By Tatiana Prophet

In spite of dominating the national cable ratings for 18 years as the most-watched cable news station, for decades, FOX News channel has been knocked around by other media and pundits as a pariah, as the Guardian put it in January 2017, with “a cloud of dubious accuracy that hovers over the network at all times.”

In fact, bashing “Faux News” is almost an entry ticket into polite society — at least the one with college graduates in it. It was accepted as fact that FOX News viewers were “bitter,” as candidate Obama put it, because of the loss of factory jobs, and that this loss made them “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” He was speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser in April 2008.

But what “polite” society missed for those 18 years was that FOX News’ viewer base was made up of much more than bitter Christians and gun “nuts.” What the elite missed, and what they’re still missing, is the unifying factor for FOX News viewers: the belief in personal responsibility and hard work, the belief in actual common sense, self-reliance and the importance of instilling those values into their offspring. These were the FOX News viewers, and in their opinion, traditional networks, plus Ted Turner’s CNN, were no longer reporting the news. They were spinning it. College grads and corporate worker bees tittered each time they heard Bill O’Reilly tell his audience (sadly made up of their own often parental family members) that they were entering the “no-spin zone.”