"OutFoxed": How Fox News Is Destroying American Journalism

I think I've said this before, but the most frequent manner in which I gather news from the tube is pretty much confined to major "they-all-are-running-it" type breaking stories ... and then I don't so much watch any one outlet's "Story". but rather I flip around through the bunch of 'em the "news" personalized category of my satellite TV station consisys of just over 30 news or news-oriented channels including the major nets, independents, and specific-interest types), watching to see how each covers "The Story". For real news and analysis, I pretty much relay on a variety of sources, from printed material - certain newspapers, periodicals and journals - live-feed tickers crawling along at the top and bottom of my monitor screen, pop-up news alerts, free and subscription news gathering services, news-oriented UseNet newsgroups, and shortwave news radio, among others, including, in some instances, direct real-time one-on-one contact with trusted contacts who literally are "There". I freely admit to being a "News Junkie", and while I know it is so, it just baffles me how any one news source might be an individual's primary, or even sole, news source. I wanna know what's happenin', not what highly paid, well groomed, glib folks say about what happened.

CI--

Surely you acknowledge you have made a judgement about an issue you have no information about.

The three things you cited that they should do to prove themselves fair and balanced--they do.
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Set--

I guess we differ about the meaning of free speech.

You set yourself as a judge on whether Canada should be able to watch FOX. "Any time a govt, be it Canada or any other, get rid of Murdoch or Black, it's a positive sign..." Thats a value judgement no one person or entity should oppress a country with, IMO. I say a govt should not take the option from a country.

Again, if Bush had decided the US should not be given the choice to see the BBC, I think you'd be on the other side of this conversation.

I don't watch the teevees except to gawk and say: "Golly, looka that fool . . . "

I wouldn't care if the Beeb were banned for its sake or any opinion on the excellence or lack of excellence in programming, or because of any putative agenda. I would, as you ought to have noticed, but found it convenient not to, object on constitutional grounds. I haven't set myself up as a judge of what Canada should or shouldn't watch; i have judged and found despicable, grasping and dangerously manipulative Messrs. Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black. That is my right, as well as the expression thereof. I further recognize that as a citizen of a different country, i have no business to determine what is moral or not for another country's government to do or have done. I have a perfect to form an opinion of what is or isn't moral, and to express it. Were the conditions in Canada sufficiently repressive to have evoked a response, you'd have heard it (if you bothered to listen) just this month, when Federal elections were held there.

Doesn't seem to have honked off the Canadians a great deal, i suggest it wasn't even a blip on their political radar. And after all, Sofia, it's their country, not mine, not yours . . .

Yep, I already agreed with all of that. Me, too, I think that, say, CNN, provides mostly a kind of infotainment rather than investigative news reporting - and I also think it has a strong slant, though I suspect I see the slant heaving the other way from how you see it (i.e., pro-American, ethnocentric, etc)


Hm. Say, you look at CBS, CNN etc - if you look at those, you see liberal news media, right? OK - now add Air America or some kind of hypothetical CommonDreams TV. Would you consider their slant to be more unnerving still than that of CBS etc?

OK, thats how I see Foxnews relate to CNN etc.

Thats based on checking out their website every so often, from picking up their stories and hell, even from looking at their polling results - and from what I read about them. Partially indirect evidence fersure, but considering how I experience CNN reporting I'm sure you have no trouble imagining how I would react to Fox.


True. That was so and it still is. I mean, not a decent Progressive or truly global perspective to be found. Look at CNN Crossfire way back when. It had some wishy-washy centrist weakling opposite raving rightwinger Buchanan. Where's the representation or fairness in that?

<winks>

[quote="nimh]
True. That was so and it still is. I mean, not a decent Progressive or truly global perspective to be found. Look at CNN Crossfire way back when. It had some wishy-washy centrist weakling opposite raving rightwinger Buchanan. Where's the representation or fairness in that?

<winks>[/quote]

You can get this perspective, you just can't get it one place.

