Time for Straight Talk About Fox News
Now, I understand that a straight news article such as this one has to be careful not to present opinion as fact. But, come on, is there really any doubt that Fox News is biased against liberals? Why can’t a straight news story state this as a fact?
Beating up on liberals is the Fox brand, the keystone of its success, a great source of its institutional pride, right? I know, I know, Fox News coyly claims to be the anti-bias network, remedying the alleged liberal bias of the rest of the news media. That’s the official line.
But don't most people, especially its loyal viewers and defenders, pretty much acknowledge that much of what Fox does (and generates ratings specifically for this reason) is trash so-called liberals?
If the demographics of its audiences are any proxy for its brand, then the Washington Post shouldn’t feel compelled to say merely that “liberals say.” According to a survey by the Pew Center for People in the Press, "[W]hile roughly the same proportion of Republicans and Democrats view Fox News as credible, Fox ranks as the most trusted news source among Republicans but is among the least trusted by Democrats." (That survey admittedly came out four years ago. But, while things can certainly change in four years, I think we can all stipulate that Fox has, if anything, intensified that profile.)
And why would a Republican president and his administration grant so many interviews to Fox if they didn’t think they’d be getting sympathetic treatment?
Here I go again, as Ronald Reagan might say, mouthing the false assumptions of the haughty liberal class. Don’t I see that Fox has a few liberal commentators, and that it committed to "fair and balanced” coverage? Don’t I see that, shucks, the network is just trying to level the playing field for the good of the nation, the regular folks? That's how one defends deception, by accusing its accusers of deception. Hit them, then complain about getting hit.
I say all this not as a liberal, by the way, though I suspect that by most definitions I am, on most issues, "liberal." (I'm not crazy about such labels, which is another thing that bugs me about Fox.) I say it because Fox's positioning seems so deliberately misleading.
The truth is, I've got nothing against "conservative" news media, even if they sometimes make my blood boil and if on occasion I surprise myself and actually agree with what they say. If Fox News would just come out and say, “Hey, we represent conservative values, and that’s the lens through which we’re calling what we see,” I would respect it for standing up for what it claims to be.
Indeed, there’s a great tradition in American journalism of newspapers that took on a particular ideology. But I should qualify that.
The era of Republican and Democratic newspapers took place when there were many more papers and you could count on getting several different points of view, even in the same small or medium-sized town. Today, with the consolidation of media organizations into the control of all but a handful of owners and with the stark cutbacks taking place in newsrooms everywhere, I'm not sure how much our society can afford that sort of ideological journalism -- at least not among those news outlets that are meant to cut across many different communities and provide a common public square where all points of view and the best ideas converge.
(If I sound like a civics puritan, well, maybe I am. But don't worry, the realist in me knows that that the obligation of media organizations to make money too often compromises the public service function of journalism.)
But this “fair and balanced,” “We report. You decide.” business that Fox feeds us is maddening for its disingenuousness. It mocks the notion of thoughtful, constructive discourse. It's a classic example of doublespeak
And we all know it, don’t we? Isn’t it time the Washington Post (and other straight news gatherers) acknowledged that as objective fact and not as a something that some people, supposedly with their own ax to grind, allege?
Jeff
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