Please Lie to Me, Tucker

[brooklynite]

The Bulwark

ike most conservatives, I initially welcomed Fox News to the airwaves. A media world that included Jennifer Griffin at the Pentagon, Neal Cavuto on Wall Street, and Charles Krauthammer every evening on Special Report was an overdue counterbalance. An enormous audience had been underserved, and Fox was able to exploit an opening.

But then things went sideways. While we can’t say the Fox News effect was entirely responsible—talk radio too played a role, as did social media—it started to become evident during the Obama years that the right’s impatience with press bias had curdled into something more ominous. Instead of seeking to fact check and balance coverage, Republican and conservative audiences demanded combat. Newt Gingrich turbocharged his anemic presidential campaign in 2011 by using the primary debates not as an opportunity to draw contrasts with his opponents but as a forum for attacking the press. When Politico’s John Harris asked Gingrich about a philosophical dispute regarding health insurance, Gingrich wheeled on him:

I hope all of my friends up here are going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other to protect Barack Obama, who deserves to be defeated, and all of us are committed as a team—whoever the nominee is—we are for defeating Barack Obama.

The crowd vibrated with pleasure, and the belligerent seed that would later bloom into Donald Trump’s war on truth itself was planted.

The revelations in the Dominion Voting Systems legal filings demonstrate the full corruption of Fox News. The channel that debuted with the tagline “fair and balanced” has become completely untethered to any standard of integrity. Its own bias bears no comparison to that of the “mainstream media.” CNN, ABC, and USA Today have their flaws, but at least remain within the bounds of reality. Fox is not a news channel—it is the right’s Pravda. Among the frank acknowledgments of what the channel had become were rebukes to reporters who attempted to tell the simple truth. When reporter Kristin Fisher noted on the air that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s howler of a press conference on November 19 contained allegations that did not align with what Trump’s lawyers were pleading in court and were not supported by evidence, she was rebuked by higher-ups at the network and told to do a better job of “respecting the audience.”

[SouthernDem4ever]

1. Another irriatating article by a right winger

I love the part where she says "The leftward tilt of the big prestige press was irritating for those of us on the other side"

I took journalism and almost made a career of it. When I was taught, there was no tilt. News was news, opinions were opinions. The lines had to be clearly drawn in every newspaper and on the three major networks. Over the last 5 decades, I have noticed that anytime someone tries to speak truth to power, it's a leftward tilt. If someone reported that a large corporate executive was embezzling money, it was a leftward tilt. When companies purposely ruined an environment, even when it wasn't necessary but might cost a few dollars to keep people from getting sick and it was reported in the news, it was a leftward tilt. Why don't you just come out and tell it like it is Mona? Any time someone does something evil or wrong, and it's reported on, it's leftward tilt Oh, I'm sorry, we should not have prosecuted Nixon or his merry band of law-breakers. As a democracy, we should just sit down and shut up and comply with the masters, is that it? There are huge factions of people out there doing there best to rip-off the public every day of their lives. Most of them are republican politicians and their lobbyists. Is that a rightward tilt?

[lambchopp59]

4. Clarify when you were taught.

Pre-reagan? It was just a high school journalism class I took, we published the rinky-dink school paper. But we had to uphold the joirnalististic integrity outlined in the Fairness Doctine and had to demonstrate the "both sides" in articles.
It seems to me the repeal of the Fairness Doctine damaged journalism, now irreparably unless congress acts at some sort of restoration of those laws.

[SouthernDem4ever]

5. The fairness didn't apply to news reporting

Only the facts. And remember you had to sum up the entire article in the first paragraph? I was also pre-Reagan and agree with you that the fairness doctrine repeal definitely changed how editorials were handled. But, I never thought we would get to a point where the lines were so blurred that the general 6th grader would be brainwashed by conjecture in the media. (Remember when news was reported at 6th grade level?) It has been a slow march to the bottom but we're there. It seems republicans in congress have forgotten why journalism was protected by the Constitution. Well they have forgotten most of the rest of it too for that matter.

[kentuck]

2. It's easier to deceive those that want to be deceived.

I heard somewhere.

[republianmushroom]

3. free not little one, he will and so will fox news.

[cyclonefence]

6. Thank Ronald Reagan for the repeal of the "equal time" requirement

Remember "Hannity and Colmes?" Alan Colmes was the token liberal who appeared with Sean Hannity and refuted Hannity's wilder rants. No more equal time; no more Colmes.