Politics & Power Quote by Reese Schonfeld

Fox News ratings aren’t being praised here; they’re being weaponized as a data point with an edge. Reese Schonfeld, a journalist who helped invent modern cable news, frames audience measurement as political intelligence: not what Americans tell pollsters, not what parties wish were true, but what millions voluntarily choose for hours at a time. The word “reliable” is doing the heavy lifting, implying that ratings are less performative than survey responses and less curated than campaign messaging. In a fragmented media environment, attention becomes the cleanest available proxy for conviction.

The subtext is harsher than the phrasing. Treating Fox’s audience as “the electorate” hints at the gravitational pull of conservative media: Fox isn’t just reflecting attitudes, it’s concentrating them, amplifying them, and setting the day’s emotional temperature. Schonfeld’s line carries a quiet cynicism about democracy-as-consumerism. If politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from what people binge, then ratings start to look like electoral polling with better sample size and worse nuance.

Context matters because Fox News has long been both a broadcaster and a political actor, shaping agendas as much as tracking them. So the intent isn’t merely observational. It’s a warning to strategists, journalists, and officials: ignore that audience at your peril, but also recognize the distortion. Ratings can be “reliable” in the way a thermometer is reliable during a fever: accurate, alarming, and incapable of explaining the underlying disease.