic and all of them to alter course when things are going wrong.  But media outlets don't necessarily share those incentives. Ratings and clicks may go up when the other party is in office, for instance, or simply when there's conflict and controversy. Other business concerns may intrude. That brings us to Gabriel Sherman's reporting on Fox News, which is apparently undergoing an internal "identity crisis" over how closely to cling to Trump as the impeachment process gets underway. Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with Fox News or any other outlet making decisions based on profits. But because the partisan media is so influential within the Republican Party, those kinds of decisions – which have nothing to do with winning elections – can create serious dysfunction.  The bottom line: A political party that allows itself to be held hostage to perverse incentives is going to have a lot of problems. That's where Republicans find themselves right now – not too conservative, whatever that might mean, but misdirected by incentives that are just plain out of whack. And it's really not clear how they can get out of it. 1. Dave Hopkins on the electoral effects of impeachment.  2. Alister Wedderburn at the Monkey Cage on Boris Johnson and the Hulk.  3. Daniel Nichanian on voting rights and the 2019 elections. 4. Jessica Pishko on bad sheriffs.  5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru on what Trump defenders are saying.  6. Harry Enten on public opinion about impeachment. Good, but remember: The number to keep an eye on isn't public support for impeachment; it's Trump's approval rating.  7. And Marisa Lagos with a nice piece on why Democrats are lucky to have House Speaker Nancy Pelosi right now. I'll admit that the evidence that Pelosi has been heading here the whole time, displaying patience and shielding her caucus until the moment was right, happens to look a lot like the evidence that she was on her way to messing this up until the whistle-blower scandal intervened. Unless there's more reporting, we won't know. But she's always been very good at her job.  Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.

Bloomberg L.P. ● 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022 Web ● Facebook ● Twitter Feedback ● Unsubscribe