As I understand it, Fox News was created as a "junk food" alternative to traditional media. By cutting back on investigative journalism and focusing on commentary and shows like "The O'reilly Factor" Fox could create "news" content for less than their competitors. I'm not sure if the apparent "right" lean was due to the ownership or to market realities that made that kind of content more appealing to right-of-center media consumers.
This model has been pretty successful financially and the other major media outlets in the US have followed suit (though often leaning left instead). I think MSNBC was one of the first with the obnoxious melodrama of Keith Olbermann.
All news is biased. Left, Right, Center is a false trichotomy. There is no such thing as objective journalism because the news is a filter. Even if one reports "just the facts", the facts one decides to report impart a bias.
I might report that "a woman is suing McDonalds for spilling hot coffee on herself". That is an unbiased fact. And it implants a story of runaway litigiousness. If I also report that "McDonalds was warned many times about the temperature of its coffee and even sure once already and the woman sustained 3rd degree burns" the story becomes one of corporate malfeasance.
Compound this further. I now state that the woman won millions of dollars, you may be tilting back toward over litigiousness. But if I report that she only sought damages and the jury awarded her punitive damages of its own accord the we're back to corporate malfeasance.
Absolutely. I can think of no better example than the recent moral panic over free speech. Because a few college kids on the wokest campuses in the country booted a few right-wingers we spent months covering every campus invitation as if it was the ratification of the first amendment itself. (I'm not saying there are no first amendment issues in America but who decided the events of a few college campuses were the evidentiary standard for a new social phenomena).
What, then, is your stance - do you think there is a difference of degree or agenda that matters? Or are they all the same, and should all be thrown out together.
In terms of trying to sift and acquire information it probably doesn't make much of a difference. It helps to know each outlet's priors so you can distill the useful information. The Drudge Report is obviously biased but for years it was the best place to get the straight dope on natsec because they had 4th amendment sensibilities. Lately I've actually become pretty avid Fox reader because they're bullshit is so blatant it's very easy to discard it and take the value. This approach does have its limits. At a certain point you do hit Infowars levels of nonsense and all useful information is scrambled.
Even if you want to focus on an ethical argument I'm not sure how to create a standard to compare them. Who is worse, Fox News who wears their bias on their sleeve or the New York Times who constantly hold themselves out as remarkable while piping all kinds of military and intelligence propaganda through to their readers. Who is worse? The organization that just outright supported Bush or the one that claimed to be a check and then held the illegal NSA spying story through an election?
IMO it's best not to choose which is better or worse. It's better to know how to read through both.
Don’t you have to know the relative strengths of each so you can weight the information as you read it? That sounds like implicitly choosing which is better or worse.
Another interesting point you brought up: how long a go should we look? Is today’s NYT still culpable for mistakes made nearly 20 years ago? (Not defending them, as I’m sure there are more recent examples. But when has enough time passed?)
> Is this really what people want in the news? A biased political stance?
When we have a great number of people who say things like “but that’s from xyz source so it’s bunk”, without examining the underlying facts or lack of facts, I’d have to say the answer to your question is Yes.
PS I’m willing to examine news from any source and employ discernment.
Someone once told me that you need bias in the news to create an adversarial system. Those that are biased towards some other viewpoint will be the only ones that dig deep to expose the problems of that other viewpoint. If everyone was neutral, there would be more motivation to present what happened rather than call foul.
I'm not sure I completely agree with this, but it did nudge my perspective.
when all mainstream news are heavily biased in favor of one political party and spread blatant misinformation, you need an alternative as a counterbalance and source of truth.
the fact people don't even notice, or choose to ignore the bias in mainstream media is beyond me.
Fox News is already amazingly biased and censured world wide - claiming you need even worse liars to help you feel better about "balance" makes no sense.
This is incorrect. Fox continues to maintain a conservative view. DailyWire and similar are radical right, which maps fairly cleanly to Nationalism, Fascism, and similar.
That's if you are using the commonly received connotation of conservative, rather than trying to rewrite reality.
What a weird thing to say, only a day after nationalists stormed the nation's capitol with the intent to disrupt the democratic process in favor of an autocratic dictator.
> only a day after nationalists stormed the nation's capitol with the intent to disrupt the democratic process in favor of an autocratic dictator.
I'm more curious to ask "why" people no longer trust the Government?
The real failure is that we've locked down society, destroyed the economy, and hastily thrown together an election so rife with problems that it's led to an environment where millions of people do not trust the outcome. The same leaders implementing the lockdowns are meanwhile dictating orders from tropical resorts or caught breaking their own rules in blatant shows of hypocrisy.
The States have not done an adequate job quelling election fraud suspicions and as a result the President and his supporters no longer believe the result. Can you blame them? Is blaming them productive? It fails to address the problem and it won't go away. Calling them white supremascists, nationalists, fasicsts, racists, and the other explicatives that have been used for the past four years is only going to further divide this nation and have the opposite intended outcome.
Did the media single out and target the people supporting, promoting, and engaging in the 3+ months of left-wing riots this past summer? Most of the media pundits now calling this latest event an insurrection, were previously condoning and explaining away "mostly peaceful" protests as multiple cities burned, as violent agitators stormed the Federal Courthouse in Portland for over 100 days, threw bombs, lit fires, burned cars, killed people (chop/chaz/portland), and more. And let's not pretend that had Trump won the election, Antifa and other left-wing groups wouldn't be over a month in of the same thing.
