A former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.
“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”
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The source continues: “I don’t think people understand that it’s an organization that’s built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that’s on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You’d think that people would wise up, but they don’t.”
This of course, is patently obvious to anyone with a pulse or anyone that doesn't live in a conservative fabrication of reality that seeks to find scandal and conspiracy around every corner, and deems innocuous things like Michelle Obama's push to get American kids off of their fat asses for an hour a day as a Stalinistic government overreach of the most egregious sort.
It doesn't take much effort to reveal the extent to which how vitriolic and ideological is Fox's programming. One only need to watch Jon Stewart for less than a week, perhaps even a single episode, to witness a multitude of incidents in which Fox routinely and deliberately ignores facts, creates controversy out of the most benign occurrences, shills for Republican policies and Republican candidates, and roils their viewers into a perpetually paranoid, angry froth through exaggeratively stark and eliminationist rhetoric and increasingly banal invocations of Democratic manifestations of Hitler, Stalin, Marxism, socialism, and the otherwise End-Of-America-As-You-Know-It.
Again, this is nothing new. But the most frustrating and dangerous aspect of Fox's existence is the public's widespread acceptance of the network and the treatment of Fox as a serious and legitimate news network. As the insider stated in the Media Matters piece, "You'd think that people would wise up, but they don't." This is exacerbated by the DC media's legitimization of Fox and their defense of Fox as one of their own:
The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch’s operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.
“That blew me away,” says the source, who stresses the White House’s critique of Fox News “happens to be true.”
There is a reason why the other media outlets rushed to Fox's defense: because like the other media outlets, Fox is a Serious Network, and an attack on one of them is an attack on all of them. It's the groupthink mentality of protecting the holy fraternity of Beltway journalists, and the other DC media giants would never align themselves with or investigate the claims of a Democratic administration, because that would be biased. And major media outlets collectively shit themselves at the very thought of being labeled as liberally biased. That and investigating or running stories against the objectivity of Fox News would require actual investigative journalism and the presentation of facts, and it is much more sexy and interesting and flashy to cover the BIG POLITICAL STORY of the latest from Sarah Palin's Facebook or Twittertwat account, midwest/northeast snow storms, and falling over themselves to book Republicans on Sunday news shows, because never in our lives has hearing weekly from the loser of a presidential election been so important or popular.
To wit, the White House is doing itself (and the nation) no favors either. Shortly after leveling claims of Fox's illegitimacy, the White House backed down amidst the outrage and criticism from the media and among other things, began once again granting interviews to Fox. Like this one:
Obama said that he thought all the news media needed to "give people the facts" in a more unvarnished way, and to give less attention to sensational or conflict-driven stories. O'Reilly then asked if Obama thought Fox News was fair to him.
"I would say that the news guys try to do a good job," he said. "Fox News has a point of view. There's nothing wrong with that."
"Do you respect it?" O'Reilly asked.
"Absolutely," Obama said.
There are, in fact, plenty of things wrong with it, and they are never going to do Obama any favors or anything other than undermine him and spit in his face at every opportunity, so it's a little irritating to see such a sycophantic response to that question.
Since the Beltway media fraternity will never take issue with Fox, Matt Taibbi had a good piece a while back that included a paragraph about how one might begin to unwind Fox's influence:
I'm beginning to wonder why effective boycotts against these hate-media channels, and particularly Fox, haven't been organized yet. Why not just pick out one Fox advertiser at random and make an example out of it? How about Subaru and their unintentionally comic "Love" slogan? I actually like their cars, but what the fuck? How about Pep Boys and that annoying logo of theirs? Just to prove that it can be done, I'd like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies. Isn't that at least the first move here? It's beginning to strike me that sitting by and doing nothing about this madness is not a terribly responsible way to behave.
I would tend to agree that doing nothing is increasingly becoming an untenable option, but Americans can hardly be bothered to get off of their fat asses to vote, let alone take up a boycott against Fox's advertisers. And it's not difficult; there is good precedent for this. In Beck's case, most advertisers simply grew uncomfortable and pulled their support of their own accord in response to his baseless and incredibly batshit stupid rhetoric. Toppling Beck's show would be just the start (since he is the "opinion" portion of the network and not "news"), but it has to start somewhere.
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