Notwithstanding Jane Harman, who apparently decided to appear on Fox News Sunday this morning, the cable news network for and by conservative Republicans is shockingly having some difficulty getting Democrats to come on its programming. Here's FNS host Chris Wallace moaning to The Politico earlier this week.

"I think the Democrats are damn fools [for] not coming on Fox News," Wallace said. "And my guess is that once you get a nominee, they probably will come on, because they know that we get a lot of voters they are going to need if they are going to win the election."

[...]

Aside from his hourlong Sunday show, the Democratic candidates will not participate in any Fox News-sponsored debates, leaving Wallace to moderate three Republican contests over the course of 2007.

"Just imagine if the Republicans, under pressure from right-to-life groups, refused to appear on CNN or MSNBC," Wallace said.

"I think there would be holy unshirted hell. I think there would be such talk about these people being captives of the extreme right wing and why are they afraid to answer questions. And I think the absence of that is very telling.

"At this point, it has become kind of a loyalty test inside the Democratic Party, ... pandering to the far-left-wing," Wallace added. "And we live with it."

Wallace is either in denial or is making a fairly poor effort at spinning. Even leaving aside the very clear bias that permeates this network and which would be too long to document in a single post, there are a great number of reasons why Democrats have little business appearing on Fox News.

To begin, no one watches Fox News Sunday. According to The Politico article, FNS' ratings earlier this month showed it pulling in less than a third of the viewers watching Meet the Press on NBC and even less than half of the viewers watching either ABC's This Week or CBS' Face the Nation. And when you look at the makeup of that viewership, it becomes even more clear why Democrats aren't and shouldn't be patronizing Fox News.

Simply put, the people watching Fox News are diehard Republicans who aren't likely to be swayed to the Democrats just because a Democrat or two appears on the network. Clearly, the network functions more as a mode of disseminating talking points to the right wing base of the Republican Party than as a true news organization (like CNN or MSNBC, which Wallace cites as being similar to Fox News).

This fact is borne out in real data. As I've noted before, polling indicates that in 2004 Fox News viewers backed George W. Bush over John Kerry by an 88 percent to 7 percent margin -- not exactly the type of numbers that indicate a swing demographic. More recent numbers show that liberals and even moderates just aren't watching the network, but rather Fox News viewers tend to overwhelmingly self-identify as conservative.

So the self-identifying newsmen at Fox may believe that they are creating real news content and, as such, should be entitled to the same type of access to both parties as are the other news organizations. But Fox News isn't a real news organization and as such shouldn't be too surprised and certainly shouldn't be up in arms when it doesn't get Democrats to come on its programming.