Censorship Series Part 2: The People Who Want To Get Rid Of Fox News Need to Look At Themselves in the Mirror

 

I have always thought that the real destruction of journalism as a public service came when CNN was launched in 1980. The creation of a twenty-four hour news network was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.

Can we honestly say that at any time the world was crying out for a 24 hour news network? The idea operates on so many faulty assumptions. First the idea that anyone’s first choice if they had free time would be to say: “Oh nothing’s on, I think I’ll watch the news.” If you’re watching cable news at 3:30 AM, it’s never voluntary; you’re either in a hospital waiting room where the TV channel can be changed or you have insomnia and you can’t find a decent movie or TV show to watch at that hour. I’ve made multiple arguments that anyone’s interest in world events is relative to the amount of free time they will devote to it; so no one was ever going to watch CNN for more than an hour or two at a time even when it was the only gig in town.

In fact, there’s an argument that CNN did more to hurt TV journalism than it has done to help it. Before the existence of the 24 hour news network, the broadcast networks were more willing to devote vast amounts of time in the day and night to public events. Political conventions were covered from gavel to gavel; Congressional hearings were covered by major networks from McCarthy to Watergate, and even minor Presidential Addresses were the cause of all broadcasts interrupting their programming. With the arrival of CNN, there has been a slow but steady reduction of the among of major political or global events that the media will cover. Primary nights used to be covered as much by broadcast networks as cable networks; now not even Super Tuesday can cause network TV to break away from coverage of it. Supreme Court confirmations received minute by minute coverage as late as the era of Clarence Thomas; Ketanji Jackson Brown’s wasn’t even acknowledged. Some Americans were outraged when the 1/6 Commission Congressional hearings opening and closing sessions were the only covered by network TV. I was surprised that they gave them that much time. Hell, when Osama Bin Laden’s being killed was announced, I imagined there were more than a few network heads upset that they had to postpone that night’s episode of Desperate Housewives. CNN and its ilk have basically allowed network journalism to disappear as a major force.

And it’s not like I’m thrilled with the events they choose to cover. Almost every twenty-four news network, when its not covering politics, is covering violence. I have thought for a very long time that one of the major factors in so many mass shootings over the last twenty-five to thirty years has as much to do with the excessive media coverage of each shooting as it does the availability of guns. Think about it: there has now been an entire generation of Americans who grew up watching news networks give hours and hours of coverage every time there was a mass shooting anywhere. They go into every detail of the carnage that was created; they spend hours and then days afterwards analyzing every aspect of the shooters motives and why they did what they did. These figures then become media sensations in the sense of a word every time there’s another shooting. For over a quarter of a century anyone who watches enough television learns that you can be famous for killing a lot of people as much as anything else. America is a nation where celebrity has always trumped everything else and everyone’s desperate to be famous, no matter what the reason. The media – not just the 24 hour news networks but all of them – are accomplices in this.

I’m not, for the record, the only person who thinks this. Roger Ebert, in the aftermath of Columbine, was interviewed by a journalist who wanted to ask him if a movie such as The Basketball Diaries, which famously involves a mass shooting was the cause of such violence. Ebert argued that a greater lesson that these shooters were learning was from the media’s excessive coverage of them. The reporter listened, thanked him for his time, and never used his interview. They found plenty of people who would say violence in the movies in the problem and plenty of people who said guns were. Perhaps there were people who blamed the media, but they will never appear on it. The media will do anything but look into its own camera.

The other problem with a twenty-four news network is, of course, there isn’t twenty-four hours in a given day. So the networks have to fill it. And they filled it with punditry, commentary, gossip, and things that aren’t news. To be clear, many print journalists called them out on this and said they were filling their stories with sensationalism. They were, of course, just jealous.

As I’ve mentioned before, journalism is a business. Print journalism is a business that was always more about scandal, violence and political opinions – news just occasionally happened. The term ‘yellow journalism’ was created at the turn of the 20^th century to refers to the scandals that rival newspaper owners William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were doing to sell more papers in their city. The only reason the Pulitzer Prize exists is because Joseph Pulitzer founded a school for journalism at Columbia, perhaps out of some kind of guilt. I seriously doubt that anyone who wants to win a Pulitzer today knows the kind of reporting he allowed at his papers, or even the ones he actually ran. Odd that the  New York Times doesn’t mention that fact when they announced they’ve won their most recent Pulitzer.

And to be clear the biggest thing the twenty-four news network did was create opportunity – for good journalists to go to cable news. As well as people who weren’t qualified to work on networks, people who had no attachment to journalism, writers, political theorists, the so-called talking heads. This brings me to Fox News.

Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch may be loathsome human beings but as much as some people want to blame them for destroying journalism, I’d make the argument all that they did was reveal what it really was: a business. Ailes and Murdoch had a very clear business model in mind, as both the book and the limited series The Loudest Voice made clear: they were going to create ‘a vision of the world as it is and how they want it to be. We do that, they will never change the channel.”

Now let’s be honest: almost every basic cable network was originally designed to a specific demographic: BET, Lifetime, Animal Planet, Syfy, TCM, all of them are marketing to a very specific audience and none of them have fundamentally changed their mission statement since their founding. Ailes and Murdoch basically did this same thing for conservative news.

And just as I spent a lot of time and energy reminded all of you about Hollywood, journalism is a business too. No one goes into reporting only to live on prizes and praises from awards, they want to make a living from it. Print journalism’s demise didn’t start with cable news or even TV news; individual and local papers had been collapsing for decades as industry took over. In the last season of The Wire David Simon argued about the death of the newspaper as part of the cause of the deterioration of society. The problem is the newspaper had been dying long before he got there, and it never been about exposing society’s problems. It was about making money. The truth has always been incidental.

I think the real reason that so many progressives have spent decades raging against Fox News has nothing to do with the content and much more to the fact that its such a success. I also point out  (as I did in an article I wrote earlier this year) this success is only part of the bubble that cable news is a part of. On Tuesday nights the past six years, twice as many people were watching This is Us than Hannity at 9:00 pm. More people watched Shondaland during the 2010s on Thursday then the entire Fox News lineup during that hour. And I’m pretty sure if Desperate Housewives had aired on that Sunday night in April, more people would have watched in that if only cable had been covering Obama’s speech on Bin Laden. Cable news has always been a percentage of the total TV audience viewing, little more than four to five percent -at most – of the entire audience of a given day. A small percentage of American’s relatively speaking are watching Fox News on a weekly or even a daily basis. A part of me wonders how large a group of that are  progressives, pundits, and those ‘bastions of journalism integrity.’  Hate-watching has been a thing for a lot of TV viewers, and there’s no reason they should be any different.

The fact that so many of these people are worked up about says more about them then the people that Fox News is aimed to. I’ve known for awhile that those same progressive who preach about the first amendment fundamentally believe it should not apply to people they disagree with. They are outraged that Fox News exists (I’ll get to that in a bit) but they’ve made it very clear that if a Republican elected official appears on Anderson Cooper or Meet the Press, if they publish an article in the New York Times or The Washington Post, really if they have an opinion in the media anywhere these outlets are tainted because they are ‘promoting their agenda.’ In a way I think  many of these people  don’t actually mind that the Fairness Doctrine was repealed: they don’t accept differing opinions any more than they accuse the right of.

And in their minds, its not enough that they don’t have to watch Fox News; no one else can. Its existence is abhorrent to them. That is why progressive sites will send out memos urging you to petition your cable service not to carry Fox News or to find cable systems that don’t carry it. Why should you’re precious liberal cable station have to share space with a channel that those people watch? As Abraham Lincoln  said, “freedom of the press must have restrictions.” (Actually that was the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia in 1999, a country that has been ranked as a flawed democracy by the United Nations for the better part of 20 years, but it’s not like most leftists would care if could take a swing at a dead, white man.)

In that sense, much of the coverage of Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News that has consumed so much of the media’s attention over the last several months has been framed in terms of a battle over freedom of the press and saving democracy rather than what it was: a corporate lawsuit. The fact that Dominion was charging defamation because of what had appeared on Fox News for much of the leadup to the 2020 election and beyond that does give significance to it beyond the usual corporate lawsuit, I will admit. But the fact is, almost all of these kinds of lawsuits do end up settling before reaching a verdict, and it was almost certainly inevitable to do so in this case. However, during the past few months those same talking heads, and political pundits have fundamentally been ignoring this reality and have almost entirely ignored a lot of critical facts:

1.       Dominion did not sue to save the Republic or lodge a victory form freedom of the press. They it did to try and save their company. The best way to do so was a massive cash infusion to their coffers. This might have been more than money to all the talking heads; it wasn’t for Dominion.

2.      Defamation cases are extremely hard to prove and have been ever since a 1964 precedent. Yes, the fact that Fox failed to dismiss it on summary judgment was a big thing in that sense, as well as that Dominion almost seemed to win on summary judgment. But once the case went to trial, the edge automatically went back to Fox News. Would proving their case have been harder based on all the transcripts and depositions we’ve already heard? Probably. But it does not change the fact that Fox News is a multi-billion dollar corporation. If they lost the case, they have more than enough money to drag this out in every court in the land, and there is no guarantee that an appeal judge or any other court might decide that the precedent had not been violated.

3.      This case would never have bankrupted Fox News. Even the most openly progressive website would never go that far. They will acknowledge that the $1.2 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to Fox’s annual revenue. However the process could far more easily have bankrupted dominion. There’s no guarantee that even if they won every appeal and the courts upheld the verdict, they would receive the full amount. And the longer the process took, the more precarious their financial position would be.

4.      Even if all of this information were revealed in court, it is highly unlikely this would change many minds regardless. I often wonder what those Progressives salivating for a trial really hoped would be the desire outcome. Were they hoping that Dominion’s attorney, a la Perry Mason, would trick Rupert Murdoch to confessing in front of a televised audience that they had knowingly committed an act of fraud. We’ve essentially got transcripts saying as much on the public record. Did they honestly think the average person who has been watching Fox News for decades would see this trial, say to themselves: “Oh my God! I’ve been lied to all my life!” and stop watching Fox. Not even they will go that far; in many of columns berating the settlement, they seem pretty sure that the viewer would just as likely to go to a rival network such as Newsmax.

So why are so many people on the left and in the media outraged by this? One word: schadenfreude. They wanted the trial to go on for weeks, possibly months, and see all of the Fox commentators, executives, possibly Murdoch themselves going in and out of a courtroom, not answering questions surrounding by a sea of attorneys. They wanted cameras on them, looking like mob bosses, speaking in diminished term, acknowledging what they said in text as real, or acting like mob bosses and saying: “Not that I recall” over and over again. They wanted an onscreen apology, not because they thought it would change any minds, but because they wanted a public shaming. The idea that Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity saying this onscreen would make a difference to the viewer – or for that matter, to Dominion – didn’t matter. They wanted to see them publicly humiliated.

And by seeing Fox News carried out into the media equivalent of the town square would make them feel good about themselves and ignore something very vital. And to make this clear, I now want to address all of the media, the punditry, the leftist blogs and basically anybody upset by this settlement:

Fox News did not create this circus. If there’s someone you should blame for this, it really is Ted Turner who created the 24-hour news cycle. You want to say that Fox News has been responsible for the destruction of journalism and politics as you know it? It’s not as you know it; its as you want it to be.

To be clear, I hold all of you as responsible for the state of our country as you say Fox News is. You want to say Fox News has been making money and indoctrinating its viewers on false outrage? What do you really think you’ve been doing every time you run coverage of Fox News or try to fundraise on the most outrageous comments by its reporters or try to get it canceled? You’re essentially saying that their outrage is false, and yours is real. End of the day, you’re both trying to capitalize on it as a business model.

