Blame It on Fox? Hardly.

The meme is around everywhere, so in certain quarters it’s clearly become the common wisdom:  The downward slide of trust in (and audience for) news organizations is the fault of Fox News.

It’s absurd, frankly, to treat Fox News as if it were more partisan than any of the news organizations that preceded it, but that’s the foundation of the thinking.  Fox introduced the partisan press.  MSNBC sprang up as the understandable counter to it.  And that has sullied the image of the news media writ large.  Here’s Rob Horowitz, opining on GoLocalProv:

The results [of polls showing distrust in the media] in large measure reflect the reality of the rise of “partisan news”—where cable television news networks and highly trafficked online news sites tend to represent either strongly conservative or liberal points of view. For example, FOX News is unapologetically conservative, favors the Republicans, and an overwhelming majority of its viewers voted for Mitt Romney. On the other hand, MSNBC is proudly liberal, favors Democrats and its viewers voted overwhelmingly for President Obama.

The game is given away, though, with the factoid at the end of this paragraph:

Perhaps more disturbing, more than 7-in-10 adults think the press tries to cover up its mistakes. And nearly 7-in-10 adults believe that news stories are often inaccurate; this compares to the less than 3-in-10 who believe that news organizations get their facts straight. The dramatic decline in faith in news reporting is evidenced by the fact that in 1985 a majority of adults believed that news organizations get the facts straight.

A lot more than Fox News has come into being since 1985.  The Internet is the most prominent, of course, but other alternative media have been emerging for years, from talk radio to news magazines.  To be sure, some purveyors have a slant, but they (I should say, “we”) see their activities not as newly partisan, but as a corrective to the bias in the mainstream media.

To focus on the slant of some alternative news sources, though, is to miss the reason the mainstream has seen an erosion of trust.  It isn’t that the public transfers its distrust of the alternatives to the tried-and-true.  It’s that the alternatives give the public an idea of what the supposedly objective publications and shows aren’t telling them — or are telling them in a misleading way.

Fox News didn’t make NBC skew the evidence in the case of George Zimmerman.  It isn’t Fox News’s fault so many in the media badly botched the early reporting of the Boston bombing.  It’s ABC News that goes out into the public with actors to try to ambush Americans into violating the unwritten liberal laws of the PC thought police with its “What Would You Do?” segments.  If anything, Fox News has been notably less partisan than the papers and broadcasts of record in the instance of sycophantic sucking up to President Obama and other high-profile Democrats.

Or look closer to home.  One of the two most-prominent stories in yesterday’s Providence Journal had this headline and lede: “Some don’t hear calls for change: In safe House districts, GOP shielded from outcry.” Below that is an AP story out of Maryland that mainly reports (if you can call it reporting) that Republicans whose constituents disagree with the liberal Democrat line on immigration are free not to vote according to the liberal Democrat line. The tone is strategic, concerning how to bring those Republicans around to the position that the reporter thinks they should take.

You do not get more nakedly partisan than that.  Or rather, the Providence Journal maxed out the partisan tilt with its headline and lede.

There’s nothing unusual about that.  Today’s front page has a story conveying the predicament of the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority from the agency’s point of view.  The problem it conveys isn’t that elected officials are groping in the dark for ways to impose new taxes and fees on the public; it’s that “the toll is in state law now,” in the words of director David Darlington, and “the state” isn’t letting the agency collect them.

Also on the front page is an article assisting the state’s ObamaCare health benefits exchange in getting its marketing word out:

“We know that there are people who could benefit from HealthSource RI in every corner of the state. Our goal is slowly building awareness,” [spokesman Ian Lang] said. …

“I’m very proud of my state for preparing for it rather than fighting it,” [passerby Jean] Chapman said of the federal healthcare overhaul, which is being resisted by many state governments. “I just can’t wait for this to become a reality so people will find out it’s nothing to be afraid of, that it’s good.”

The founders of the United States — the folks who explicitly mentioned freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights — understood how critical it is to have powerful checks against the government, and the promulgation of news, presented as fully as possible from every angle, is an important one.  In the decades leading up to those 1985 poll results, the corporate news industry had consolidated behind a particular worldview and support of politicians and others who shared it, all while claiming to be presenting things objectively.

It isn’t resolving an existential mystery to explain the changing poll results as new channels began to open up, giving the public glimpses of the world and perspectives not incorporated in that worldview.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in The Ocean State Current, including text, graphics, images, and information are solely those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the views and opinions of The Current, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, or its members or staff. The Current cannot be held responsible for information posted or provided by third-party sources. Readers are encouraged to fact check any information on this web site with other sources.

YOUR CART
  • No products in the cart.
0