{"id":31486,"date":"2016-04-27T20:10:56","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T03:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=31486"},"modified":"2016-04-27T20:14:34","modified_gmt":"2016-04-28T03:14:34","slug":"fox-news-anchor-pitches-fair-and-balanced-nonsense-to-stephen-colbert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=31486","title":{"rendered":"Fox News Anchor Pitches ‘Fair And Balanced’ Nonsense To Stephen Colbert"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a measure of self-delusion that infects the natives at Fox News and prevents them from making the most obvious appraisals of reality. What else could explain why, after twenty years of shoveling right-wing propaganda down the throats of American cable news viewers, the network’s anchors persist in pushing the absurdity that Fox engages in anything resembling journalism?<\/p>\n

\"Fox
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The host of Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace, appeared on Late Night with Stephen Colbert last night (video below) and once again demonstrated an acute case of a personality disorder that obstructs him from recognizing the truth about himself and his job. Colbert asked him what ought to have been a simple question, but he was unable to answer accurately or honestly.<\/p>\n

Colbert:<\/strong> Rightly or wrongly Fox News is generally perceived to be the Republican news network. I know Fox News Sunday is on Fox Broadcasting, but you’re also on Fox News Channel. Do you think it’s fair to call Fox News a conservative broadcasting network?
\nWallace:<\/strong> No. Look, there are obviously, in prime time, there are some shows, the opinion shows \u2014 Hannity, O’Reilly \u2014 that are conservative, no question about it. But we think that there’s a firewall between the opinion shows and hard news.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wallace is continuing to advance the fallacy that only a couple of shows in primetime have partisan agendas, and everything else is straight up, unbiased reporting. He actually uses the phrase “We commit journalism every day,”<\/em> as if it were a crime. You have to wonder if he is just deliberately lying or if he has ever watched the network.<\/p>\n

There are three hours every morning that are hosted by folks like Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, Tucker Carlson, Anna Kooiman, etc., who are rabidly right-wing and viciously anti-Democrat. They regularly feature such ultra-conservative guests as Andrew Napolitano, Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, and Donald Trump had a scheduled Monday morning segment for several years.<\/p>\n

That’s followed by Outnumbered, a program name meant to refer to the four female hosts who invite a single male guest. But it really refers to the whole panel generally being comprised of only conservatives (with an occasional pseudo-liberal punching bag). Then there is the Real Story with Gretchen Carlson, who was promoted to that slot from her prior seat on the Fox & Friends curvy couch. A little later in the day is Your World with Neil Cavuto. It would be interesting to see if Wallace thinks that Cavuto is a neutral journalist as he berates and interrupts his liberal guests and cozies up to wingnut Republicans from Congress and business. After Cavuto is The Five, a program hosted by four hard-core right-wingers and one rotating Fox version of a lefty.<\/p>\n

That’s seven hours of daytime programming that is unambiguously conservative. So where Wallace gets the notion that it’s only in primetime that opinions are expressed is a mystery. But he is insistent that his network trades in legitimate journalism. He went to have this exchange with Colbert:<\/p>\n

Colbert:<\/strong> So there’s no sense of chaos as to what the unified message would be, or the narrative that’s being created by the network. There’s never any sense of like, this is what we’re gonna be talking about today or this is the take we’re gonna have on a story?
\nWallace:<\/strong> I know there’s this narrative out there that there’s this talking points we have to all follow. It’s bull.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the truth has long been known that Fox CEO Roger Ailes distributes a “morning memo”<\/em> everyday that does exactly what Colbert said with regard to a unified message. It would almost be worse if there weren’t. Because that would mean that everybody on the network just spontaneously said all the same things, with the same spin, without any coordination. It would mean they were all manufactured on the same assembly line of right-wing mouthpieces with the same hate-speech chips inserted.<\/p>\n

That’s a pretty scary thought. But no scarier than the fact that Fox News just happened to have created conservative stalwarts like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and many other others. Have they ever launched a liberal icon of the sort? Of course not, and that isn’t an accident. So Wallace might want to watch a few hours of Fox and see if he can plausibly defend the network and its obvious rightward bent.<\/p>\n

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How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
\nFox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.<\/a>
\nAvailable now at Amazon.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n