Playing off this lovely new back-and-forth between the White House and Fox News, thought it'd be fun to muse a bit on the nature of modern media. So here goes.
The Administration's decision to call out Fox on its obvious role as a right-wing bullhorn is ultimately, I think, a good one. It's not like Fox's coverage of Obama could really be any more negative, so no downside there. Additionally, it gives the other networks a lovely new angle to attack a competitor (say, Wolf Blitzer tomorrow night: "Is our primary cable news rival actually nothing more than a partisan bullhorn? The answer may surprise you!"). It's worth examining, in light of this, two elements of Fox's existence. First, what it does to overall news coverage; second, whether it's historically all that unusual.
I think it's pretty clear what the existence of Fox as a major news outlet does to coverage: it pulls it to the right. Hell, that's pretty much its stated purpose, and the rationale cited by many of its viewers: "The media's too liberal, and there needs to be a conservative voice out there too." And were this true, I'd even be supportive of such a goal, wishy-washy fair-minded liberal that I am. But I think it's pretty clear that this isn't true, and wasn't even before Fox existed as a news outlet. When conservatives rail that the media's liberal, they generally cite as proof the overwhelmingly Eastern university-educated population of reporters and editors, the voting records of said professionals, and "the media's" attitudes on social issues.
While it's true that many of the country's most prominent reporters, anchors, and editors went to Eastern colleges, vote for Democrats, and live in places like New York, DC, and Boston, which tends to make them more amenable to things like legal abortion and equal marriage rights, making the leap to "media coverage has a liberal slant" is, um, foolish. For one thing, the Eastern colleges (j-school especially) which taught our media elite not only encourage fairness and balance, they downright fetishize it. Learning to recognize and weed out your own biases is fundamental to any serious education in journalism. Just as importantly, most (pretty much all) of these journalists work for giant corporations. Most giant corporations couldn't give two shits about social policy ("The gays can get married? Great. See about expanding the catering division."), but have a huge interest in economic policy. Specifically, in making sure their coverage encourages pro-business policies (lower taxes, lighter regulation, etc.).
Leaving us with a TV media in which there are on one side a few giant networks with an interest in fairly reporting the truth, so long as it doesn't offend the shareholders, and on the other side a network devoted to making as much noise as possible on behalf of a hard-right point of view. If this dichotomy of an excessively fairness-minded and corporate-owned majority pulled rightward by a noisy and determined minority is reminding you of a certain bicameral legislative body, there's a reason.
So this brings us to my second question; is this state of affairs particularly unusual or condemnable? For most of the history of media as we know it, it was par for the course to have newspapers act as the wholly owned subsidiaries of political interests. We all read in our high school history textbooks about the "yellow journalism" that got us into the Spanish-American War, and we're directed by said texts to shake our heads and cluck disapprovingly at Hearst's awful abuse of the public trust. (Fortunately, these textbooks taught us a valuable lesson, and we never let a small band of imperialists use the media to trick us into an unnecessary and foolish war ever again.) But that wasn't a particularly unusual use of the press at the time. What we think of as the ironclad separation between the A section and the op-ed page is a really new phenomenon. And even with our general devotion to truth and fairness above all in media, anyone living in a city with multiple papers can always tell you which one's liberal and which conservative, and has probably been able to since well before Roger Ailes decided to build a "news network."
Fox, of course, is far more blatant in their pushing of a party line, and far more nationally prominent, than just about anything we've seen since the Hearst days. So now that they've released the old partisan press genie from its prison, where do we go? MSNBC seems to be trying to follow along, marketing itself as the liberal alternative to Fox, though of course they do still have a pretty strong delineation between their news coverage and their Olbermann-Maddow primetime lineup. Also, any network that gives Joe Scarborough three hours every morning isn't exactly burning with the flames of the left.
I think the White House probably has the right outlook on this. Fox is likely here to stay, it's got enough of an audience to be profitable. But calling attention to its partisan nature can reduce its pull on the other networks. If Fox is a news network, then ratings competion and fear of being scooped will demand that CNN covers the stories that they're pushing. If it's seen as an opinion network, then it can pretty much be ignored. This doesn't fix the corporate ownership issues, of course, but that's a subject for a much longer post later on.
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