Conservatives who like to believe that whites and blacks are fully integrated in the culture should consider this: Not one of the ten most-watched television programs in white America is in the top ten for blacks. In fact, in recent years, television networks have been able to capture nearly the entire black audience without attracting any white viewers at all, and “narrowcasting” has emerged as a dominant programming philosophy among television executives. Now Kristal Brent Zook has written a book exploring this practice and the cultural divide to which it is responding. Color By Fox tells the story of the rise of the Fox television network (part of News Corporation, the parent of THE WEEKLY STANDARD). Zook is absolutely right that the topic is fascinating, and she’s absolutely wrong about why.

One of the popular parlor games among TV people of the 1970s and early 1980s was imagining what it would take to launch a fourth broadcast network to compete with NBC, CBS, and ABC. Like starting a new major movie studio, it was fun to talk about, but looked economically insane. When the Fox television network was launched in 1986, cobbled together from a few seldom-watched UHF stations in major cities, the TV establishment chuckled dismissively and assumed that it would quickly fold in the face of overwhelming competition from the majors. But Fox wisely chose not to compete at all with the Big Three, but to aim at an undeserved audience: black America.