(CNN) -- "Viewers don't want to be informed. Viewers want to feel informed." Those are the words of Chet Collier, one of the founders of Fox News, as quoted in Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Roger Ailes, the network's chief. Mission apparently accomplished: Fox is the most-watched cable news network, and yet, some surveys suggest that people who rely on Fox as their primary information source know less about current events than people who watch no news at all. But to jab at Fox for inaccuracy is to miss Fox's purpose. Fox has created an information community. We used to say, "Everybody's entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." In a mass media age, what counted as "fact" was defined by a few great national institutions: a small group of prestigious newspapers, a pair of leading news magazines, a trio of television broadcasters.
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David Frum: Fox's Roger Ailes created an information community for a specific demographic
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He says Fox appeals to an older audience concerned about direction of change in America
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He says new biography of Ailes shows an anxious network and an anxious audience
Like talk radio before it, but even more intensely, @placeholder offered information programmed not as a stream of randomly connected facts, but as a means of self-definition and a refuge from a hostile external reality.