Our Long National Nightmare Ends: Fox News Dumps Sarah Palin and Deems Her Irrelevant

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:06 pm

Angry Palin

It is the end of the line for Sarah Palin. Fox News has dumped the quitter governor and deemed her irrelevant to American politics.

On June 24, 2015, a Fox news spokesperson confirmed to the website Politico that Fox terminated its contract with Sarah Palin on June 1st. Palin will no longer be a commentator for the Fox network, although she parted with the network on amicable terms and will still be called upon for occasional guest appearances.

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According to Politico, Palin was dumped because executives at Fox News no longer consider her relevant:

When Palin was at her zenith, she made frequent appearances, and Fox installed a camera at her house. But executives consider her less relevant now, and her appearances were sometimes hampered by the vast time difference with Alaska. She remains a huge conservative force on Facebook, with 4.5 million fans – twice that of Rand Paul, who has the biggest reach in the 2016 field. She also has 1.15 million Twitter followers.

Fox News is the lifeline to cash for conservative Kardashians like Palin. When Palin was previously dropped by Fox, she vanished off the scene completely. It got so bad that Palin went begging back to Roger Ailes and took a pay cut in order to get her media exposure back.

Sarah Palin has been deemed irrelevant to the conservative movement by the single strongest media force that shapes the Republican Party.

Palin has been a regular commentator on the network since 2008. Whether Fox will change their minds however is an open question. In January 2013, a Fox spokesman told The New York Times that the network had ended her contract, but then apparently her contract was extended anyway.

Sarah Palin has a colorful history of making egregious verbal gaffes on camera. However, that does not appear to be a disqualifying factor on the Fox network where bombastic conservatives prone to mangling the facts are a dime a dozen. Instead, Palin may have been discarded simply because her relevance as a commentator may be slipping away.

With the GOP field up to 13 officially announced candidates, and a number of shadow candidates still waiting to announce, the Vice Presidential candidate from 2008 is old news to network viewers. As the Republican field continues to grow towards the size of Duggar family reunion, and as bombastic candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz continue to draw media attention, Sarah Palin’s folksy in your face conservative shtick no longer stands out. The entire Republican Party has become the caricature that Palin was in 2008 when she burst onto the national scene.

Fox has parted ways with Sarah Palin as a regular commentator, but the entire network is infected with Palin-esque thinking. Palin has outlived her usefulness, not because Fox is tired of her clueless rants or her dissembling of the facts, but because Fox can draw upon so many commentators who do what Palin did just as well.

Some of those commentators are newer faces that don’t remind Republican viewers of the political drubbing they took in 2008 with Palin on the national ticket. They parted ways amicably because there is no difference in mindset between the network and the failed political candidate. However, a lot of Fox network personalities can say the same things Palin has been saying without reminding viewers that those ideas were big losers in 2008.



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