Ahhyup ... that's the deal the way I figure it. Helluvabuncha folks just can't be bothered to take the effort; why work to discover whats out there when what you like is handed to you?. Damned shame. And unlikely ever to change.

Timber:

Especially when what's handed to you has to pass through a CEO's filter:)

Don't blame the CEO, NeoGuin; were the CEO not successful at placing product to suit the demands of the existing market, that product would not have the success which cements the CEO's position.

Sofia, On that score, I must admit I have very little to no knowledge. How can I? I don't watch Fox (nor other tv stations). However, there are many participants on A2K that continues to reenforce my ideas about Fox's slant towards the GOP.

Not bein' mean, here, c.i. , but I submit that your response to Sofia there reinforces my contention that all too many folks all too frequently find it more comforting and convenient to accept uncritcally that which others of similar mind say of a thing or condition than to take effort to discover for themselves the true nature of that thing or condition ... "That sounds good to me; it must be right".

So, by your own admission, you know very little to nothing about it but you come on here and trash it?

When your view, in large part, comes from ignorance & conjecture, perhaps you'd be well-advised to make less opinionated statements.

Actually, Fox, in and of itself, was never proposed for broadcast in Canada. It has not been banned here. The package it was part of was denied as many of the other channels in the package were going to provide a duplication of existing services. That is a no-go. Fox, on its own, was offered 'air space' 4 years ago, and declined to enter the market.

This is the bigger issue, in my opinion. Should the news be a product to be consumed?

Now that I asked that question, I'm not sure of the answer myself. I'll have to think about this.

Thanks for the clarification re: Fox and Canada, ehBeth. That didn't seem right to me ("banned"??), but I didn't know one way or the other.

I suspected it was BS, but wasn't going to bother looking it up . . . my point was that our political values don't apply to Canada, and what goes on there is the business of its people, and not our business.

All of which being said, i am quite content and smug to have had the refutation from the Sweetiepie of the North.

Monger and timber, Actually, I made up my mind after watching Fox for some years that their coverage is/was biased. The posters on A2K confirmed that for me ever since. I suppose I can take a peek now and then to see if they still have the same bias, but I just didn't want to waste my time. "Sounds good to me" just confirms what I've known for a long time. Let me know if and when they change their bias to a more level rhetoric.

Gee, lookee what I found. I knew I wasn't imagining things like some people claimed on this thread. http://www.fair.org/extra/0108/fox-main.html

We exhort, you comply

A no-spin look at Fox News' quest for Canada

By Ian King
Sun., May. 16th 2004

John Doyle's fight with Bill O'Reilly started innocently enough. All the Globe and Mail's TV critic did was support the ides of making the Fox News channel available to Canadian cable and satellite subscribers.Oh, but he was a tad sarcastic and dismissive of Fox's pretensions to being a "news channel." That set off a cross-border pissing match that made the New York Times, and revived the whole issue of whether the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is - or isn't - blocking the right-wing current affairs network from Canadian viewers.

First, a little history: In 2000, a slew of digital TV networks, 283 to be exact, were okayed by the CRTC. Among them were Canadian editions of MSNBC and Fox, who would blend their U.S. programming with some Canadian material - 10% at first, eventually rising to 35% after five years. MSNBC Canada is on the air; Fox Canada never made it. Since then, a small but vocal group of mostly conservative Canadians have been screaming, "I want my Fox TV!" The cable industry tried last year to bring several American cable channels, Fox News among them, to the digital dial. It failed, officially because the channels - most of them like HBO and movie channels - were already being duplicated by Canadian operations. Canadian policy is to shield Canadian stations that import programming - whether they're on cable or over the air (Say hello, Global?) Was Fox targeted by the CRTC, or caught up in a general rejection? Believe what you will; anything I write won't change your mind. Having been kicked into touch by the CRTC, the cable lobby has returned with a new pitch to bring Fox to Canada - in industry lingo, to "sponsor" the channel. This time, they've done their homework.

