No doubt about it, Fox News is the ratings winner, day after day, night after night, and week after week. One of its top-rated shows (if not the top-rated show), The O'Reilly Factor, draws among the largest audiences by far. Although Fox News claims to be "fair and balanced" and says "we report you decide"to anyone who will listen, Fox News offers a wide-range of right-centric pundits and hyper-conservative talking heads.
Its guests are right-focused and its spin is right-focused. Its one token lefty, Alan Colms, left Sean Hannity's show years ago, and even Colms knew he wasn't a Liberal.
Indeed, the right-focused Fox News is the heavy-weight contender in the prime-time ring, and it wins round after round by pounding down its non-right rivals with huge ratings wins.
Yet Fox News claims to be a lightweight, to not have the influence of what it perceives as "the media," the real media, the left-aligned media. It's as if Fox News somehow feels it's unable to have its voice heard because the pervasive, omnipresent, left-aligned "media" is speaking louder.
Sure it is.
So the questions are... is "the media" not anyone or anything that offers glimpses into the news of the day, the current events and topics that affect us, affect and effect our opinions, and influence both? And, therefore, is Fox News not part of the media?
The answers are yes and yes.
And so, by any definition, Fox News is part of the media, but to hear Fox News folks tell it, "the media" is always liberal and left, and Fox News has no place being lumped in with anything that's not right of center (i.e., not the media).
Yup. Fox News blaming "the media" for its bias is akin to a bass blaming a bluegill for peeing in the pond.
If only Fox News, et al., could accept this simple truth: some parts of "the media" have a left-to-Liberal bias and other parts of "the media," including Fox News, have a right-to-Conservative bias.
But this is how Fox News sees it: "The media" = left, Liberal, biased; Fox News = the truth.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
And they all have a corporate bias, unless they are non-profits. This has been the case for so long that I'm pretty sure most people can't see the corporate bias in media any longer. Major media delivers a very narrow range of opinion, most folks just don't realize it.
FOX does indeed play the poor underdog role up to their huge audience as you say, but to use a publishing analogy - Harlequin Romance publishes more books than anyone in the world, that doesn't make them literature.
I prefer to think of FOX the way I do junk food. Some people find it tasty but it has no nutritional value and too much will harm your (mental) health.
Post a Comment