I’ve been very pleased that the Obama White House has called it like it is and declared that Fox isn’t really a news organization. That’s been abundantly clear to anyone with a brain for a long, long time — after all, we’re talking about a group that went to court to protect their right to lie in the news, right? A group that sponsors Teabagging protests, and that was an active cheerleader for even the most egregious Bush-era atrocities. It’s not a point of debate.
What’s been shocking is that the rest of the mainstream media — the parts that are supposedly “liberal” — have basically just started parroting Fox’s own talking points on the subject.
Gawker’s Jezebel has a great summary of the whole affair:
Even if MSNBC does have a liberal bias in its news reporting (as opposed to its opinion and analysis) — for our purposes here, I’ll even stipulate that it does — it’s still comparing apples and rotting, bug-infested oranges. The problem is not that Fox News leans a bit to the right (in my opinion, so does CNN and so does half the “liberal” opinion on MSNBC), but that they consistently violate principles of journalistic ethics as if that is, in fact, their primary goal and they’re systematically working through a checklist. It’s not that they editorialize; it’s that they lie. It’s not that they sympathize with right-wing whackjobs, it’s that they sponsor them. You want to have a conversation about media bias on both sides, that’s fine, but you cannot have an intellectually honest version of that discussion if you begin with the premise that Fox and MSNBC are equally outrageous in their departure from objectivity and distortion of the facts — or, you know, “the fiction that Fox News is a traditional news organization.”
It’s convenient for folks at CNN to pretend that the two are equivalent, since that makes them look like the one cable news outlet that gives a damn about balanced reporting. But such an assertion actually betrays both bias and bull on their part (even if the bias is chiefly toward their own profits). Fox News has consistently displayed such a flagrant lack of concern for facts, balance and integrity, any journalist with the slightest pretension to objectivity should be mortified by the mere thought of defending them.
Fox is not news organization. Period. It’s a partisan extension of the right wing of the Republican party, and it has no right to the courtesy typically extended to nominally fairminded journalists. Their slogan “fair and balanced” is so brazen as to be Orwellian, and to defend them as somehow equivalent to CNN or MSNBC in their slant is to betray your own fundamental misunderstanding of words like “truth” and “journalism.”
The fact that Campbell Brown is whining about the White House’s treatment of Fox doesn’t suggest the Obama Administration is wrong; it suggests that Brown is nearly as shoddy a “journalist” as anyone at Fox. Fox is a major part of the problem, but it’s a problem that extends to all broadcast media today. So-called journalists have abandoned their traditional investigative, critical role in favor of a bullshit “present the controversy” approach that reaches its apotheosis when birthers like Orly Taitz are given airtime to suggest Obama isn’t actually a citizen.
Controversy may sell ads, but the responsibility of a news desk is to present facts. Countering the views of epidemiologists with Jenny McCarthy babbling about vaccinations and autism, and providing no voice of reason, is simply malpractice. And that’s what’s happening with the Fox vs. Obama coverage.