On the Contrary

We all have seen the news about the Administration calling Fox News what it is, a political arm of the Republican Party.  Last week the Administration put their new executive pay czar out for interviews, and because they didn’t recognize Fox as a news organization anymore, did not invite them.  The other networks objected and the Administration relented.  I guess their thinking was that if you can ostracize one news organization based upon its reporting, then you can control the media.  It is flawed logic and like when they totally failed us on WMD, they are making a very similar error here.

Now as the arguments go, the thought is that all the networks have their opinion shows and so what is the big deal, other than Fox is more anti-Administration than the rest.  If this were true, then the other media outlets that supported Fox in this tiff with the Administration would be correct in their stand against the Administration.  But that is not how Fox operates.  Fox has taken a page from Dick Cheney when he manipulated the press so successfully on WMD.

What Dick did was to leak a piece of intelligence that was false (yellow cake uranium) to the press, and then in interviews cite the source, say the New York Times, to say that reliable sources have identified this threat.  In effect he was creating a false rumor and then using it to manipulate the media into echoing this falsehood.  This is exactly how Fox operates.  Their nut-jobs like Beck or Limbaugh make some outrageous claim and then it is a running story on the real “news” shows all day on Fox.  This along with the documented instances where the news was a direct quote from Republican talking points, and the fact the network actively engages in fund raising and organizing to remove this administration certainly pushes them out of the category of a news organization and into the category of a propaganda arm for a political organization.

As I have chronicled in the past, most of the news media out there is deplorable with their failure to fact check their guest’s claims and allowing their statements to stand unchallenged.  But that is simply bad journalism.  But when a news organization takes a false statement and then heavily biases it with making it a running theme for the news day, interviewing only those that support these outrageous statements, it becomes propaganda.  So what the other news media outlets did in supporting Fox against the administration was not to defend access to the Administration, but for a media outlet to become a propaganda tool for a political party.  You think they would understand the difference between news and propaganda and how damaging it could be to the whole news business if this kind of propaganda passes as journalism.

You probably don’t remember when the Bush Administration ostracized Richard Engel of CNN after an interview with President Bush where he challenged many of President Bush’s statements about Iraq.  This was cited as an example of how the media must support reporters and their media owners who ask hard questions and challenge the Administration.  But there is a big difference.  Richard’s questions and challenges were based upon fact.  Much of Fox News stories turn out to be bogus or exaggerated.  So there is a big difference between taking an ethical stand where a media stands up to power with truth, and where a media continuously promulgates false information as propaganda and then is offended when access is denied.

The Administration needs to find its backbone and the rest of the news media needs to re-examine their logic and values if they don’t want to become just entertainers instead of journalists.  The Administration’s real fear is that if Fox is allowed to set the agenda on what is covered in the news, and the rest of the media follow them, real news is dead.  I agree with them.  Our country depends upon objective news to give us the facts about an issue.  If the news media becomes more and more a creature of the outlandish without real fact checking, then our media will be know as those guys who get the latest rumor to you first.  Maybe that is what they are now.

If you doubt we aren’t headed down this road think about how the balloon story that dominated the news last week.  This whole story was a hoax by a person who wanted more media coverage and the media, like deprived addicts needing a fix, fell right in line to maximize coverage.  Sooner or later they are going to have to step back and decide whether they are journalists with an extremely important role in our society, or they are part of our declining ability to think critically.  There latest stand with Fox News says to me we are headed for a train wreck.