“Fair” and “Balanced”

This post is also avail­able at Leon’s new weblog!

Living in Britain, and lack­ing a cable or satel­lite con­nec­tion, I don’t get to see much of Fox News. (Maybe thank­fully.) The sta­tion has already been cen­sured by Ofcom for broad­cast­ing imflam­ma­tory mate­r­ial in the UK, but that’s noth­ing com­pared to some of its pro­gram­ming in Amer­ica. A doc­u­men­tary called Out­Foxed which inves­ti­gates the channel’s bias - not just con­ser­v­a­tive, but defi­antly par­ti­san and sup­port­ive of Bush’s admin­is­traition - might be stat­ing the obvi­ous: cor­po­rate news media favours those who pass bills which help them (no shit, Sher­lock). But what’s hor­rific about it is the way in which Fox (motto: Fair and Bal­anced) and its pre­sen­ters such as Bill O’Reilly equate any ques­tion­ing of the Republican/Neo-con agenda with unqual­i­fied sup­port for al-​Qaeda and every other filthy ter­rist stalk­ing the land (well, I say every other ter­rist; what I mean is every other ter­rist with brown skin). This clip from Out­foxed (16mb down­load; worth every minute) is an analy­sis of an inter­view by O’Reilly with Jonathan Glick, whose father, a Port Author­ity worker in Man­hat­tan, was killed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001. Apart from the fact that O’Reilly says to Glick that he’s “done more for vic­tims of 9/11 than you ever have”, apart from the fact that O’Reilly accuses Glick of saying that Bush orches­trated the attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pen­ta­gon, apart from the fact that Glick is ordered out of the studio in case O’Reilly beats the shit out of him, it’s inter­est­ing for the fact that here - on prime time tele­vi­sion - is a pre­sen­ter telling some­one whose father has just been mur­dered in a brutal attack that he has no right to speak: O’Reilly con­tin­u­ally tells Glick to “shut up” before saying “cut his mic; I’m not gonna dress you down any more” when Glick starts to talk about how the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment funded Osama bin Laden when he was part of the mujahideen in Afghanistan, fight­ing against the USSR.

Yes, Fox are an easy target, and yes, their anchors are foaming-​at-​the-​mouth nutjobs. But you know the scary thing? They’re the appar­ent anti­dote to the sup­pos­edly lib­eral media in the US. That would be the same “liberal” media which swal­lowed whole the claims of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion that Saddam Hus­sein had WMD, the “liberal” media which swal­lowed whole the lies ped­dled by a pos­si­ble Iran­ian agent in order to invade Iraq.

Once again, it’s not like this is any­thing approach­ing a sur­prise. But it’s worth reflect­ing on just how vit­ri­olic Fox is when it comes to main­tain­ing the Bush status quo; can you imag­ine some­one like Jeremy Paxman or Nicholas Witchell telling the griev­ing son of a ter­ror­ist bomb­ing that they’re not qual­i­fied to speak about the fact that the IRA killed their father?

Posted at 9pm on 20/07/04 by Leon McDermott to the news category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us
Tags: news, politics