In the Summer of 2004 I found myself living in a small apartment taking classes and catching up for graduation.
Paying for cable television was out of the question and within a few days of moving in the service was cut off.
To my surprise, however, I found that three stations still came in clearly: Outdoor Life Network, Lifetime Movie Network and Fox News. OLN was covering the Tour de France full time and my aversion to anything French ruled this out as an option.
After enduring a Canadian film about a husband who gets beat up by his psycho wife and tells his friends he “fell down some stairs” on Lifetime, I realized I had but one choice left.
I had often heard people discuss Fox News as though its conservative bias was a matter of course.
Now my severely limited television viewing options would give me an opportunity to see for myself just how slanted its coverage was.
With the 2004 election looming, what better time to examine the most popular cable news network? Yes, Fox News would become my sole source of fair and balanced information on all worldly affairs.
At first glance, Fox’s coverage seemed to possess more of a “news-as-entertainment” bias than a conservative one.
Despite the upcoming election, most of their reporters seemed to be staking out the courthouse holding the Michael Jackson trial to find out what color pajamas Jacko would show up in. However, Fox’s most popular shows tell a slightly different story.
Two weeks into the experiment, Bill O’Reilly’s anti-France rhetoric was really speaking to me.
Also, his ability to determine whether a guest was a credit to humanity or scum not fit to walk the earth in five minutes seemed like just the kind of nuanced coverage I was looking for.
His debate with Michael Moore at the Democratic National Convention was certainly riveting television. For a moment I really thought O’Reilly would take Moore’s offer to join the army and fight Al Qaeda.
Ann Coulter is also a fixture on the network.
You remember Ann, right? She’s the one who looks like a liberal feminist but sounds like a Christian version of Joseph Goebbels.
On a college speaking tour last year she told an audience of Miami University students that women should not have been given the right to vote because otherwise Republicans would have won every election since 1950.
Before you think Fox News has failed to live up to its Fair and Balanced mantra, however, they do include the liberal perspective.
The coup de grace for my Fox News experiment came when the station aired a short segment shortly after John Kerry chose Senator John Edwards as his running mate. The piece featured a number of shots of Kerry and Edwards holding hands while uttering unfortunate sound-bites like, “We were meant to be together.” In the background played “Stand by Your Man” and the last shot of the segment was filmed from an angle that made it look as though the two presidential hopefuls were about to kiss. While all of this was in good fun, I still couldn’t help but notice the lack of a similar segment featuring George W. and his pal Dick Cheney. Granted, they certainly don’t make such a cute couple. And it may be hard to get shots of Darth Cheney since I hear he only emerges from his subterranean lair to give speeches to the Heritage Foundation.
In the end, it seems Fox News may not be the best place to go for objective news coverage. Nevertheless, it is watched by more people than any other cable news network and whilst I only subjected myself to it for one summer, I fear many Americans do so year round and without supplement.
Considering the influence this station wields, we ignore its message at our own peril. So next time you’re channel-surfing and see Bill O’Reilly’s Talking Points memo about the liberal plot to steal Christmas, just sit back and enjoy some fair and balanced (and corporately owned) news coverage.
Send comments to Jon at [email protected].
