How do you decide whether the person you're talking to is a liberal or conservative? Here's a subtle tell: if the number of mentions of "liberal left-wing media" or "in the tank for Obama" is greater than 5 per sentence, you are speaking to a conservative. Now, we all know that the concept of an over-arching liberal bias in the media is complete and utter rhino shit and a total fabrication. Unfortunately, judgments of the claim's merit is ultimately beside the point. The fact that media judgment is now viewed through the lens of "biased vs. unbiased" reflects an undesirable shift in the criteria by which we judge the media's credibility and performance.
It's pretty amazing to consider how a channel as proudly trashy as Fox News ever succeeded at creating such a drastic paradigm shift in how we perceive journalism. What used to be a forum to document the day's events and developments is now purely driven by the presentation of opinion. This is just the nature of the ratings-driven aspect of the news - TV shows will put on what will grab the public's attention, and nothing grabs attention better than crazy people who elicit outrage. But this emphasis on punditry has also opened the door for entire news organizations to demagogue and advocate a specific point of view. In the case of Fox News, that point of view is that of the Republican Party, and matching the GOP's ability to deceive and distort is a tall order, to say the least.
Being a water-carrier doesn't come without challenges - when a certain partisan faction tries to convince you that the reality you're experiencing is all in your head, they have no choice but to dismiss anything and anybody who will address that reality. How else to convince the public that up is down, left is right, and that trickle-down economics is in the best interest of poor families? It's a flimsy facade, but the reason it works as well as it does is in its insistence that it's the only "neutral" media outlet on TV. Whether or not this claim is true is beside the point: the fact that it's repeated ad nauseum is their attempt to goad us into judging their opinion journalism on irrelevant criteria. Of course, the slogan of "fair and balanced" is a blatant hoax to all but the most sycophantic viewers. "You mean Fox News isn't actually Fair and Balanced? Thanks for that info, Captain Obvious."
Yet we have come perilously close to falling for the trap: we have convinced ourselves that the easiest way to combat Fox is to continue exposing their blatant right-wing slant in the hopes that Americans haven't figured it out for themselves. When you hire pundits to spout off, then there is going to be bias present no matter what. Ignoring any partisan spin, Countdown is biased towards "Keith's opinion", and Bill O'Reilly is biased towards Bill O'Reilly. It's kind of pointless to even mention that there may be a slant. And since we've accepted such a high proportion of commentary to pollute the shitbox, we've implicitly accepted, perhaps even embraced, the existence of these biases. Yet we constantly complain about them, occasionally at the expense of de-emphasizing transparency, accuracy and logic first and foremost. And in doing so, we have started to prioritize the need for media neutrality to an unseemly degree.
Thus, the infection of this insane obsession with media bias has metastesized throughout the mainstream press. I documented a major consequence of this re-prioritization a month ago in a diary on how Fox News has created an environment where competing stations have been forced to create false equivalencies to maintain that air of neutrality. CNN is the absolute king of false equivalencies, where McCain fuck-ups are diminished and/or ignored, and the 3 or 4 Obama slip-ups are recited and recycled - thus amplified - every time they need a counter-point. And for what? To convince the public that they're "centrist" and "unbiased", as though that's even a noble goal.
The ultimate false equivalency in all of this is the comparison of MSNBC vs. Fox News - see Campbell Brown's interview on The Daily Show, part 3 of Oct. 27. Brown wants it both ways: she claims that since Fox News advocates for McCain, and MSNBC advocates for Obama, they're both lacking in credibility, and it's CNN who provides the best analysis through its centrist position. But this is a rather odd argument to juxtapose with her assertion that just maybe one side is pulling our prick a little more forcefully than the other. Well, if that's the case, why base the entire premise of your show around a centrist disposition? One side is bullshitting us, yet the truth lies in the middle? What sort of nonsense is that?
This is why the unwarranted value we place on journalistic non-partisanship is so dangerous. There are times when the reality is partisan. And it seems to me that the follow-up to the Worst President Ever would be one of those times. This is why we need to hold the media to the standards they don't want us to: accuracy, thoroughness, and honesty, but not neutrality. It's certainly possible to respect a right-wing network that meets certain journalistic standards - and that's why Fox News is so contemptible. It's not that they're conservative, so much as they're nasty, dishonest, and completely uninterested in the accuracy of their reporting. KO may be biased, but I enjoy him regardless because he is capable of making a compelling case that his biases are warranted. It's not hypocrisy to enjoy Countdown or The Rachel Maddow Show while condemning Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. It just means we hold our commentators to our own standards, and they're not left/right judgments - they're credibility judgments.