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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Not Now, Not Ever, Has Fox News Been Journalism
And it's a dangerous delusion to misclassify it as such

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, is an
important voice in the media ecosystem that seeks to encourage media
institutions to do a better job of holding politicians accountable. And
she does so diligently and intelligently, getting tons of likes and
retweets when she posts on Twitter, which is all to the good.

Thing is, many people believe that in order to be an effective
mainstream media columnist, you have to pretend to believe a lot of
things that have consistently been demonstrated to be false, lest you
find yourself admitting just how horrible the situation has gotten and
admit that well, dammit, it's hopeless. The appearance of
"fairness" is also another crucial consideration. The best example
of this came early in the century with Thomas Friedman's consistent
promise that maybe, somehow, in the next six months, something was going
to turn around for U.S. troops in the Iraq War, for which he had so
energetically cheerled. At some point, he had to have known better, but
he couldn't admit it. Hence the invention of the "Friedman Unit
."

Sullivan does something similar, albeit far less egregiously, in her
current column
,
in which she notes:

Last fall, shortly after the election, as Fox teetered
slightly-briefly losing audience share to Newsmax and One America to
its right, and to CNN and MSNBC to its left-I had the quixotic notion
of suggesting something that the network might do.

With the cable network's great hero, Donald Trump, moving off center
stage, I thought perhaps Fox might want to pursue more hard-edged
reporting about serious subjects. Beef up the news report; tone down the
rhetoric.

If they did it from a conservative perspective, fine. But they could at
least make their programming about the news, not hyperpartisan
commentary.

I don't know Sullivan well, but I know she is too smart to believe
that this was ever really possible. She nods in this general direction
with her use of the word "quixotic" in the column. The rest of the
column, regarding Fox's doubling (at least) down on incitement,
disinformation, and general craziness since the inauguration covers much
the same ground I did in my column in this space last week
.
This, too, is salutary, as far more people pay attention to what
Sullivan writes than what I do. This can be demonstrated by the fact
that I have undoubtedly made a version of this argument literally
hundreds of times since Fox became the benighted force in our lives, the
moment it first appeared in 1996 when then-NYC mayor, now Trump-loving
(alleged) criminal conspirator Rudy Giuliani literally forced Time
Warner to carry it

as a favor to Rupert Murdoch, and ultimately, to himself.

Fox has not ever been a news organization, and it never had any
intention of being one. Eleven years ago, I tried to raise the question
of exactly what it was in this column
.
It began as follows:

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.

Recall that last spring, David Frum lost his appointment at the
conservative American Enterprise Institute before observing,
"Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are
discovering we work for Fox."

A big part of the genius of Fox has been its successful ability to
masquerade as a news station and to get real journalists to go along
with the con. I could give literally thousands of examples of how Fox
anchors and personalities act in ways that are directly contrary to the
way professional journalists are understood to behave, but I want to
return to two that I used in that same 2010 column to demonstrate, to
borrow from George and Ira Gershwin, how long this has been going on
.

[W]hen Fox ran Andrew Breitbart's deliberately doctored video over and
over that was designed to falsely portray Department of Agriculture
employee Shirley Sherrod of having bragged to an NAACP audience of
discriminating against whites when she was saying just the opposite,
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack [then and now, alas] panicked and
fired her right away, without bothering to get to the truth himself.

What spooked him so? As Sherrod explained, Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl
Cook had demanded her resignation, telling her "do it, because
you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight."

The implied threat of unfavorable Fox coverage works even better with
Republicans. During the period of 2010 when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
[Remember that Lindsey Graham?] was negotiating to join Democrat John
Kerry and conservative independent Joe Lieberman in their attempt to
craft an energy bill, the Republican warned Lieberman and Kerry that
they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill
"before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious
process," one of the people involved in the negotiations said to The
New Yorker's Ryan Lizza.

"He would say, 'The second they focus on us, it's gonna be all
cap-and-tax all the time, and it's gonna become just a disaster for me
on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as
possible.'"

The upshot was that, even way back then, Democratic Cabinet officials
and Republican senators were afraid to do whatever they truly believed
to be the right thing lest Fox twist it into some nefarious plot against
"real" Americans. It did not matter that Fox anchors were nakedly
lying (or in the case of Beck, were obviously nuts). With Breitbart,
they were playing a deliberately doctored videotape, purposely out of
context, in order to slander Sherrod and intimidate Vilsack. And the
last thing in the world that mattered to the Fox executives who so
frightened Lindsey Graham was the fact that the United States
desperately needed some sort of response to the climate catastrophe
whose reality the network continues to deny to the detriment of
literally everyone on the planet who does not make money from it.

Since then, our politics have grown far more toxic, and conservatives
considerably crazier and more malicious. Fox has led every step of the
way. The result has been literally billions in profit for the Murdoch
family that controls its stock, and tens-in some cases hundreds-of
millions for the lying liars who peddle the poison it sells on camera.
Was Fox likely to follow the 2020 vote (and the murderous insurrection
that followed) by suddenly turning toward honest (if "conservative")
journalism? I have a bridge for sale ...

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Did you
know that was a line from James Joyce's Ulysses? I didn't until I
finally read it, in a class, finishing on the eve of this year's
"Bloomsday." I live right around the corner from Symphony Space,
where the annual all-day Bloomsday reading of Ulysses has traditionally
been held. I've been a few times, but I never really knew what I was
listening to. Imagine my pride, therefore, when I rode a Citi Bike
across town on Sunday (in the rain, alas) for the Origin Theatre
Company's "Bloomsday Revel," held at Bloom's Tavern, which
featured Ulysses readings by New York Irish actors, music, and, God help
us, a juried costume contest (with a free trip to Ireland as the prize).

I am not going to embarrass myself by trying to say anything
particularly perspicacious about the work itself. I disagree with the
people in my class who insisted that the novel has a plot. I think
it's a portrayal of the consciousness of genius; perhaps the best one
we will ever have. In this regard, it reminded me of Saul Bellow's
best work, and so I was pleased to find in Ulysses a character-one who
rates only a single sentence-named Moses Herzog
, thereby
demonstrating that Bellow must have been thinking about Ulysses, too.
Instead, I am going to suggest that you read this wonderful essay

from The Paris Review. It captures the experience of reading Ulysses as
part of a group, rather like Torah study. No less significantly,
however, it serves as a powerful argument about another of my pet
causes: the criminal underfunding of CUNY, one of the most important
institutions I've ever encountered in the battle against economic
inequality and for making the American dream a little more real.

(Sorry, there's no music this week. My Altercation overlords don't
like me to write much more than this, but thanks to my classmate Katha
Pollitt, here
is one
of the only two known recordings of James Joyce reading aloud,
fittingly, at Shakespeare and Company, in 1924.)

Finally, this event, "News Media and the Politics of Truth
,"
was inspired by my recent Altercation newsletter "Why Journalism
Isn't Really Covering the Threat of Fascism
."
It will feature a short talk by yours truly and responses by the
esteemed professors of government (and scholars of media) Tom Patterson
of the Kennedy School at Harvard and Robert Shapiro of Columbia. It will
take place on Zoom at 7:30 p.m. this coming Thursday, and you can sign
up at the link above.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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