A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
I could write a long blog post in “academic-eze” trying to analyze or explain the utter dishonesty of Fox ‘News,’ and the network’s constant efforts to twist anything and everything to fit their hysterical anti-Obama agenda.
Or you could just watch this absolutely brilliant take-down from the Daily Show. I love Jon Stewart!
CommentsA hoax story circulated over the weekend about an Islamic council in Pakistan protesting the use of padded bras. Fox “News” doesn’t fact-check, as we all know, so it reported the story as fact.
Also today, Fox announced that Evan Bayh would be joining the network, as a “Democratic” commentator.
Kevin Drum summed up the situation perfectly. Noting Bayh’s abrupt resignation from the Senate (a resignation that cost his party that Senate seat), Drum noted:
“Even at the time, Bayh’s move was tough to understand. He implored Americans to take seriously the “challenges of historic import” that “threaten America’s future,” while at the same time announcing that he would stop working on these challenges altogether.
And what would he do with this time? Bayh said he had a few ideas in mind, including possibly teaching and/or philanthropic work. He added at the time that he hoped to do something “worthwhile for society.”
That was a year ago. Today, the former senator who decried “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology” will be paid by a ridiculous cable news outlet that exists to spew “strident partisanship” and “unyielding ideology.”
Not to mention his lobbying gig.
Facebook posts have registered a number of reactions to this latest news, but surprise has not been among them. Anyone who has followed Evan’s career can appreciate how appropriate it was that the announcement came on the same day as the debunking of the story about padded bras.
Fake boobs, fake Democrat–it’s all about pretending to be more substantial than you really are.
CommentsNumbers cruncher Nate Silver took a look at the recent New York Times poll of people who consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party movement, and noted that media habits were the most salient predictor of such support.
According to Silver, “Tea-partiers are disproportionately attached to, and perhaps influenced by, FOX News. And they are particularly enamored of Glenn Beck. Nationally, just 18 percent of people have a favorable opinion of Beck (the majority have no opinion whatsoever about him). But most tea-partiers do… 59 percent of those who do think highly of Beck consider themselves a part of the tea-party. This is, in fact, the single biggest differentiator of any of the items that the NYT asked about: not ideology, not any particular political belief, but whom they watch on television.”
It isn’t just Fox. Increasingly, the television programming you watch, the newspapers, magazines and blogs you read, and the other media you access have become predictors of the reality you inhabit.
Over the past eight years, I have team-taught a course with James Brown, Associate Dean of IUPUI’s Journalism School. The course is titled “Media and Public Affairs” and it enrolls both journalism and policy students. Its purpose is to explore the mutual dependence of the media and government. When we first taught the course, it was a relatively straightforward exploration of the history of American journalism and freedom of the press: today, we aren’t even sure what “the media” is. And that’s a problem, not just for the classroom, but for the country.
In a large and diverse democracy, the ability of citizens to make informed decisions about public policy is critically dependent upon the quality, objectivity and completeness of the information available to them. We are seeing dramatic changes in the ways in which Americans access that information. At a time when the relationship between government and media has become increasingly important, that relationship has become increasingly problematic.
The media’s role in American policymaking involves two supremely important functions, that of “watchdog” and that of information provider. The watchdog function is intended to keep public administrators honest; the information function allows the public to make reasoned judgments, not just about their government’s actions and decisions, but about the all-important context within which those actions are taken and decisions made.
Governments depend upon a properly functioning media in order to make sound policy; citizens require a properly functioning media to ensure that their own policy judgments are informed.
The ideal of journalism is objectivity, difficult as that often is to achieve. Every journalist cannot be Walter Cronkite, but we cannot function as citizens without genuinely impartial and trustworthy sources of information. When we substitute commentators for reporters, when supposedly reputable news sources act like stenographers—giving us “balance” (i.e. “he said, she said”) without fact-checking who’s telling the truth—we end up in a black and white world where we can choose the “facts” we prefer to believe.
And then we wonder why everyone is so angry.
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