Fox Is News, Bad News

[Joanne98]

For OpEdNews: David Swanson - Writer

As someone who believes the producers of Fox News should be behind bars for promoting illegal wars and instigating domestic violence, and as someone who advocates never watching it, I feel compelled to speak up against the notion that Fox News is not a news outlet.

Now, Fox News does little investigative reporting. Mostly it chitters and chatters and re-processes. Nor does it stick with reliable information. It intentionally lies and distorts. It also screams and yells, demonizes and infantilizes. But these behaviors just make Fox News a small-time and untrustworthy news outlet that degrades the content and the form of our public discourse. These are not the reasons being widely offered for the declaration that Fox is not a news outlet at all.

To make that claim, we are being told that Fox News has an agenda and engages in activism. But every news outlet has an agenda, and I would like nothing more than to see the better ones engage in activism. Fox is owned by an international corporation, and generates xenophobic rallies against "socialistic fascism." This raises serious questions of foreign interference in our politics as well as pathetic ironies and sad hilarities. But, the central objection seems to be that Fox News has a right-wing agenda opposed by most Americans. That is true enough, and I almost always oppose Fox's agenda quite passionately. That more majoritarian agendas are not advanced by any major television networks is a severe defect in our system, not evidence of what constitutes real news.


The non-Fox television networks that we do have, with a few satellite, cable, and online exceptions, have agendas that are not terribly far removed from that of Fox. When Fox tells you to go out and rally against healthcare and explains what votes are coming up in Congress, it is doing something MORE democratic than what ABC News does when it reports on Congressional votes after the fact, explains them from the same corporate viewpoint as Fox, and makes clear that citizens are in no way involved in the process.

One of the best summaries of the "Fox is not news" argument is found in Adele Stan's "8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization" on Alternet. This is an intelligent argument from a talented writer on an excellent news site. But it is a news site with an agenda and a great deal of admirable and beneficial advocacy of activism. And I wouldn't want it any other way. Stan writes:

"Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda . . . ."

CNN and MSNBC don't have ideological agendas? Surely that's not seriously what's being claimed here. These news outlets oppose healthcare favored by most Americans, back wars opposed by most Americans, and generally advance a minority corporate agenda on a wide range of issues. MSNBC has begun including a few talking heads who sometimes stray from its overall agenda, but they are distinctly labeled as doing so, whereas most MSNBC reporting advances the same agenda as always, and under the obscuring banner of "objectivity" and the powerful pretense of no point of view at all. Thankfully, Alternet itself has quite a good agenda and provides a far better service to our nation than MSNBC or CNN. The accuracy of its reporting does not seem to be in any way put in doubt by its activism.

"Fox News Channel," Stan writes, "is anything but a news operation." Instead it's "a massive media campaign for the consolidation of wealth through unfettered markets." Of course Fox could be both of those things, but it isn't. It wants the markets very much fettered to the advantage of mega-corporate interests and against the rest of us. That does not, however, prevent its being a news organization, any more than the Nation Magazine's preference for socialistic solutions (a preference I share) prevents it from reporting news.

The "Fox is not news" campaign criticizes Fox for, in Stan's words, "declaring war" on President Obama. But I don't recall Alternet objecting to Keith Olbermann's rants against President Bush on MSNBC. What has happened is not that Fox has ceased to report news. What has happened is that Fox has begun criticizing a president in a way that most of the corporate media refuses to ever criticize any president, and a way that progressive media outlets are happy to criticize only Republican presidents. Now, Alternet has published criticism of Obama, including some written by me. And Fox New's fantastic racist falsehoods are not something I want to see emulated. But the general notion -- which, following the Bush-Cheney years, ought to be absurd on its face -- that a media outlet disqualifies itself by criticizing a president, is as much a function of the partisan loyalties of those diagnosing Fox's status as it is of Fox itself.

Here are excerpts from Stan's eight reasons that Fox News is not news:

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/Fox-Is-News-Bad-News-by-David-Swanson-091027-47.html