Fox News markets itself as the “fair and balanced” news commodity, and there is a sound marketing reason for this advertising. Fox’s idea of being “fair and balanced” is in relation to the political left bias of the majority of the other mainstream news outlets. In other words, Fox markets itself as providing the other side of the political bias, which helps to make the spectrum of news reporting more balanced on the whole. Does this mean that Fox itself provides fair and balanced information? Not necessarily. Fox is no different than the other mainstream news outlets in that they report the news from their own political perspectives, or through what Hermann and Chomsky (1988) might call “filters.”
Our experience and last week’s readings should help us to understand that in the commodification of information—which the news media is really all about—there is no “fair and balanced” approach. Romano (1986) reminds us that in news reporting, facts are removed from actual experiences because someone must write down what is the equivalent of an interpretation of the actual event (p.64). The event is the event. The reporting of the event is the reporter’s take on the event. And the reporter’s take on the event is filtered through the editors’ and news corporation owners’ “filters” often which are controlled by special interests, as Hermann and Chomsky (1988) remind us. Perhaps Chomsky’s term “propaganda” is a bit of a strong word to use about the result of this process. Propaganda is only propaganda, in my estimation, if the people to whom the information is disseminated become manipulated by it due to their ignorance. But Chomsky is no stranger to using loaded terminology to describe real processes. I like to call it the process of commodifying information, because in the end, news corporations are big businesses operating in a capitalist society in which they are competing for readers, listeners, and watchers of news. We shouldn’t be shocked by this reality. Big business is big business. We should be shocked, however, at our own ignorance and naiveté of being manipulated by media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch who are not selling information, but who are selling a commodified bastardization of information--a wolf in sheep’s clothes-- that reads, looks, and sounds like objective truth, but is economically-and-politically filtered information.
References
Herman E., & Chomsky N. (1988). Manufacturing consent. New York, NY: Random House.
Romano, C. (1986). Grisly Truth About Bare Facts. In R. K. Manoff & M. Schudson
(Eds.) Reading the news. New York, NY: Pantheon. Retrieved from:
https://learn.gonzaga.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_40834_1%26url%3D.
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