By now it’s no secret that Fox News parent News Corporation had donated $1 million to the Republican Governor’s Association in June. You wouldn’t know it by reading the Fox wikipedia entry, however, as the blurb about it has allegedly been removed by Fox’s “scrubbers.”
According to Daily KOS:
“On the Fox News main page, someone put this inocuous little statement, heavily referenced, under the controversy section:
‘In June 2010, News Corporation donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association‘
… Two FNC scrubbers were on the case and according to the history page had that puppy removed.”
It’s not uncommon to see companies editing their own Wikipedia entries and the ethics of that is a debate for another time. What I would like to address here is the “fair and balanced” appearance that Fox News insists on pushing, when it is obviously not.
Let me get this straight: Your parent company donates *one million dollars* to the RGA and we’re expected to believe that you, one of the largest entities owned by News Corp., are not in the slightest bit influenced by the company that pays your bills?
We’ve seen your edits to undesirable Republicans on your T.V. shows. We’ve seen you turn a 180 on the idea of protesting a president’s actions from being un-American to being patriotic. Now we see that your parent company is a direct funder of the Republican Party, so what gives?
Why not just admit it? Either you are an extension of the Republican party, or the Republican party is an extension of you. One of those is clearly true and cannot be denied. And before you assume I’m just some liberal douche, let me clarify that I have the exact same problem with MSNBC.
What I don’t get is these folks who play the “us vs. them” game. Do we not understand it, yet? It’s all a pro-wrestling match; we’re being taken to the cleaners by a bunch of aristocrats who act like they’re against each other, but in fact are out for the same things: Our loyalty and money.
What irks me about this situation is that we finally have something that is clearly in the public eye that can expose these kinds of lies and it’s being swept under the carpet. But that’s what we’ve come to expect from news organizations that aren’t interested in the truth, on both sides of the aisle.
Maybe what they really mean by “fair and balanced” is that, yes, they have a right-wing slant, but that it only begins to balance the enormous left-wing slant of the majority of the rest of the media.
But even the rest of the media isn’t really left wing. Sure, you’ve got Olbermann and Maddow, but the majority are /at most/ center-left when it comes to their ideals. Fox has gone from being right-wing (back in the 1990s) to being extreme right-wing (2009). It’s startling to see the change if you examine their programming from back then versus now.
The issue of “balance” disturbs me because I don’t see as such. I see it as driving a wedge into a people who (if they weren’t so ignorant of the facts) could perhaps come together to make some good things happen.
As I said, all the media companies are full of it and they aren’t interested in doing anything but getting ratings, that’s why they’ll keep perpetuating this “our team, their team” crap.
It’s kinda sad, though, when you get more objectivity and information out of say, The Daily Show or The Colbert Report than you do out of MSNBC or FOX.