One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?
Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II.
Catch the shell game? The real complaint has nothing to do with "fairness" or imaginary journalistic "objectivity." What this fool actually misses is the "good old days" of Democratic party hegemony over the media, itself a deformity of the American political spirit born of the emergence of the Democratic New Deal coalition and its consolidation during the Second World War. It was an era that allowed a self appointed elite to define what was allowable, which they labelled "fair" and/or "objective," and what wasn't, which they called "unfair" and "biased." The real goal, of course, was to marginalize ideas the elite didn't like. Thus you had the New York Times hide the crimes of Stalin from its readers because, somehow, the truth was deemed to be "unfair" and "biased."
My appeal to Stalinism is purposeful, because what dishonest hacks like this really want would be modelled more by the old Soviet Pravda than anything else. Only one elite approved view would be allowed.
This truly moronic and perverse view of journalism largely explains why we no longer have a newspaper culture in this country while places like the UK still does. One knows in Britain that you can read papers with differing editorial views. Going to London is always fun for an American because one can buy three or four different papers that provide a riot of contrasting styles, information, ideological visions, and perspectives. In the United States our papers are nothing of the sort. The are bland, homogenized, and, frankly, a mockery of our free speech protections. Why have a First Amendment when all the papers say the same damn thing?
Television news, because it was born at the moment of Democratic hegemony, had always suffered from the same stultifying ideological conformity that dominated the "New York Times" model of newspapers. The rise of Fox News, which offers a different perspective from the old liberal model, presented American viewers with something of the color and diversity we can see in English newspapers, and, for this reason, the reactionary old guard hate it. They long for the days when they acted as the sole arbiter of what the American people could learn about the social and political world. Just think of the hubris involved in the motto of the Times. "All The News That's Fit to Print" isn't a promise of public service, it's a symbol of the repression of democracy by a benighted elite who view themselves in almost Nitzschean terms. They are the overmen who create the values the rest of us inferiors must live by, and as such they put themselves above questioning or criticism. People like Howell Raines, former editor of the Times and the author of the drivel linked to above, have no respect for honest differences or real diversity of opinion, and when it comes to the tenets of democratic society they are truly amoral beasts.
UPDATE:
Here is an interesting and slightly different take on this column from Right Wing Nut House: HOWELL RAINS AND JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS
In order to compete with network news, newspapers abandoned straight, factual news reporting and went into the business of using news as a way to convey opinion, infusing “drama” into stories. A young black kid did not kill the old white lady for her purse because he’s a criminal. Racism killed the old lady as surely as if George Wallace had pulled the trigger.
An exaggeration, but nevertheless, the entire concept of “objectivity” had been turned on its head in order to both sell newspapers and satisfy the “new journalism” that was making a mark in publications like Rolling Stone and Village Voice. The young, strongly opinionated writers for those publications and others were the vanguard of new kind of “journalist” who saw newspaper reporting as more than just a means to inform the public about what was going on in their part of the world, but viewed their mission as “reforming” the staid, old institutions of the media in order to promote a decidedly liberal point of view.
Rains has got to know that the New York Times does not report news the same way it did in the 1950’s, doesn’t he?
I understand where this is coming from, but I'd argue that the difference between the way papers like the Times were covering news in the 1950's and how they were covering it the last ten years is a difference of degree not kind. The mid-twentieth-century Liberal "consensus" was already well established and reflected in how the Times of the world did business in the Fifties. The "new journalism" of the late 60's and early 70's is mostly a matter of younger journalists who differed from their elders not in their politics, but in their rejection of existing decorum. In a sense the "new journalists" did interject a first moment of honesty by saying, "Screw this pussyfooting around. Let's just be what we are already (i.e. ideologically motivated activists), and stop pretending we are something else."
To date, that also marked their last moment of honesty.
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