Fox News? No Such Thing

Many conservatives appreciate the political slant they find on Fox News, but it can be argued that Fox doesn't really provide news at all. Rather than investigative journalism and reporters, they have extended commentary on the news being reported by other media outlets. That's not really news, so why do many conservatives prefer it? Do they not care?

Eric Boehlert writes for Salon about Fox's "coverage" of the tsunami in Asia:

Two things have become obvious to news consumers in the aftermath of the tsunami. The first is that even when faced with covering a global humanitarian crisis, Fox News is incapable of turning off its robotic partisanship, not to mention its ever-present sense of victimization. Secondly, Fox News can barely call itself a serious news-gathering operation. Fox News is "not a news station," argues filmmaker Robert Greenwald, whose 2004 film "Outfoxed" was critical of Rupert Murdoch's news operation. "They put their money and resources into paying O'Reilly and [Sean] Hannity millions and millions, not into having reporters and real journalists around the world."

As the Financial Times noted this week, "While CNN, the only U.S. news network with a strong global presence, was able to mobilize its correspondents in the region and fly in big-name reinforcements, Fox had to rely on untested freelancers, some of whom appeared to have never stood in front of a television camera before." ... Back on the night of Dec. 30, when CNN was going wall-to-wall with its tsunami coverage, Fox was airing, as the Los Angeles Times noted, a rerun of O'Reilly interviewing actress/fitness guru Suzanne Somers.

CNN has roughly 75 staffers fanned out across the region, including "NewsNight's" Aaron Brown in Indonesia, and morning host Soledad O'Brien in Thailand. At broadcast networks, "CBS Evening News'" Dan Rather and "NBC Nightly News'" Brian Williams were both sent to the region to anchor broadcasts, as was ABC's Diane Sawyer, and scores of other celebrity journalists. But not Fox News. With its competitors dispatching their A-teams to South Asia, Fox's big guns -- O'Reilly, Brit Hume, Tony Snow, Chris Wallace, Greta Van Susteren -- all remained safely ensconced inside East Coast studios. That's because they're not reporters but Beltway creatures of comfort, who rarely stray beyond the 202 and 212 area codes.

This isn't even the worst of it. Fox commentators (they apparently don't have much in the way of reporters) have spent a lot of time attacking people for things they haven't said and trying to turn the story of thousands of deaths into something more familiar: how awful Bill Clinton is, how awful liberals, are, and how awful the U.N. is. Unless they are attacking someone to the left of them, it seems as though they have nothing much at all to say.

Publius does an excellent job showing how someone like O'Reilly uses emotion to make an argument rather than logic. O'Reilly doesn't like how people have criticized Alberto Gonzales, but he doesn't even try to explain how those criticisms are wrong. Instead, he says that people shouldn't criticize Gonzales because he grew up poor and, by the end, connects the criticisms with conservative perceptions of declining morality in America. How does he manage it? By not appealing to logic or reason once throughout his little tirade — and this is typical of not only him, but the rest of Fox "News."

Frankly, for any organization that tries to call itself "news media," this performance is nothing short of pathetic. Tell me again why people bother watching them?

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