Journalism was once a completely respectable profession.
Reporters traditionally have been trained writers, and for me one of their real virtues has always been that they write well — sometimes extremely well — on a tight deadline. Anyone who has struggled for years writing a novel — as I have, on several occasions — must of necessity marvel at the ability of a good journalist to tell a story, have it edited, perhaps re-write it and have it re-edited, all in a matter of a few hours before going to press or on camera. This is a charmed capability, and I have spent my entire writing life admiring good reporting.
And then there’s Fox.
Television journalism is of course nothing new and has occasionally been quite good. Jim McKay’s reportage on ABC of the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Olympic Games remains in my memory one of the most gripping examples ever of what good television journalism can do. Also, almost everything that came with television’s coverage of the Vietnam war was exemplary of what good journalism must do, which is to get the real facts, weigh all sides of the story, and then tell it as truthfully and clearly as possible, no matter the consequences. September 11? Incredible. January 6? For the most part, except for the subject of this essay, superb.
In war, the first casualty is truth, as we have learned in the engagements subsequent to Vietnam. In that war, the people running it realized that these scribblers with their cynical, unpatriotic search for the truth were writing things injurious to the war effort, which in a way, we now know, was always being lost. So, post-Vietnam government policies changed, and “embedded” journalists, heavy military “minding,” and censorship became the norm.
But I digress.
Fox News has now long been the prime purveyor of yellow journalism. Originally the child of a circulation battle in the 1890s between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, “yellow journalism” sacrificed truth in favor of sensationalism in order simply to sell more papers. It was a business ploy, not an example of high journalistic ideals. Under the influence of the late Roger Ailes, Fox News embraced the unbridled goal of increasing viewership and sales through neo-conservative blustering. Facts lost their hold. Opinions took the low ground, and the basic idea of genuine journalism descended from any high ground it once may have occupied.
On Fox, commentators are not reporters; they are editorialists. They do not seek the facts and are not fair in their judgments. They turn the injudicious selection of certain facts to the service of their long-ago received political ideologies, gather themselves together for the camera (makeup and so on), and once the camera is on, they opine. This has all been documented and argued over for many years. Fox has become so yellow that journalism itself barely exists there.
At such places, what may once have been healthy respect for proper journalistic practices has become a rabid pursuit of blow-hardism and personal hubris. But Partisan Rant is not Journalism. A Rude Interruptive Voice is not Journalism. A Sneer is not Journalism.
For an example, the braying about illegal immigration without having read much about the important history of illegal immigration to the United States from the day the Republic was founded, seems a bit short of fine journalism. (That immigration is, after all, the basic history of this country.) Fox also makes the mistake of lumping traditional politicians from the Democratic and Republican parties together, implying that they are all…well, to be fair, Democrats more than Republicans… just a bunch of weak-minded, timid time-servers who can’t see or won’t engage the real issues facing the American electorate. In recent years, some politicians who espouse those same views have been voted into office and therewith prove that, in some cases, Fox may be right.
The expatriate American journalist Larry King (not the television host) has written that “the British media [are] as untroubled by logical inconsistency as they are by a shortage of facts, lack of knowledge, or deficiencies in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.” The same could be said of Yellow Fox.
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