The release of Gabriel Sherman's book about Fox News chief Roger Ailes has led to a number of reviews and articles about the conservative channel. Is Ailes a diabolical genius in control of the Republican Party or merely a man who presides over a network with aging viewers and dimished political clout? Meanwhile, several liberal columnists have essentially urged other liberals to ignore Fox News altogether. But just because Fox can't elect a president or steer the Republican Party in whatever direction it pleases does not mean that it should be ignored. Fox News is still dangerous, even if it cannot decide elections.

Some commentators have restricted themselves to the argument that liberals should simply not fret about Fox's electoral power. Jill Lepore implied as much in her New Yorker review of Sherman's book, and Michael Wolff wrote that, "Ailes hasn't divided the country. He's chipped off his own profitable piece of it." In my own review of Sherman's book, I argued that an otherwise excellent biography was slightly marred by the author's tendency to overstate Ailes's power and influence. Television networks do not decide elections, or even choose Democratic or Republican nominees.

But it requires a leap of logic to say that because Fox is not omnipotent it should be ignored. And yet that is the argument that Frank Rich makes in a long piece for New York magazine, titled "Stop Beating a Dead Fox." Rich runs through all the familiar arguments about Ailes's large yet not limitless political influence, but Rich has a larger point to make: that Fox's insanity should essentially be treated by liberals as if it were not occurring.

Rich begins with the "White Santa" story of several weeks ago, in which Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, whose obsession with skin color should really be addressed by someone with more psychological training than I possess, declared on her program that "Santa just is white." Rich uses this example to scold liberals for getting angry about Kelly's comments:

Of course what Kelly said was dumb. But the reaction was even dumber...When this supposed “national firestorm” (as Al Sharpton inflated it on his MSNBC show) finally died down, only two things had been accomplished beyond the waste of everyone’s time. Liberals had played right into Fox’s stereotype of them—as killjoy p.c. police. And Fox News could once again brag about its power to set an agenda for its adversaries even as it also played the woebegone ­victim.

For Rich to claim that outrage over this remark was "dumber" than the actual remark is absurd. As is the notion that outrage over Fox's racial games makes liberals seem like the "killjoy P.C. police." (Because racism is so fun!) But Rich's underlying reasoning is even more flawed: