Fox News is not for Journalists

On the heels of a South Park episode mocking Glenn Beck, I have decided to look a little further at Fox News, and why people continually watch it and believe it to be a credible "news" source.

South Park just might be the greatest form of satire this generation has. Mark Twain would be proud. The latest episode, which aired Wednesday, Nov. 11, depicted Eric Cartman, the show's not-so-lovable loud mouth, as the newest reader of the morning announcements in South Park Elementary.

Cartman soon takes his position to the extreme and begins "asking questions," as he puts it, of the administration, especially Wendy Testeburger, the student body presidents. The parallels to Glenn Beck and President Obama are unmistakable, especially when Cartman opts to broadcast the morning announcements over TV, complete with rockin' intro music, an EC logo in the style of Beck's GB logo, and the infamous chalkboard.

Beck's response can be heard here, from his radio show:




The full episode can be viewed for free here, courtesy southparkstudios.com:

The issue at hand here is multi-layered, and I will do my best to describe each one.

First off, Beck finds it complementary to be made fun of on South Park. While it's true that South Park has made fun of some famous people in the past, anywhere from Phil Collins to Jesus himself, Beck misses the point. They are making fun of these people because they believe what they are doing is wrong. (If you don't believe it, watch Team America, in which a slew of movie stars from the Screen Actors Guild are killed in malicious and hilarious fashion.) It's satire, not a humorous jest or mere poking fun. Satire is defined as using humor to reveal the fallacies and falsehoods of some institution, belief, person, etc.

Second off, Fox News, by namesake, should be a news corporation. But in modern times, where new media dominate our lives, news has taken the backseat to entertainment, spoof and fluff. The entirety of Fox's primetime line up - Beck, Sean Hannity, Fox and Friends, Bill O'Reilly, etc. - is not news. It's punditry. It's entertainment.

That's not only my opinion, but it was stated by Fox news officials. The hours of programming they consider "News" are 9am-4p.m. and 6p.m.-8p.m. And the rest? Well, people certainly know when something is opinion and something is actual, legitimate, researched, sourced News, right? (Watch this clip of The Daily Show that covers this.)

According to the novel American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media, they don't.

"Shortly after the 2004 presidential election, the University of Maryland reported in a survey that more than 70 percent of those who voted for George W. Bush in the November 2004 elections believed wrongly that the administration had found proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. These same voters believed wrongly that world opinion supported the American invasion of Iraq. These voters also were convinced that Saddam Hussein's regime had a direct link to al-Qaeda terrorists and the 9/11 attack on America, despite all official evidence and widespread news coverage to the contrary on each point. This poll showed that millions of these voters relied heavily on Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, as their chief source for news and information...

The researchers reported that viewers of Fox, today the nation's most highly rated news channel and the news source most closely aligned with Republican Party interests, were nearly four times as likely to hold demonstrably untrue views about the circumstances surrounding the war in Iraq as Americans who relied instead on National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)" (41-42) (emphasis added).

Another survey took place in the spring of 2005. 1500 adults were surveyed and of those polled, 27 percent considered Rush Limbaugh a journalist, and an even higher 44 percent considered Mr. O'Reilly a journalist.

The point isn't that Limbaugh, O'Reilly and the likes claim to be journalists. I don't think they necessarily do. But, they certainly don't argue it when people say they are.

Again from American Carnival:

"Limbaugh reacted by saying he was 'not surprised' by the findings and claimed that it reflected the public disenchantment with the performance of traditional media" (266, footnote 72).

The issue, I'm afraid, isn't the public's "disenchantment" with traditional media, but rather, their inability to discern between what is JOURNALISM and what is ENTERTAINMENT/OPINION.

It is frustrating to think that there are people out there so uneducated that they believe Fox News is just looking out for the little guy, that they are "fair and balanced," when they couldn't be any further from it, and that they are "news." Fox is not news. It is a charade.

"To the average American citizen, a Journalist is the television talker who is paid a considerable retainer to regularly make noise on cable news programs, arguing any questions of the day regardless of whether he or she knows anything about the topic or not. The figure who hosts the show is a Journalist, too, paid a high salary not to seek out and report the news but to entertain an audience with a certain glibness and an argumentative personality" (American Carnival, 55) (emphasis added).

Some analysts on Fox argued that Obama's administration, by attacking Fox News, is inhibiting "freedom of the press" (here, I quote a clip from the Daily Show). It's hard to attack "freedom of the press" when Fox News can hardly call themselves "the press."

I refuse to argue that MSNBC does the same thing as Fox. Not because MSNBC isn't biased. It is. Not because I agree with MSNBC, which I do generally. But rather because, MSNBC acts as an editorial. They present journalistic fact, and follow up with their opinion (typically from the left). Fox does not operate under the standards of journalistic editorial. Instead, they act the same as any random 13-year-old with a blog and a poor attitude - ranting, raving and with no remorse or responsibility for what they say.

To paraphrase both Beck and O'Reilly, they refuse to honor certain points or answer honest questions because those asking the questions are "pinheads."

This doesn't create a center for debate. Instead, it gives whoever has the microphone thirty minutes or an hour to simply say whatever they want, and those naive people watching, those a part of the percentages listed above, believe it to be "News."

To tie it back to South Park, you don't have to listen to Beck because he has a microphone. He's just a guy with a microphone (and a stupid chalk board) who thinks he's doing America a favor by just "asking questions," when in reality, Americans need to be the ones asking the questions of all entertainment "journalists."