Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen says Rupert Murdoch, who started Fox News, merits an award "listing his sins and a bucket of slime with his name on it." CBS news president Andrew Heyward, oh so high-tone, says, "There is a longstanding tradition in the mainstream press of middle-of-the-road journalism that is objective and fair. I would hate to see that fall victim to a panic about the Fox effect." But NBC News president Neal Shapiro may be getting the message of the medium when he says, "If you have a range of opinion that leaves out a whole part of the country, you're unintentionally sending a message that 'you are not welcome here.' "
It could be that American readers, listeners and viewers are not the idiots the supercilious left thinks they are. They are basically moderate conservatives who see the liberalism in so much of the coverage and "analysis" in mainstream journalism comprising newspapers (and newsmagazines) and network news. Tuning them out, they turned on to talk-radio and cable news, and now they are flocking to Fox - seeing it as fair and balanced, predominately conservative though it may be, as a counterpoise in an otherwise lopsidedly leftist media world.
"The Fox effect" may be defined as a blurring of traditional notions of "objectivity" via a seamless interlacing of news with analysis and opinion - or opinion masked as analysis. But what is possibly revolutionary about it is not that it is new but that the opinion is conservative.
Newspapers have been injecting opinion - almost entirely liberal - into news columns for decades. (Keats said marvelously, "Let any man write six words and I can hang him for it" - i.e., in just six words the writer's bias or slant will be clear.) Some newspapers are blurring the distinction between news and opinion by running analysis or opinion pieces, frequently by reporters, in the news columns. The New York Times sort of sealed the deal when it named its adamantly leftist editorial page editor as editor of the news department.
The rise of Fox News may be the latest response to the liberalism in the press first heralded by the rise of conservative syndicated columnists, who long have dominated the op/ed pages. Leftism permeates newspapers and television. In his book Coloring the News, William McGowan - a reporter published widely - finds at key major dailies "an invisible liberal consensus." Civil libertarian and press observer Nat Hentoff concurs.
In television, network coverage generally supported the American enterprise in Vietnam - until Walter Cronkite editorialized against it. That opened the floodgates. Today network television is drowning in blatant bias evident in bites such as this Lesley Stahl tilt with Colin Powell March 25 on CBS' "48 Hours":
Stahl: There are now criticisms, we're beginning to hear, that this force (in Iraq) isn't massive enough.
POWELL: It's nonsense....
Stahl: Yeah, but our, the rear is exposed.
POWELL: It's not. Exposed to what? Exposed to small -
Stahl: Exposed to fedayeen, exposed -
POWELL: Fine. So? We'll get them in due course....
Stahl: Are you saying you're not worried or concerned about guerrilla warfare?
POWELL: Of course we are and that, and we're trained to handle this. ... They're not threatening the advance.
Stahl: But you can't get your supplies -
POWELL: Who says?
Stahl: - can't get the humanitarian -
POWELL: Who says?