The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences just announced their nominees for the 36th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards. Among those honored by the Academy are PBS with 47 nominations, CBS with 44, ABC with 17, NBC with 14, CNN with 10, and MSNBC with 2. The only major television news broadcaster that came away empty-handed was Fox News.
The easy explanation for this rejection is that Fox is not actually in the news business. They are a thinly disguised tabloid entertainment outlet with a mission to advance a right-wing agenda and demean Democrats and liberals. It is a network that is filled with fiction, drama, scandal, soap opera, soft-porn, and a prodigious amount of unintentional comedy. Earlier this year Fox News CEO Roger Ailes admitted that his business model is geared toward entertainment saying that he doesn’t regard CNN or MSNBC as rivals and that “We’re competing with TNT and USA and ESPN.”
However, the embarrassing failure to be recognized for even a single program is rooted in a much deeper problem for Fox. They are not simply failing to offer programming that is deserving of praise from their “peers,” they are purposefully producing stories that are false and serve only to malign their ideological adversaries.
A conveniently timed example of this is the Planned Parenthood story Fox is currently hyping. It involves a video that has already been repudiated by independent analysts as grossly distorted and unrepresentative of the facts. Nevertheless, Fox is repeatedly airing segments that go into some length disparaging Planned Parenthood without offering any time for rebuttal by the organization.
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This is typical of the phony fare that Fox broadcasts. They obsess over fake scandals like Benghazi, or Jade Helm 15, or Obama phones, or death panels (which they recently revived), and on and on. They combine relentless hostility toward liberals with obsequious fawning over Republicans. It is their brazen unprofessional and unethical brand of journalism that best explains why they are passed over for awards from actual news professionals year after year.
