Let’s talk a little about Fox News and the Republican Party.

Political parties in the U.S. are made up of both formal organizations (such as the Republican National Committee) and informal networks. Or, to look at it another way, each party has thousands and thousands of actors who can be grouped by what they do: politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, donors and activists, party-aligned interest groups, and the partisan press.

Which brings us to Fox News, and the central importance of partisan media within today’s Republican Party. There’s nothing wrong with party-aligned media per se; sure, neutral news values have their advantages, but partisan newspapers go back to the earliest days of the republic, so it’s hard to say that their 21st-century successors are inherently incompatible with democracy. At the voter level, I tend to think that worries about people only getting party-based information are overblown.

The problem comes when partisan media becomes extremely strong within the party, as seems to be the case among Republicans. That’s because the partisan press is also a business – and one that may have incentives that are, from a political perspective, perverse.