The Deep Archeology of Fox News
............
What we see today in Fox News is most of the story: a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. What has always been the tell about Fox News is the tagline and motto: fair and balanced. The operation’s very branding is an aggressive bit of trolling. An unabashedly partisan and ideological operation selling itself under the heading of “fair and balanced.” It’s less a lie than a knowing taunt.
Here we get to the nub of the issue. Because this is not the entirety of the story. One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against, the history that in Bill Buckley’s famous phrase he was standing athwart and yelling “Stop!” None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.
So how do we get from this elemental misunderstanding to the raw and casual lying of the Fox of today? Well, that’s the thing: we don’t. Both were there from the very start. It’s all but impossible to disentangle the culture clash, the inability and refusal to really grasp what these institutions were, and the more open culture of propaganda, lying and mendacity. They’re fused together so tightly that getting your head around the relationship between them is more a matter of meditative absorption than anything that can be processed or explained discursively.
One further nugget brings the story nearer to our time from the distant past of the early Cold War and the origins of modern conservatism. Today we know Tucker Carlson as the preppy boyishly middle aged white nationalist who is the current center of gravity to Fox News. But that wasn’t always his public presentation. Always a conservative, his younger incarnation held an air of ironic and quasi-urbane detachment from full wingnut intensity. Back in February 2009, in a moment of mid-career identity crisis, he gave a speech at CPAC which bundled together much of what we’re discussing here. The fact that no one took conservative news organizations and journalists seriously, he told the crowd, wasn’t a matter of liberal bias or anything about the establishment. It was because they weren’t really journalists. Needless to say, he wasn’t speaking to a terribly receptive audience. “If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail,” he said. “The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it is also…a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.”
MORE:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-deep-archeology-of-fox-news
Link to tweet
?s=20
