Logic–Fox News Style

My husband was doing the “guy thing,” clicking the remote through a series of channels. He paused for a roundtable discussion on Fox; we were both somewhat startled because the participants were praising a report aired by NPR. Evidently, NPR had been criticized by Media Matters, and they were engaging in the time-honored tactic of “the enemy of my enemy is suddenly my friend.” Those participating in the roundtable used the attack to launch into a group chorus to the effect that “the liberal media” are all hopelessly biased.

With the exception of a kind word for NPR, it was a pretty predictable Fox rant. But then….(drumroll, please)…the discussion turned to CNN and its purported  liberal bias. One of the talking heads dismissed the insistence of a CNN executive to the effect that the network was neither Right nor Left– that its mission is simply to report the news. Her “evidence” that CNN was a “liberal” outlet was that they often reported the same news as MSNBC.

It evidently never occurred to her that two descriptions of newsworthy objective reality might turn out to be similar. Or that real journalists report on events even when those events tend to cast doubt on their preferred view of reality.

Or that sometimes, reality itself has a “liberal bias.”

2 Comments

  1. I saw the same clip. You missed the part where the CNN exec stated they were going to combat the stereotype by “bringing more balance into their news coverage.” Whoops.

    And lifting talking points from MSNBC does qualify you as a liberal news outlet. I don’t know if we’ve ever lived in a world where you don’t have to fact-check news coverage, but we certainly aren’t there now.

    In general, it’s a sad state of affairs if one news organization has to have a “discussion” about the problems at another news organization. I’ve heard of a slow news day, but d—….

  2. People left of center see Fox as hard right. But Fox fired its only two true conservatives, Glenn Beck and Joseph Napolitano. On the political spectrum Fox is in the bland middle now, but it probably looks hard-right because it isn’t lovingly deferential to Mr Obama. It’s all perception. You don’t hear a libertarian point of view on Fox, like, let’s undo the last 100 years of government expansion. You don’t hear that anywhere because too many people have a stake in big government.

    Napolitano was fired the week after he stated that the Middle East wars were illegal. Which they are, especially the US attacks on Libya, which literally violated the War Powers Act. He went down swinging, trying to do the right thing.

    CNN lost its credibility after admitting they’d covered up atrocities in Iraq in order to stay in business in that country.

    The US is a bankrupt empire. What we’ve been doing for the past 100 years has been a failure both domestically and internationally.

Comments are closed.