Politico's "senior media" guy, Jack Shafer, protests at some length that Bruce Bartlett's recent assessment of Fox News is hooey. You can read Bartlett here, which Shafer characterizes as an "inflation" of the "network's power," a sin often committed by "Fox critics," he notes. Shafer does allow Bartlett's larger argument (that of the "echo chamber" effect) a reasonably fair hearing. But Bartlett's somewhat passing and perhaps rhetorically overblown claim that "Fox now exercises such powerful control over the GOP that it has become the party’s kingmaker in presidential primaries" induces a pouncing sort of apoplexy in Shafer:
The Republican Party had been fielding "Foxy" presidential candidates for decades before the network’s 1996 launch, such as Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968..., which suggests that the network isn’t leading the right-wing parade but has only positioned itself at the front of the procession…. To suggest that Fox alone pushed the GOP in the direction of radicalism is to ignore the political history that followed: After wounding Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential campaign, Reagan completed the reset of the GOP as an ideologically driven conservative party in 1980, and there it has largely remained.
Does Bartlett argue that "Fox alone pushed the GOP in the direction of radicalism"? Of course not. Yet Shafer suggests that Bartlett suggests such a thing, which constitutes both Shafer's major assault on Bartlett and, if cornered on it, his escape hatch. Shafer enjoys demolishing an argument that Bartlett never made, while Shafer can only always deny that he explicitly fingers Bartlett for having made it. Pretty neat.
Indeed, in support of Shafer's counterargument against Bartlett's phantom argument, the latter himself writes that "In the George W. Bush years … [Fox] began objectively tilting well to the right of center…. Whether driven by politics and ideology or simply by ratings, the shift proved highly successful" (italics mine). Here, Bartlett is vividly open to the proposition that Fox reacted to the GOP's further-rightward shift, rather than the other way around.
Elsewhere, Bartlett professes that Fox "functions basically as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party." As I read that line, Bartlett is no more saying that Fox has shanghaied the GOP's ideology than Ian Kershaw has ever said that Goebbels dictated Nazism's tenets to the Führer (and no I'm not comparing the two parties).
One can march ever backward through the modern GOP's ancestral causations of radicalism, but for the sake of sensible proximity, I'd wager that most historians of contemporary conservatism would mark Bill Buckley's National Review think pieces of the late 1950s and early '60s as the launching, or breakout, point. It was NR's dialectical synthesis of the party's squabbling factions that impelled Goldwaterism to national notoriety, which then rippled to the rubes in the middle — the New Right's and Reagan's and Gingrich's and W.'s rubes. Fox News merely jumped on the proverbial bandwagon. And I should think Bruce Bartlett would agree.