I used to be a big Fox News viewer back in the late 90s when I was a conservative Republican who had never voted for a Democrat.
As regular readers may know, my political views have evolved since then and Fox News, probably as much as anything, was a factor in that change of heart and mind.
Today, I am convinced that the most dangerous thing to be found in any American household is not a gun, bomb-making material or a dangerous chemical. It’s not lead pain on the plaster or asbestos in the shingles.
The most dangerous thing in an American household today is a television set tuned to Fox News.
My original affinity for Fox News is that it reported what others news outlets did not report at all or reported only superficially. That the views expressed on the channel aligned with my own at the time certainly didn’t erode my fondness of it.
But there came a point when the reality I saw out my window didn’t match what I was seeing on my TV. What started as an occasional disconnect became, in my mind, a wildly disparate version of government, politics, religion and society in general than what I knew to be true.
While other news outlets may have shaded the truth. Fox News began to create a new reality — alternative facts, as Trump press secretary Kellyanne Conway termed them.
It has become a source of pure political propaganda.
It is today, I suspect, what Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch intended it to be when he founded Fox News 25 years ago — a partisan organ to promote conservative views.
It should be noted that “the partisan press” has been around as long as there have been news media. In fact, the first newspapers were founded to support a specific cause or ideology. In Europe, especially, the partisan press has existed without interruption.
But in the United States, the role of news media began to leave their partisan roots to pursue a more noble goal — an independent voice, “The Fourth Estate” whose role was to accurately report the news and hold the nation’s three branches of government accountable without fear or favor. By the dawn of the 20th Century, there were few mass-circulation newspapers that claimed allegiance to a political view or party. While some newspapers — and later radio and TV stations — may have built an audience that appealed to one political ideology or another, media in the United States became far more independent than the media found anywhere else in the world. I’m convinced that our independent media helped make our nation stronger, better, more successful. For a century, the American media played that vital role and Americans of all political persuasions generally trusted what they read, saw and heard on “the news.”
Rupert Murdoch, through the founding of Fox News in 1996, has done more to undermine Americans’ trust in the media than anything ever imagined by the “Yellow Journalism” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Murdoch exploited a certain naivety in the American people that had grown in a century’s worth of nonpartisan press. As noted, In London or Paris or other European cities — the partisan press has been around since the inception of media. A Londoner knows at a glance which newspaper is a “Labour” paper and which is a “Tory” paper and understands that what is reported may be designed to align with a political point of view. So even Tories take what is written in a Tory newspaper with a fair amount of skepticism.
Fox News is that sort of media. But the difference is, it often reaches an unsophisticated American audience that had, for a century, trusted their media to present an independent view of news. If some Americans don’t trust the New York Times or CNN or any of the other right-wing punching bags, it’s largely because Fox News told them they shouldn’t.
By contrast, for many Americans, Fox News is simply “the news.” They believe what they see and hear without an inkling of skepticism.
In the past five years, Fox News has gone from cheerleading for extremist right-wing policy to creating it, often through the demagoguery of hosts like Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, et al.
Carbon monoxide isn’t all that dangerous unless it goes undetected.
And that’s what makes Fox News so dangerous.
There is not one issue in today’s world that Fox News hasn’t made intentionally worse. Not one.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
