Fox News Purges Sarah Palin

Fox News has announced that Sarah Palin will no longer be an FNC contributor. The network offered the former vice presidential candidate and wildly popular speaker a greatly reduced salary, which she declined to accept. While Palin will continue to appear on FNC and Fox Business, she will be far less prominent. With her departure, cable’s conservative network has purged one of its most uncompromising pro-life, pro-family commentators. In fact, with Mike Huckabee gone, the social conservative cause is now represented by Todd Starnes (when he appears), Gretchen Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Father John Morris. (For some reason, Pat Buchanan and Alveda King are not currently listed as contributors on the network’s website.) Who is out – and who is still in – at Fox reflects a growing war within the ranks of the Republican Party between evangelical conservatives and GOP operatives over the soul of the conservative movement. Palin underwent a media witch-hunt because she attended a Pentecostal church, and her faith has been a defining part of her life. That does not sit well with political elites in either party – nor does independence of thought. The network fired Dick Morris, not a social conservative but someone willing to buck party orthodoxy, allegedly because he wrongly predicted Mitt Romney would win the 2012 election in a landslide. Yet Karl Rove not only predicted Romney would win but engaged in an 18-and-a-half minute on-air meltdown when the network announced that he had lost, demanding that the network’s star, Megyn Kelly, traverse the length of the Fox News complex and ask the analysts to justify their (ultimately correct) decision. Rove yielded only after Michael Barone began discussing the remaining vote in granular detail. (The remaining vote included “Parma, the famous place with all the bowling alleys….”) Rove also predicted Republicans would retake the Senate in 2012; they actually lost two seats. Perhaps more to the point, he advised George W. Bush to embrace “No Child Left Behind,” the Medicare prescription drug benefit, amnesty, and other positions both unpopular with his base and injurious to the nation as a whole. Yet his whiteboard etchings still fetch him a reported $400,000 a year. Rove has at times been openly contemptuous of Palin and her family, saying that Sarah lacks “gravitas” while bellowing that the Palins’ endorsements “don’t mean snot.” He formed a super PAC before dedicated to combating conservatives in the 2014 GOP primaries. “Karl Rove is the leading opponent of social conservatives in the Republican Party,” one well-connected D.C. figure told me at the time. (He was not the only person with this assessment.) Fox News briefly cut ties with Palin in 2013, only to temporarily restore them. On Wednesday, it handed Rove another triumph. But should Fox News listen to Rove’s analysis? Karl Rove’s advice helped destroy the Republican Party brand, with the backlash beginning during the 2006 midterm elections. Imagine how helpful his advice would be in an area that is not his specialty. Palin’s purge was but one of a number of moves positioning the network in the donors’ camp, rather than on the side of the conservative grassroots. The network squeezed out Glenn Beck‘s more education-oriented program in favor of the commentary roundtable, The Five. It helped launch the broadcast career of Sally Kohn, who once wrote, “I’m a Jewish lesbian and he’d probably have me killed,” but “I have a little crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejiad,” the then-president of Iran. In 2013, it brought in former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who sold out his pro-life views before running for president in 2004. More recently, the network added Katherine Timpf, a National Review Online writer who is disgusted by the concept of Biblical marriage. In February, she tweeted, “Few things make me shudder quite like hearing someone use the phrase ‘traditional marriage’ unironically.” Fox News deems Sarah Palin meaningless but has had no trouble paying these people? How relevant are they? Do Fox News viewers really want to see the Roves and Timpfs of the world instead of Sarah Palin? Then there is the network’s decision to help raise funds for homosexual causes. FNC talking heads have taken part in fundraisers for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) alongside their counterparts from MSNBC, provoking concern over Fox News’ “growing pro-homosexual bias.” At a minimum, that kind of activism – actively filling the coffers of a homosexual advocacy organization – is clearly at odds with the views of much of its viewership. With the departure of Palin and Huckabee, Fox News must reassure evangelicals by signing at least two equally outspoken social conservatives to take their places. Tony Perkins, Michele Bachmann, Jim DeMint, Sandy Rios, Bryan Fischer, and Steve Deace, among others, are available. Until then, Todd Starnes could be given Huckabee’s former one-hour weekly TV slot. (Greg Gutfeld’s funny, but he’s not socially conservative.) Or Pat Buchanan could revive Crossfire. Fox News became the top news channel in the country, because it reflected the conservative views of the silenced majority. If it freezes out evangelicals, they will increasingly turn to other news sources that share their values. In the meantime, the network’s viewers should be aware of what is happening at the one major news network not entirely at war with their faith.