Dept. of Bad Timing
February 10, 2009 6:54 pm ET by Jamison Foser
Via Calderone, it seems Esquire has a new profile of Fox's Shepard Smith. In it, the anchor offers a common defense of Fox's objectivity:
"There has to be news at a place called Fox News," he says, and he's not the only one. It's the mantra of the network, the fallback equation that — until the recent entrance of Glenn Beck, anyway — has enabled its employees to distinguish between the programming that takes place between nine in the morning and eight at night, which is called News, and the programming that takes over thereafter, which is called Opinion. "I think we do a pretty good job of labeling it for the viewer," Shep says.
Again: that's the Standard Fox Line. O'Reilly and Hannity may be ideologues, but during the day, Fox is straight news. Fair and balanced.
That has always been an absurd claim, of course. But today, it's particularly funny. See, on today's edition of Fox's Happening Now, one of those supposedly unbiased daytime news programs, Fox tried to pass off a Republican press release as its own reporting. As Media Matters demonstrated, the Fox "reporting" copied the GOP press release word for word -- right down to a typo.
So, what was that you were saying, Shep?
THERE IS NO DOUBT that the particular business known as Fox News Channel, as part of a bigger business called News Corporation, there's no doubt that over the past eight years, Fox News Channel sold 24/7 to the American People, every lie or half-truth told by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney et al in their administration, for the purposes of influencing and manipulating the political opinions of the American People, most notably IRAQ.
They did more than just sell those lies: at times they seemed to be the designer and original manufacturer of them.
Again, Fox News Channel sold for almost eight years to the American People, everything BUSH and IRAQ, for their own private gain, and all by way of the powerful privilege to broadcast to the American People, more exactly, the power to influence and manipulate those People's political opinions (think BUSH and IRAQ).
Point: what danged difference can it possibly make now, or have made then, that Fox News Channel chooses to characterize their selling of BUSH and IRAQ between the hours of 9AM and 8PM, characterizes that as "news", and then chooses to refer to the same BUSH and IRAQ cheerleading by FNC's featured players, after the hour of 8PM, calls that particularly BUSH IRAQ cheerleading an "opinion"...
"When we sell you BUSH and IRAQ before 8PM, we call that news; and when the hour strikes 8PM, well then the same selling of the same things are called opinion after that hour"
What possible difference does a mincing of words make, when all the time someone is simply trying to influence and manipulate your opinion, about politics?
And who is there among those who have paid attention to these matters, and yet won't admit that the thing called Fox News Channel's mission is to influence and manipulate the political opinions of the American People, or at least the ones who're watching FNC?
There's no doubt about it: call it news, call it opinion, even call it "entertainment" (as the limbaugh defenders have done recently), but whatever you call it, if it's the work of influencing and manipulating the political opinions of the American People, then call it that, because that's what it really is, no matter what sign or label (news or opinion) you hang on it...
If you don't think so, then think BUSH and IRAQ, and think who it was that helped sell you those things... think of Fox News Channel.