It says here that the top-rated show on the Fox News Channel, Bill O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Factor, has an average viewership of 2.65 million people; Hannity & Colmes draws 1.65 million. Alex S. Jones in The New York Times says these are "huge" numbers. These are not huge numbers. These are PAX network numbers. Oh, OK -- O’Reilly does beat everything in the PAX primetime lineup handily. But Hannity does only slightly better than PAX’s top ratings-getter, Doc, starring former country music flash-in-the-pan Billy Ray Cyrus and his mullet; the numbers are here. (Please note that a show with a genuinely "huge" audience -- Will & Grace, say -- draws an audience ten times as large as Hannity’s.)

This is not to say that Fox’s small niche market doesn’t matter. It matters a lot -- for the simple reason that the voting population of this country, particularly in non-presidential elections, is itself a small niche market. Not a lot of us vote, and not a lot of us think about politics much, and right now a statistically significant percentage of the people who do vote and think about politics a lot are people who think Hillary Clinton is more evil than Saddam Hussein or Adolf Eichmann.

The commentators currently trying to figure out why Fox is beating CNN in the ratings don’t really understand what’s going on -- Jones, in the Times, seems out-and-out flummoxed; Neil Swidey, writing a Bill O’Reilly profile/love letter in The Boston Globe, thinks O’Reilly’s appeal is that he’s just so, well ... compelling; even the best of the think pieces on Fox to appear in the last couple of days, from Michael Wolff in New York magazine, suggests that Fox’s strength is simply an appealing us-versus-them pugnaciousness rather than a specific political message that seems profound and inspirational to people who think it’s a knee-slapper to spell the former vice president’s name "Algore."

Two years ago, at a time when hanging chads were being examined in Florida, Robert Wright wrote a column in Slate called "Mad as Hell." Wright never mentioned Fox -- few pundits did in 2000 -- but, without knowing it, he explained the secret of Fox’s appeal, a secret Jones, Swidey, and Wolff are still groping for:

Conservatives are an angrier group than liberals. It's conservatives, after all, who have Rush Limbaugh. Liberals sometimes mourn the absence of a left-wing Limbaugh, as if this void signified a spiritual energy crisis. I personally think it's a sign of mental health..... [T]he fact is that it is Republicans, not Democrats, who depend on a sizeable bloc of voters whose defining characteristic is heated intolerance of people different from themselves (e.g., homosexuals).

Even though I believe in anger a bit more than Wright does, I think he basically nails it.