BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
"Fair and balanced" debunked --
by a conservative. Fox News fans who actually buy into Roger
Ailes's "fair and balanced" crapola ought to get themselves over to
the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com.
Yesterday the site republished a
long piece from City Journal written by one Brian C. Anderson,
who glowingly sings the praises of the Fox News Channel because --
get this, Roger -- it's unapologetically
conservative.
Writes
Anderson: "Watch Fox for
just a few hours and you encounter a conservative presence unlike
anything on TV." Naturally, Anderson thinks this enables Fox to do
better journalism than its so-called liberal competitors, which is a
dubious proposition. But it's refreshing to see someone on the other
side acknowledge simple reality.
Anderson doesn't stop there. He
praises South Park for its allegedly conservative sensibility
-- he's absolutely rhapsodic over segments that depict the rain
forest as smelling "like ass," and that make fun of Native
Americans.
And he engages in the absolutely
loathsome practice of attributing to liberals views that are held
only by a few seriously demented extremists.
For instance, he points to a
South Park encounter with the North American Man-Boy Love
Association (NAMBLA) as somehow saying something important --
importantly bad, that is -- about liberals. He writes of
NAMBLA:
One of the contemporary
left's most extreme (and, to conservatives, objectionable)
strategies is its effort to draw the mantle of civil liberties
over behavior once deemed criminal, pathological or immoral
...
Of course, Anderson offers not a
whit of proof that any real liberal would "draw the mantle of civil
liberties" over the behavior that NAMBLA advocates, as opposed
to letting the organization simply talk about it, which is a very
different thing. Then again, the First Amendment isn't all that big
with the right these days, so it's perhaps too much to expect
Anderson to make such fine distinctions.
Anderson also lets Matt Welch
assert, without challenge, that he started his weblog right after
9/11 "in direct response to reading five days' worth of outrageous
bullshit in the media from people like Noam Chomsky and Robert
Jensen."
Yes, it's true that Chomsky and
Jensen are members of the hard left. Like virtually every liberal I
know, I was deeply offended by Chomsky's blithe blame-it-on-the-US
attitude following the terrorist attacks.
But Welch -- and, by extension,
Anderson -- would lead one to believe that Chomsky was perched at the
right (okay, left) hand of Howell Raines during those days and weeks
of 24/7 coverage. In fact, you'd have to scour the websites of, say,
CounterPunch
and the Nation
to find any unmediated Chomsky. And even the Nation's editors
felt compelled to balance Chomsky with erstwhile lefty war hawk
Christopher Hitchens. For the most part, the public was introduced to
Chomsky's views by pundits who quoted him for the sole purpose of
attacking him.
As for Jensen, I couldn't even
remember who he was until I Googled him this morning.
Here
is his home page. As I
recall, he nearly lost his job for speaking out, and was saved only
by an old-fashioned idea called academic freedom.
Toward the end, Anderson cites
Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam's attack on bloggers last
year (sorry, can't find it online) as an example of elite liberal
bias. Beam is certainly an elitist, as I'm sure he would be the first
to attest; but he's actually a conservative, in an elitist,
old-fashioned sort of way.
Ultimately Anderson's piece is
well-written, well-argued, and silly. It sounds good, but it falls
apart when you examine the faulty premises on which it
rests.
But he's right about one thing: Fox
News is as fair and balanced as the Wall Street Journal's
editorial page.
posted at 9:18 AM |
|
link
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
