Fox ‘News’
Fox News claims to be ‘fair and balanced’ when it is completely obvious that it is one of the most heavily biased sources of news you will find in any western democracy. Basically it’s the American equivalent of Al Jazeera, always cheering for the home team and generally limited in its reporting of different viewpoints. Has anyone like Noam Chomsky or Robert Fisk ever been interviewed on Fox News? Not that I’m aware of, unless someone can point it out to me. Those sorts of opinions are generally ignored or mischaracterised on Fox News. Their trademark ‘We report, you decide’ is utterly meaningless if you are only receiving a limited amount of facts. All of this is well documented and widely parodied on liberal TV shows like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. I don’t mind the lack of objectivity so much, what I have a problem with is a news organisation being dishonest about their bias and is trying to hide it.
Another joke is the minuscule amount of actual real news reported on Fox News. If you take out the commentary, analysis, celebrity interest and little-white-girl-missing-in-the-woods stories, then there is very little useful content left, especially foreign news. A simple comparison to illustrate this is to watch Fox News’s sister station in the UK, Sky News. Compare the length of the news bulletins on each station – the UK station has about five times the amount of news. Of course if more Americans weren’t so insular and actually paid some attention to the international media, they might actually wake up and realise how crap their own news media is.
It all reminds me of like how in the Communist era, the Soviets called their main newspaper and party mouth piece, ‘Pravda’ meaning Russian for ‘truth’ or at least their own version of it. Whenever you see an organisation like Fox News claiming to profess the ‘truth‘ or ‘just the facts’, you know what they are claiming it is pretty much the opposite of the what the real truth is. With a news organisation as closely aligned to the reigning government as Fox News is, that history lesson is something to keep close in mind.
Fox News are one of the main instigators of the trend of turning news into a form of entertainment. An example of this is during the initial stages of the Iraq war; when they in the opening to the news had movies with rolling tanks, action music and American flags on screen. As if war was something akin to a high school football match. They have have also developed a form of journalism that doesn’t relay a story; it pits two sides against each other for argument - a sort of political Punch and Judy show that encourages destructive partisan politics. Great for ratings, bad for the country. O’Reilly and Hannity are among the worst examples. Participants on these shows spend so much time arguing back and forth, that they lose sight of what the actual issue is.
Finally there is the disingenuous claims of false victimhood. Fox News journalists and commentators still see themselves as the underdog fighting against the ‘mainstream media’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Fox News is part of one of the largest media empires on the planet and is the news dominant network in the US in terms of ratings.