Fox News Channel has been accused by the left-wing dominated media as promoting in-your-face right-wing partisanship. It appears that many in the mainstream media are worried about this supposed and alleged trend.
There is no question about the popularity of Fox News. It is clobbering its competition (CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, etc.) in the ratings. Perhaps more alarming to the liberals, it is leading the other cable news services to imitate it. The mainstream media complains this is debasing the quality of cable news, but it appears that it is doing the opposite, raising the integrity of broadcast journalism.
Some liberals have even suggested that a far more dangerous effect of Fox’s popularity with viewers is that it will destroy public confidence in all news. How laughable is that? CBS is the network that wins the prize in that category, with deposed anchor Dan Rather airing patently false documents about President Bush’s military service in an attempt to influence the 2004 presidential election, and then trying in vain to defend their authenticity when they knew it couldn’t be done.
The fear of the left is that they will be exposed. They will no longer be able to continue their drivel unchecked and unbridled as they did before Fox came on the scene several years ago.
The mainstream media’s attack on what they call the “Foxization” of American news tries to make the public believe that Fox is deliberately partisan. These people that make such attacks have been so far to the left of center politically for so long that they don’t seem to realize how fair and balanced Fox actually is.
The popularity of Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, and other radio broadcasters is not necessarily because of what the liberals label their “extreme and virulent right-wing views”. It is because of the fact that they are a medium that speaks the truth and represents the majority of America.
As Limbaugh says, he doesn’t pretend to be even-handed, but rather to balance the rest of the media, which is certainly dominated by ultra-left-wing attitudes. Fox, on the other hand, has many commentators from all parts of the political spectrum, even though its audience is mostly conservative.
Why do the mainstream media view Fox as such a threat? For some reason, they believe that Fox presents another set of biases than those found in the presentation of the news at ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as the major newspapers in the USA. They feel that those news organizations are the ones that are fair and balanced themselves.
It isn’t that Fox has a corner on the truth. It’s just that the rest of the media, by and large, grind their liberal partisan axes continuously and have, in the process, ceased to be taken as serious seekers of truth.
The New York Times and the Washington Post were once revered as standards for journalistic excellence and intergrity. With all of the fallout from the false stories and outright lies that those papers and others like them have printed lately, no one seriously believes they can be trusted anymore.
Thus, we are left with Fox as perhaps the only authoritative source of truth in news. It is undisputed that all of the other networks are certainly left of center, some to an extreme extent. It can certainly be argued that Fox is the only outlet that has staked out a position that is even close to the center.
Everyone knows that the most careful print and broadcast journalists can make mistakes. However, it is increasingly clear that most of the mainstream media really has put their liberal political agenda above getting it right, and when they are exposed, they only grudgingly acknowledge their errors in the most obscure way possible to try to cover up their lies.
Have we created a battlefield of warring biases in journalism? It seems as if the liberal media, having run out of ideas, can only attack the position of conservatives with smear tactics and character assassination, trying to convince us that Fox is right-wing and tabloid in their approach.
It isn’t working. The American public is too smart for that. The current debate on the truth about Social Security is but one example. Without Fox as a balancing force, we would never get both sides of that debate.
Depicting Fox as a menacing ogre in an attempt to discredit it is unbecoming of the rest of the media. Instead of polluting the news, Fox is presenting it in a clear, straightforward manner. The rest of those in journalism, those liberals inside the Washington, D.C., beltway, and on the east and west coasts, aren’t quite sure what to do about that. Their weak attempts are falling on deaf ears on the main streets of America’s heartland.
John Mark Hancock
JMH@ICX.NET