Fox's Sandstorm

William Raspberry at WaPo editorializes The in-your-face right-wing partisanship that marks Fox News Channel's news broadcasts is having two dangerous effects. The first is that the popularity of the approach -- Fox is clobbering its direct competition (CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, etc.) -- leads other cable broadcasters to mimic it, which in turn debases the quality of the news available to that segment of the TV audience. The second, far more dangerous, effect is that it threatens to destroy public confidence in all news.

The latter, I admit, is more fear than prediction, but let me tell you what produces that fear. Fox News Channel -- though the people who run the operation are at great pains to insist otherwise -- is deliberately partisan.

Fox is "Fair and Balanced" and has about as many liberal pundits as conservative pundits, but the Extreme Left views having conservative views getting even equal exposure is terrible.

It is as though right-wing talk radio has metastasized into cable and assumed a new virulence. The main difference is that radio's Rush Limbaugh, for instance, doesn't pretend even-handedness. As he has said, he doesn't seek to be balanced but to balance the rest of the media, which he sees as generally dominated by left-of-center attitudes.

And he is correct in that view

Part of the FNC approach, on the other hand, is to promote itself as "fair and balanced." I suppose it does so with a wink and a nod to its far-right audience, who must know it isn't balanced. Certainly those near the center of the political spectrum know it.

How would an extreme left wing pundit like William Raspberry know what those near the center of the political spectrum know?

So why would I consider Fox such a generalized threat? Because I think the plan is not so much to convince the public that its particular view is correct but rather to sell the notion that what FNC presents is just another set of biases, no worse (and for some, a good deal better) than the biases that routinely drive the presentation of the news on ABC, CBS or NBC -- and, by extension, the major newspapers.

In other words, the TRUTH

For the Foxidation process to work, it isn't necessary to convince Americans that the verbal ruffians who give FNC its crackle have a corner on the truth -- only that all of us in the news business are grinding our partisan axes all the time and that none of us deserves to be taken seriously as seekers of truth.

The truth as you see it, i.e. as viewed from your partisan perspective

This is huge. As a friend remarked recently, time was when if you found it in the New York Times, that settled the bar bet and the other guy paid off.

That was when the NYT was not as biased as it now is. At one time it's bias was restricted to its editorial pages. Now the entire paper is biased.

But if the Times and The Post or any other mainstream news outlet -- including the major networks -- come to be seen as the left-of-center counterparts of Fox News Channel, why would anyone accept them as authoritative sources of truth?

I certainly don't accept them as authoritative sources of truth.

Betsy Newmark blogged William Raspberry has his panties all in a knot worrying about Fox News. He is perturbed because he thinks that the “Foxidation” effect is making people distrustful of the mainstream media. His column is remarkably free of examples and evidence. His worries and concerns are enough. Poor Raspberry confuses causes and effect.

How could he be so dense as not to recognize that FNC is succeeding because there already was that perception among many, many people. Those same people, who distrust the Times and Post, also read blogs. They would be doing so, even without Fox. The distrust existed before Fox came along, before Rush came along. Now, those people who are conservative and don’t have faith in the mainstream media have somewhere else to get their news. Sure, it’s slanted news. But don’t blame FNC for the distrust. Really, I can’t understand how Raspberry would be so obtuse to confuse cause and effect. Doesn’t he remember the appeal of Spiro Agnew’s diatribes against the media? Doesn’t he remember the bumper stickers from the 1992 election, “Annoy the Media. Reelect Bush”? This isn’t a chicken and egg conundrum. It’s quite clear which came first. People have been distrustful of the MSM for decades. Finally, some clever people have found a way to tap into that feeling.

Orrin Judd blogged Everything Was Fine Until The Other Side Got A Voice. He means openly, not deliberately. People trust Fox more precisely because it announces its biases--like thinking America should prevail in the war or that Palestinian bombers are terrorists--than they do the MSM outlets that pretend they're nonpartisan, lying either to themselves, to us, or both.

PoliPundit blogged This column by liberal Washington Post columnist William Raspberry is beyond self-parody. Raspberry grumbles that Fox News is too partisan. But, while describing Fox News, its employees, and its viewers, here are some of the words he uses: “virulence,” “far-right,” “a generalized threat,” “verbal ruffians,” “a huge and menacing ogre,” “the baddest kid in the particular sandbox of cable news.” Nope, no partisanship there.