For one, there won't be any challenges from Canadian broadcasters who import American programming from HBO. This is a standalone application. Second, the Fox News Canada service is officially dead. Although it was given until late November to get to air before losing its licence, CanWest Global and Fox have announced that the Fox News Canada idea won't proceed. With the Canadian equivalent out of the way, it should be clear sailing for this new proposal. Well, the fuss around it is anything but. Ralph Klein advisor Rod Love, possibly the most overrated political strategist in Canada, chimed in with an error-laden Globe and Mail rant about how it was obviously a government plot to keep Fox away from sensitive Canucks. Well, the first thing he got wrong was that the aforementioned John Doyle "cheered" when the CRTC rejected the cable industry's original plant to import Fox. "The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (an anachronistic title in 2004, if there ever was one) is applying a separate standard to Fox News than it does to, say, the woolly-headed lefties at the BBC, for the simple reason that Fox News is an unabashedly conservative news network.

You can just hear the bureaucrats in Ottawa discussing in apocalyptic terms what they fear would happen if Canadians were exposed to a steady diet of televised, pro-American, conservative debate." Well, no, actually. Setting aside the fact that the last paragraph was conjecture from an Alberta Tory who bombed in Ottawa, there is no separate standard. The Beeb's World Service is not the same as the BBC's domestic news or entertainment service, and the BBC Canada service does have to provide CanCon, just like any other digital network. Toronto Sun crank Peter Worthington was already accusing the government of stalling in his screed. Yes, 10 days after the cable industry submitted its Fox proposal, Worthington smelled a delay. Seeing as it takes the CRTC months to decide on most anything, it hardly seems that Fox has been singled out by those Chardonnay-sipping mandarins in Hull. Worthington and Love both argue that Fox's absence from Canadian cable is a government plot. While they've thrown together a load of conjecture about how a Liberal government, especially one who appoints the CRTC's commissioners, would do anything to shield Canadians from a "fair and balanced" right-wing rant service, they've provided little proof.

Stating that the government is Liberal does not mean that they banned a conservative network. Come to think of it, only the Canadian Fox fans have cried foul. The network itself? Nothing. Explain me this, boys: why did the CRTC okay the original service, with extra Canadian content that would have focussed directly on said Liberal government - from a very unfriendly point of view? Something here doesn't add up.

Now, I have no problem with bringing Fox to Canada. Yes, we need it for the laughs, as Doyle pointed out. Bureaucratic purists and Fox opponents might argue that waving in Fox would be bending the rules to allow Fox in with fewer restrictions that MSNBC had to contend with. No problem - call it an ethnic news service, targeted at a specific type of Canadian underserved by existing Canadian cable offerings. But let's also give it to the Fox fans as a comfort blanket to shield them from facts and viewpoints that might challenge the poor dears. If nothing else, it'll silence their whining about their channel, and let them trade conspiracies about a Fox ban for other conspiracies instead (like the one that says CanWest Global runs a chain of Liberal party organs.)

And fear not, lefties. Bringing Fox to Canada won't veer this country far out into right field. Hell, if Lord Tubby couldn't overthrow the government while controlling 60% of the country's English-language dailies

QUESTION: Why is CNN on regular cable, while other American networks aren't? Answer: Because they were there first. Seriously. That's what grandfathering's all about.
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Though this guy comes to the conclusion A) Fox is no good and B) The rejection wasn't purposeful, I can see why some may think it was.

Anyhoo, I'm glad it will be available.

Now, you may not find this as funny as I do, sofia, but the newspapers you and I found the confirmation that Fox was not banned in Canada - they're both right of centre. One would be considered right of centre in Fox-land (The Sun - the one that didn't think Fox would be good), the other is just Canajun right of centre.

I think it's pretty clear that Fox isn't interested in the Canajun market in any case. They were given an opportunity to go on-air in 2000 and passed it by. MSNBC was given the same chance, took it, and has a small but decent market share.