To be clear, you all have biases the same as every Fox News commentator and viewers does. I’ll go into this in a separate article but don’t pretend that you don’t have one and you’re try to both weaponize and make money of it. All of you – every progressive who has raged against Fox News, every commentator who has rerun Fox News Commentary to point out ‘misguided’ it is, every one who writes an article, think piece or goes on TV to argue against Fox News – you’re not doing this out of altruism or some magical concept of ethics. You’re trying to make a living on this the same as they are. You’ll never say as much, either in public or private, because its good for business.

I’m not the only person who’s pointed that out. For the better part of a decade Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert went out of the way to point out exactly what all of you in this media-industrial complex are doing. They were sounding the warning bells long before the arrival of Donald Trump about just how much not only Fox News, but your precious CNN and MSNBC were doing to wreck journalism, democracy and all those principles you good liberal people will claim you support. The Daily Show spent years mocking everything you and your ilk stand for, and Stewart ended up getting the name ‘The Most Trusted Name in News’ first as a joke, then by default. And rather than accept this as the message it was, some of you made him ‘part of the mainstream media’ and the rest of you played along because you thought it more entertaining to be part of the joke rather than actually listen to what he was saying.

You want to blame Fox News, the conservatives and the right-wing media apparatus for destroying your beloved institutions? Go right ahead. You will anyway. The fact that you’re following what amounts to Roger Ailes’ business model is an irony that you will neither recognize or accept. Hypocrisy has always been a bipartisan affair and don’t pretend that the media has ever been innocent of it.

The question is, what can we do? Well, I have two solutions: my approach and a variation that’s basically one I heard on a fictional TV show. Neither is easy, but since the media has advocated its responsibility, we have to do the work ourselves.

Ever since I moved into my own apartment nearly two years ago, with the exception of last year’s midterms, I have not watched any cable news. Even on the night of the midterms, I spent more time on the broadcast networks and only continued to watch cable as I waited for the remainder of the results. I know that I have networks like Newsnation and Newsmax, but I don’t know what channels they are, nor am I likely to look.

I spent a lot of time the previous decade watching cable news, and honestly I find my life richer for its absence. I’ve always thought cable news has been little more than noise, and I don’t miss it.

So how do I get my information? I read newspapers and magazines, both online  and – gasp -print. When I look at article online, I note who the author is and I google both them and if the source isn’t clear, the publication they write for. Wikipedia will often tell you what you need to know in a few lines. I also do research on so many of the sources for polls to know about their bias – which really prepared me for the results of last year’s midterms.

I realize this is a lot of work to some, and I can’t pretend that everyone has the same devotion to it. But if the media is going to advocate it’s role, sadly, it is up to the average citizen.

This brings me, not coincidentally, to an argument that Tom Fontana made on OZ more than twenty years ago about the media. It was a different era then – the episode aired before 9/11 – and his discussion of it was focused on broadcast networks, not cable. But the principle is still true:

Augustus Hill went through a long discussion of how he loved how the three major networks would all cover the same story on the same night and he would channel chase between all of them. His conclusion was simple: “I figure if I watch all of them, maybe, I might get some tiny sliver of the truth.” That argument was dead on in 2001, it’s more accurate to day.

So for all of you, don’t get all your news from one source. Look at every version, not just the channels or publications you like, but the ones you don’t like or trust. And always remember at the end of the day, everybody has some kind of bias. It has nothing to do with political views or racial or gender; it has to do with that nobody’s version of events is exactly the same.

Everyone has an agenda. I’ve made that argument against many columnists on this blog, and I’m not going to say I’m any different. I don’t think that I get any benefit from telling people to do their homework and research themselves – it’s not sexy and it doesn’t lend itself to clickbait – but perhaps there’s one I can’t see. I’m a human being and I have a bias. We all do. Perhaps the best way to fix the broken system is for us to get as many different biased versions of events and try and figure out what the truth is. I wish it were easier, but to quote a man who was once considered ‘The Most Trusted Man In News,’ that’s the way it is.