Unfair and Unbalanced

There's a funny billboard in the hinterlands that displays the Fox News logo. Underneath it reads: "We Deceive. You Believe." That pretty much sums it up for me, full-stop. Going further, Eric Alterman (Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress) ponders aloud: what exactly is Fox News? He writes:

Fox News Channel is often described as a cable news station. On occasion, the words “conservative” or “biased” are attached to that description. But few dispute the journalistic orientation of the overall enterprise.

This is a mistake. Fox is something new—something for which we do not yet have a word. It provides almost no actual journalism. Instead it gives ideological guidance to the Republican Party and millions of its supporters, attacking its opponents and keeping its supporters in line. And it does so at a hefty profit, thereby turning itself into the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

And his conclusions?

Again, I’m not exactly sure what to call Fox. It has more in common with the integrated political/judicial/business/media empire that is making a mockery of Italian democracy under the rule of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi than any American political or media machine of the past. And yet for a whole host of reasons, both financial and psychological, many in the media cannot admit this, thereby allowing Fox to benefit from the protections of journalism offered up by the First Amendment while simultaneously subverting their purpose.

The whole piece is worth a careful read. There's no point in hurling snarky remarks at Fox News gratuitously. What Alterman finds is simply sad.