Altercation: MSM Discovers Fox 'News' Isn't News
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Altercation: MSM Discovers Fox ‘News’ Isn’t News
Only 25 years after it became obvious
by Eric Alterman
December 17, 2021
On the PBS NewsHour Tuesday night, anchor Judy Woodruff and NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik discussed the recent text messages sent by Fox News hosts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the January 6 violent insurrection. Woodruff wondered whether “in terms of what we knew about—we have known in the past they have spoken favorably of a former President Trump for years. But does this take it to a different level, do you think?” Folkenflik added, “And so I think that what you have here is a question of Fox News having that word ‘news’ appended to its name, but not operating like a news operation.”
I’ve been writing about Fox News since it first began broadcasting 25 years ago. The first story I remember had to do with the fact that New York’s then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, at the behest of Roger Ailes, used the power of his office to force Time Warner Cable to carry Fox in New York. It had originally been left off the dial and could not likely have survived without that market. That gives you a clue that maybe it was not a typical “news” station from moment one.
Those clues have been mounting on a daily basis ever since. I can’t count the number of times I’ve felt compelled, in different fora, to argue that what Fox does is not and has never been “news.” I think my clearest statement of this fact, and of the problem that everybody pretended that this was not case, came in a “Think Again” column I wrote in 2010 on the website of the Center for American Progress. The piece, headlined “Just What Exactly Is Fox News?” began with this:
This is a mistake. Fox is something new—something for which we do not yet have a word. It provides almost no actual journalism. Instead, it gives ideological guidance to the Republican Party and millions of its supporters, attacking its opponents and keeping its supporters in line. And it does so at a hefty profit, thereby turning itself into the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
snip//
I can’t bear at this point to list all the times I’ve tried to make the point that “‘real’ journalists debase themselves and their profession by participating in the destructive and debilitating charade” of treating Fox “journalists” as their colleagues. Readers might recall that, at one point, the Obama administration tried to address Fox’s dishonesty by barring its officials from appearing on Fox’s Sunday shows. The administration was attacked—and Fox defended—by the likes of CNN’s Jake Tapper, and The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik, with assists from Maggie Haberman, the Times’ White House correspondent, NBC’s Jonathan Allen, the Associated Press’s Zeke Miller, and Politico’s Jack Shafer, and sadly, many, many others; thereby helping to enable Fox’s lies, and with them the systematic destruction of our democracy and our planet.
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https://prospect.org/politics/altercation-msm-discovers-fox-news-isnt-news/
= new reply since forum marked as read
"maybe Fox is biased to the right, but liberals have every other channel on their side". 
but they're convinced (I wonder where they got this idea from?) every news channel but Fox ( they never talk about Sinclair, Newsmax or OAN) is ultra-liberal and turning the country into communists.
I guess that's how they come to grips with Sinclair, Fox, Newsmax, OAN, etc. and their fascist joyride toward autocracy. We're all "communists" from watching CNN or MSNBC. 
Just because we prefer facts and truth over opinions.
Response to babylonsister (Original post)
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