FOX News is a disgrace and embarrassment to serious journalism. That said lets not ignore the offenses of the other networks most notably CBS during the Rather years, PBS and MSNBC. I will grant that FOX is far more glaring in its complete abandonment of even the veneer of journalistic integrity and neutrality. But the political left slanted the news for so long it seems a bit disingenuous to suddenly find one's voice and express indignation here.
But yea, the author is correct. FOX has sold its soul to the GOP and is little more than a propaganda machine for the far right and the neo-cons.
The Infant God
8 hours ago
16 comments:
I couldn't disagree more. Fox News is about the only bright spot on the journalistic scene. I'm grateful for men like Beck and O'Reilly and thankfully the country agrees with me.
If you like propaganda posing as news than you are welcome to it. Beck is a tool (and not a very bright one I might ad). O'Reilly has a clue but that just makes him more culpable for the dreadful distortions and often outright lies put forth on his program.
It's all red meat for the radical right and the neo-cons that lied us into a war with a country that never attacked us and bankrupted the nation with their fiscal insanity. We won't even begin to discuss what they did to the Bill of Rights.
It couldn't possibly be that all the honest journalists work for Roger Ailes?
Is it just that if they don't agree with you, that means they have abandoned "journalistic integrity and neutrality"? You do seem to recognize that the left has "slanted the news for so long...."
Maybe you just don't like the truth, so the reporters must be biased.
I too disagree with your assessment John. The MSM threw fair and unbiased journalism under the bus decades ago. Wapo and the rest of the industry need to clean up their own houses and stop kissing the &*# of the Democrat Party before they cast any stones.
I like Fox News. Britt Hume beats up on everyone during interviews.
John, I fully agree with you.
That's why I watch MSNBC whenever the Republicans are in power and FOX whenever the Democrats are. You get, as it were, a balance of lies.
The reason I prefer Fox news generally (and I am certainly no fan of Glenn Beck and find Bill O'Reilly tiresome) is that while their biases may be on the right they are actually entertaining and often informative and they do not make me feel that if I disagree with them then I belong to the great unwashed. Reading the WaPo article you link to does exactly that. I do not like being patronised by the likes of WaPo, the New York Times or CNN who all pretend that their left wing bias does not exist and that I am a fool to believe that it does. Frankly, if they go belly up I will cheer. And for those lamenting their loss there is always NPR, CBS, NBC and ABC.
John, you must know that the commentators such as Beck, O'Reilly and Hannity are not part of the news division, anymore than Maddow and Olberman are part of their team's news organization.
The success of Beck et al is what is driving Raines and other liberals beserk. How dare we the hoi polloi look to other points of view to learn what is going on? Oh for the good old days when liberals controlled the media outlets.
Now that people can get news from other sources, and that the liberal media are so in the bag for the left wing in general and Obama in particular, the free market is at work. People do not trust the left wing media anymore frankly.
Look up John Stossel's history. His is a classic case. So long as he toed the liberal line, he was a golden boy. But when he started investigating liberal sacred cows, he was scapegoated.
In Europe, many news firms don't pretend to some level of objectivity. They are forthright in saying "we are left (or right) of center, and will report and print from that point of view." I like that frankness.
Fox will appear right of center simply by reporting on sides of a story nearly every other outlet will ignore. Only those other outlets think the only objective report is their own point of view. Give Fox credit for being more honest.
You don't really believe that "Bush lied" horse hockey do you? BTW Saddam attacked us lots of times, and they FOUND the yellow cake uranium. Hitler didn't "attack us" and no that's not different...oh I'm not arguing this again. What's on tap?
Fr. John: lighten up! So FOX doesn't live up to your reporting standards. So you can watch CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS or read the New York Times or .... Duh. Next time you organize a Pro-Life event call a Democrat. May I suggest that Catholic fraud Pelosi or that LDS fraud Reid. You need to get out more. Statmann
VSO,
What's your take on this:
http://molonlabe70.blogspot.com/2008/02/bush-caught-lying-about-september-11th.html
I'm agnostic to a point about what I believe on the news, any news. I've been getting that way more and more. It just seems so hard any more to know who and what to believe and why. Even "true" news spun a certain way can be deceptive.
For me, I haven't owned a television now for many years. What IS on tap?
Fox news is slanted to the neo-con right. I am a conservative/libertarian. I don't want my news slanted at all. I understand the desire to want to chose a team, especially since the media has marginalized the largest ideological percentage of this nation. I differ from the blogger in that I am not looking for a moderate slant either, ideally I want no slant, just a report of facts where I can make my own opinion. That isn't an easy task because I may require information to be reported in order to understand the context and that is where slant or the accusation of slant comes in. I do find it intellectually dishonest for people to slam the left for slanting the news (which they do) and then pretend that Fox news isn't something other than news slanted to neo-cons.
I most heartily disagree. If not for Fox, the Left would own the news.
Catechumen & regular reader of your blog.
Here's an idea- the Left and Right are both worldly ideologies, forged by man's Luciferian audacity to reshape the world into his vision of perfection, and "moderate" just means status quo. Christianity has nothing to do with any of this.
Whatever one thinks of Fox News' commentators (I think that O'Reilly is a tedious self-possessed bore that I can't stand listening to even the 85% of the time I agree with him, that Hannity is a good loyal GOP party hack, and that Beck's style is completely over the top, but that he's done a good thing by popularizing the content of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism), the WaPo's editorialist's crown jewel in decrying Fox's purported lack of journalistic standards is the assetion, 'It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform.' "
I do not thing Fox News can be faulted for the corruption of the language we have seen surrounding health care. Members of Congress and the pro-Obama media (I characterize them that way because of the complete pass they gave him on any examination of his background during the campaign) perpetually use what I like to call "the Newspeak phrase 'health care'" as an equivalent for any of the English phrase "health care", "health insurance", "government-run health care", "government-run health insurance".
Probably if one disambiguates the phrase "health care reform" as "reforms which will contain costs" a majority of the American people favor it, while if one disambiguates it as "reforms which will extend coverage while raising costs and expanding the role of the Federal Government", a majority of the American people oppose it. Since it is only the latter that is being pushed though Congress, the Fox News assertion is not an "uber-lie", rather the way the Washington Post and most other media outlets discuss the issue is the sort of "uber-lie" that Orwell warned us of in which words themselves become lies in the service of a political party's ideology.
Evidently a great many people object to bias in the news not out of any principle but only because it's contrary to their own biases.
Yes John, it had to be said. Thanks.
Romulus
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