The level of hypocrisy and disconnect is so startling it's scary. What I see is a total lack of understanding across the spectrum, a total failure to acknowledge both sides and apply standards consistently and unequivocally, a total failure of communication and decency. I'm not sure how the country moves in a positive direction.
Or, they were encouraged to believe so by propaganda. And that led to the deaths of several people due to their insurrection, as most people not divorced from reality could have predicted several years before.
Just saying, there was little surprising yesterday to anyone who has taken time to talk to these conspiracy theorists and seen the level of fear they choose to live in and surround themselves with, though it is deeply sad.
Or, it's a coherent philosophy of corporate ownership of the economy directed by government dictate, as it has been known since long before your identified method of deflection.
> corporate ownership of the economy directed by government dictate
Your "explanation" contains a contradiction, so you're not off to a great start here. If the economy or corporations are directed by government dictate, they don't really own anything in a meaningful sense. In this arrangement they are more like managers than owners. If you disagree, ask yourself if any corporation really has another option other to comply if one of their decisions is countermanded by the state.
There is a reason it is named after the Fasces, a symbol of authority borne by a Lictor through the streets of Rome ahead of Tribunes and other officials with authority (okay, granted that this term and symbolism is decidedly Italian, fascism will always feature symbols distinct to each nation). The essence of fascism is power. A fascist believes this power comes from unity (another reason the Fasces is a chosen symbol, as it contains a bundle of sticks that when bound together cannot be easily broken) and so the subordination of the individual and every institution to state power is the cornerstone of their policy.
You seem to misrepresent the primacy of economics in fascist ideology, perhaps confusing this with Syndicalism, which Mussolini was involved with early in his political career. Fascism is something else. While it incorporates the subordination of the economy to the state, above this it values ethics of action, a willingness to commit violence against its enemies, courage, and obedience to authority. It is inherently anti-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian. It will not tolerate internal rivals or dissent. It always features a leader who rules as dictator and to my knowledge has never succeeded in a stable transfer of power once that leader dies.
It has often been linked to the Romantic period as so much of fascist ideology is based on emotion, feeling, symbolic mysticism, and the irrational. It's politics can be seen as a reaction to the ultra-rational basis from which Communism claims to descend.
Your lack of understanding or stubbornness aside, if your grandfather fought actual fascists it is doubtful he defined the term.
All that is immaterial, of course, to your current incorrect claim that Fox News somehow became liberal recently, which I can only assume is established in your view by the idea that Trump presently dislikes them.
You posted the same thing (almost word for word) five posts upthread. Just repeating yourself is not a convincing argument. It might be a decent propaganda technique, but it's a lousy argument.
OK, to those who downvoted the parent: I understand the temptation to downvote everything someone says when you disagree strongly with them on some point, but there is nothing in the parent post that deserves your downvotes. Downvote the post; not the person.
It's attractive to ignore it because "reality has a well-known liberal bias". Politics are not created equal. Conservatives are observably less educated than liberals: look at the demographics.
That said, any bias (including corporate influence) is worse than an agnostic information reporting machine (which C-SPAN or the BBC approach best).
Education is indeed becoming the dividing line between left and right all over the world. Sadly, it is because the scope of "education" has been expanded to include subjects with no intellectual content.
Mhm, there have always been soft sciences (sorry MBAs).
I agree that education is becoming a major dividing line, but in my opinion that's because the "left" is moving towards elitism, whereas the "right" is slowly embracing populism. "Only dummies vote for the others" is just a snobby way of saying "we lost the working class".
That line summarizing the article you linked isn't inaccurate but left out some big chunks of logic. Just to clarify the article outlines that Fox News was created to prevent something like what Nixon did ever having a disastrous effect on the party - rather than preventing what Nixon did.
Sorry, yes, I wrote my comment quickly and poorly. It was created to enable GOP politicians to behave like Nixon while avoiding the accountability to the truth that Nixon was forced to face.
> Fox (however detestable you may find it) was created as an alternative to the corporate media hegemony on thought
No, it wasn't. First, because it's part of the corporate media created by what was already a media megacorp, so at best it might participate in the corporate media hegemony on thought, not provide an alternative.
Fox was created by a Republican operative (Roger Ailes) for the purpose of getting Republicans elected to office, financed by Rupert Murdoch, one of the most powerful news executives in the English-speaking world.
No, it was created to make a fantasy land bubble for insane conspiracy theorists and extremist right wingers. It did its job and normalized those things for the entire GOP.
edit: downvotes with no response is really weak, especially given what we see going on in the world today which completely backs up my point.
It has certainly morphed into this - but it wasn't precisely created for this reason. It was created as a place where GOP party lines could be broadcast clearly when other news outlets were focusing on negative facets of GOP actions. This does align pretty closely with your description of a fantasy land bubble, that's pretty apt - but the conspiracy theory stuff is a more recent development.
I do think it's fair to describe fox as openly embracing conspiracy theories - the first really big example for me was how they popularized "the caravan" for months.
Yeah, I definitely agree with this. The corporate media is a hive mind of sorts, and look at the unhinged hysteria presented on CNN. I'm definitely not a fan of FOX, but during the Presidential debate, their panel contained two Biden supporters, two Trump supporters, and two never-Trumpers. That diversity of opinion was lacking on all of the other major networks.
I think we're seeing a sort of religious phenomenon here in regards to the corporate media. They're pushing narratives everyone know are untrue, but no-one can come out and say it publicly due to the religiosity of the mob.
