Gene Lyons reflects upon today's media in an article titled "People, we are in deep trouble." In the course of arguing his case, he offered up this 1943 quote from George Orwell as he reflected on the Spanish civil war:
"I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed ... I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.' "
Lyons runs through a list of bogus hoaxes perpetrated upon the public by a partisan press--local coverage of a black man's trial in the south, for example, Whitewater, the New York Times and Washington Post trumpeting the case for the war in Iraq.
In the case of Fox news, yet another study released this week confirmed what we already know: Their viewers are less informed on actual facts than are viewers of other news programs.
What this misses, however, is that a good-sized demographic--staunch conservatives--wants its own version of the news, its own worldview appearing to be dominant. Fox news represents its market. It didn't create it.
Besides, Fox is not necessarily the only offender here, just the biggest. Fox's coverage of the 2008 Democratic campaign was, in my view, often more objective than coverage at, say, MSNBC.
In any case, even without Fox, does anyone really think that the public square would not be filled with lies and deceptions? Billions of dollars are at stake, as well as tons of power. All the world's religions teach the dangers of both, for multiple reasons, one of which is that lies tend to swirl around both with special vigor.
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