Politics & Power Quote by Michael K. Powell

Powell’s line is a quiet indictment disguised as a shrug. He frames the old complaint about “liberal media” as background noise - decades of conservative grievance that elites, regulators, and the broader public learned to tune out. Then he pivots: “Now, all of a sudden,” the panic arrives, not because media power suddenly became dangerous, but because it changed hands. The sentence is built to expose asymmetry: ideology didn’t discover media influence; it discovered competition.

The wording does a lot of political work. “Griping” is dismissive, almost domestic, reducing a long-running conservative argument to nagging. “Freaked out” is even sharper: it paints today’s anxieties as emotional overreaction rather than principled concern. Between those two verbs sits the real target - establishment hypocrisy. Powell’s subtext is that outrage about bias is often less about fairness and more about who gets to set the narrative.

Context matters. Powell isn’t a cable-news pundit; he’s a policy-world figure, the kind of Republican who moved between government, telecom, and regulatory debates where “media consolidation” and “public interest” language is supposed to be taken seriously. By pointing to “one news channel,” he’s also normalizing Fox’s rise as merely the market answering unmet demand - a counterweight, not a menace.

What makes the quote effective is its strategic understatement. It doesn’t defend Fox on the merits; it mocks the selective alarm. The punchline is implicit: if you ignored complaints when liberals were winning, spare us the sudden devotion to media ethics now that conservatives have a megaphone.