Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?

[mirrera]

By Howell Raines
Sunday, March 14, 2010

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

Fox repeats this as gospel. But as a matter of historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News, this assertion ranks somewhere between debatable and untrue.


more at link:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010031102523.html

[CC]

1. Some do, have you not seen

Olbermann or Madow? Course then Fox and the media followers try pegging them and MSNBC as being as bad as Fox but only to the left which is pure bullshit. Or they minimize it to a personnel conflict between two TV talking heads. The real sad thing is there are so few real journalist out that at all. Now most are talking heads that read whatever they are told to read.

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. In a field where jobs are drying up...

...why shoot holes in your lifeboat, to mix metaphors?

[Cirque du So-What]

3. I spotted an old, bearded man carrying a lantern

Went by the name of Diogenes. He said he was on a quest for an honest journalist; he looked awfully fatigued and discouraged.