We all get what Fox News is about by now, don't we?
CNN's Oliver Darcy seems to think we're still not clear.
Fox News is hosting the GOP presidential debate tonight — without the one guy who will probably be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee — and it’s hard to avoid a certain going-through-the-motions vibe of a “debate” that seems mostly like an audition to become Donald Trump’s veep nominee, or perhaps to lay the foundation for a post-campaign career in conservative media. So we in the media find our narratives where we can.
Still, I’m perplexed by this take from CNN’s Oliver Darcy:
It is the year 2023. And news organizations are still failing in their coverage of Fox News.
The right-wing channel, which is in the spotlight as it prepares to host the first GOP primary debate of the 2024 election on Wednesday, was exposed in grand fashion as a dishonest propaganda organ of the Republican Party just months ago when it paid a historic $787 million defamation settlement to Dominion Voting Systems over the lies it spread during the last presidential election.
If newsrooms somehow didn't comprehend what Fox News really was before that explosive lawsuit, there isn't an excuse now.
Well sure.
But, uh, does any sentient adult in the United States really not get Fox News’ whole thing by now?
Yes, Fox News is a “dishonest propaganda organ of the Republican Party!” Everybody knows that! The only people who might plausibly dispute that are the people who watch Fox News — but they watch it, presumably, because … Fox News is a dishonest propaganda organ of the Republican Party. They’re not the kind of folks who are going to trust the assessments of the Washington Post , New York Times or (natch) CNN, all of which have covered Fox News’ failings extensively.
But Darcy thinks those organizations ought to be trying harder.
What is striking, however, is how many credible news organizations are failing to describe in clear-eyed terms to their audiences — who count on them, and often pay them to deliver the unvarnished truth — what the network actually is.
Most outlets still haven't worked up the courage to describe Fox News as a "right-wing channel." The WaPo on Tuesday didn't even refer to the outlet's prime time bloc of Donald Trump propagandists in such terms. It merely described the channel's evening programming as "conservative leaning." Calling that language weak would be generous.
Yeah, that’s not the strongest language from the Post. But I’m having a difficult time getting to the “so what” of things.
Washington Post readers are, by virtue of being interested in and paying to access the Washington Post, probably among most informed citizens in this country. Maybe even in the top 10 percent! They presumably have a general idea of what the media landscape looks like in America. And they can probably be trusted to understand the nature of Fox News without the WaPo nudging them along just a bit harder by using “right-wing” instead of conservative.
There has been, in the Trump Era, a form of media criticism that condemns news organizations not because they’ve failed to tell us the bad news about the former president and the right-wing ecosphere — but because those journalists haven’t constantly worked to remind us that that bad news is, in fact, bad. If you’re not explicitly condemning Trumpism’s racism and anti-democratic tendencies, maybe readers won’t understand that racism and anti-democratic positions are not good things.
That critique, I think, presumes that readers of the NYT and WaPo are dumb babies who have no independent moral sense, no ability to process and weigh these things without being hand-held a bit.
Maybe that’s true. Trumpism, after all, has a wide constituency on the right. And Trump did rise to the presidency in 2016 on the back of “earned media” from outlets that saw him more as a goose for ratings than as a threat to democracy. The Post and Times and CNN haven’t always covered themselves in glory. (And, uh, the Times gave Ann Coulter space in the opinion section today, which let’s face it was a really bad idea.)
Me? I wouldn’t give a platform to anybody who advocated, even jokingly, murdering my organization’s journalists. Then again, I also think that NYT readers probably get Ann Coulter’s whole thing, too. Nobody’s fooled.
But I digress.
I suspect that despite Darcy’s criticism, more vigorously calling Fox News “right-wing” instead of “conservative” probably wouldn’t move the needle on Americans’ assessment of Fox News, or of Trumpism more generally.
The problem is not that people don’t know what Fox News is. It’s that they know … and a good number of them are fine with it. I’m not sure what, exactly, the media can do about that.
The one issue I have with this article is that Fox lost its conservative base when it chose not to fight the Dominion law suite and got rid of Tucker. Fox, with the Murdock sons have become more of a left wing propaganda machine then a right wing propagandist. It’s ratings over the past few months are showing this. I guess people are not aware of this yet.
You nailed it in your first paragraph, I think. The problem is less the framing of particular pieces of Fox News programming, it's the way each such piece is treated as a either discrete event to be covered in detail or a total non-event. The "coverage" needed by general audiences isn't a detailed breakdown of how and why each candidate is saying whatever ridiculous thing or how Trump's decision not to attend or even RSVP both explains and is explained by the Dominion lawsuit, it's "Fox News and the Republican party continue to cower in fear of their own base of support; we'll let you know if anything actually happens." As a rule, I'd be hard pressed to pick a more offensive word to see in a cable news chyron than "Breaking".
As to Ann Coulter, I can't be bothered to know much about her particular posture in reactionary politics. From your reaction, I'm reminded of my attitude towards Charles Murray: the problem with platforming him isn't that he's offensive, it's that he's making old, bad arguments in favor of ideas that everyone else with a genuine interest in the fact of the matter has long moved past. As Murray is a waste of a lecture slot, so Coulter is almost certainly a waste of column-inches.