It is and always has been the job of news organizations to keep the
government honest. However, in order to keep the government honest, a
news organization must itself be honest. That means admitting its own
biases, taking great care to separate facts from opinions, and taking
even greater care to ensure that the facts it presents are backed up by
hard evidence. While this article was inspired by the current "feud"
between Fox News and the Obama administration, my main purpose here is
to highlight what I believe are fundamental problems among all cable
news outlets, not just Fox.
"The fact that our numbers are up 30
plus in the news arena on basic cable I'd like to think is a sign that
we are just putting what we believe to be the facts out on the table."
-- Michael Clemente, Fox Senior Vice President for News
OK, but if that were really a valid argument, then the National Enquirer would be five times more factual
than the Wall Street Journal, because five times as many people read it.
It doesn't work that way. More facts don't generate more ratings, and more ratings don't generate more facts. Rather, the opposite is usually true. Sensationalism generates ratings. All
24-hour news networks are, by their very nature, sensationalistic. They
have too much time to fill and too little hard news, so they blow every
little story way too far out of proportion and focus on what they think
the viewers want to hear, not on what the viewers need to hear. The
culture of fear that this has created in our society is a topic for
another editorial, but the basic point is that cable news is driven by
money, not by journalistic integrity. Like modern-day Howard Beales,
the news networks draw more viewers when they say and do outrageous
things, not when they report the hard news. There are no negative
inducements to this, no checks and balances to prevent them from airing
opinions or false information as facts.
Broadcast networks were
once subject to the FCC's "Mayflower Doctrine" (AKA "Fairness
Doctrine"), which guaranteed equal time for controversial issues. The
basic reasoning was that the airwaves are a limited public resource, so
the government should step in to ensure that no single viewpoint is
allowed to dominate them. However, the rise of cable TV in the 80's
largely undermined this scarcity argument, and thus the Fairness
Doctrine was abolished by the FCC during the Reagan era. Broadcasters
and cable providers are still required to serve the "public interest",
though, and in fact, news programs are a large part of how broadcasters
satisfy this requirement. Cable providers, on the other hand, satisfy
the public interest requirement by allocating additional channels for
public access or local news. Cable news
networks like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are not individually subject to the
public interest requirement. It is assumed that, if these networks are
achieving sufficient ratings to keep them on the air, then the public is
satisfied with them, and they are serving the public interest.
The
other major difference between broadcast and cable news is that
broadcast news is not designed to attract viewers to a network. It is
designed to retain viewers. Broadcast news is a public service
tantamount to providing free newspapers at a coffee shop. The coffee
shop makes their money on coffee, so if they provide a free newspaper,
then there's a good chance that their patrons will have a second cup
while reading it. Similarly, people who tune in to a particular
broadcast news program often stick around for that network's primetime
programming. The cable news networks are, on the other hand, like news
stands. News stands make their money on newspapers and magazines, so
they're going to put the more expensive, more colorful, more
sensationalistic tabloids and magazines up front to draw in the
customers. Similarly, the cable news networks primarily air punditry
shows in primetime, not hard news.
“An increasing number of
viewers are relying on Fox News for both news and opinion, and the
average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the A-section of
the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming
represents." -- Michael Clemente, Fox Senior Vice President for News
Sure,
it's easy to distinguish the editorial page from the A section, because
the editorial page usually has "Editorial Page" emblazoned across the
top in 100-point Helvetica. Would it be as easy to separate the news
from the op-ed pieces if they were intermingled and written in the same
style? I haven't written a real editorial since the state editorial writing contest my senior year of high school, but even then, I knew that
it is the fundamental job of an editorial writer to make sure that the
audience knows that the piece is an editorial. In fact, if the audience
cannot discern the editorial nature of the piece after one paragraph,
then the writer has failed. This is where Clemente's analogy breaks
down. The pundits for the major cable news outlets often do not present
themselves as editorialists. They present themselves as investigative
journalists who claim to be getting to the bottom of a story. Could
the average, casual watcher of a cable news channel easily identify the
pundits from the reporters? This is particularly difficult when the
pundits and the reporters appear on the same shows and even, at times,
interview each other.
The other fundamental job of the editorial
writer is to present opinions, not facts. This is a distinction that we
teach to elementary school students but one which we seem to have
forgotten as adults. You can't write an op-ed piece claiming that the
sky is green or that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 or that
Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen. These statements can be proven or
disproven empirically, and thus they are not opinions. If you are
attempting to disprove something that most people accept as fact, then
you are not an editorialist. You are an investigative journalist. As
soon as you cross the line into investigative journalism, then you are
required to present evidence to back up your claims, and you are
compelled by the credo of journalistic integrity to be impartial.
This is the major problem with many cable news pundits. They
attempt to hide behind the veil of editorialism, but they present
themselves as investigative journalists. An investigative journalist
who displays bias and does not back up his or her claims with evidence is a
tabloid journalist, not an editorialist. Whether or not something
actually happened is irrelevant to a tabloid journalist. All they need
is one or two people ("sources") to say that it actually happened.
"I went
back to my days 40 years ago, when I was on the Nixon White House staff,
and I think I see some of the same early steps that I saw then." --
Senator Lamar Alexander. Alexander went on to refer to the White
House's stance as "classifying people who disagree with you as your
enemies."
The issue is not whether a news organization disagrees
with the White House. The issue is whether said news organization is
using misinformation to support its disagreement. This goes
back to the difference between fact and opinion. "I disagree with the
president's policies, and here's why" is an opinion. "The president is a
socialist muslim" or "the president is a fascist terrorist" is not an
opinion. An opinion is a subjective statement. It is something that cannot be argued empirically, because it speaks to a personal preference or a personal experience. A fact is objective. It is something that can be proven ... or disproven. The problem is that, if it is disproven, it is no longer a fact. It is misinformation, and those who knowingly represent misinformation as facts in order to further an agenda are not journalists. They are propagandists. Plus, here's the third thing that they
taught us in high school editorial writing: never engage in personal
attacks or name calling. If someone wants to disagree with the
president's policies, that's fine, but as soon as they start accusing
the president of un-American activities, they had better be prepared to
back that up. That goes for any president, not just the ones I voted
for.
"The other thing I don't get is why the mainstream media,
which, frankly, would go absolutely nuts if George Bush had singled out
MSNBC and said, you know, Nobody follow them, they're not really a news
organization, and we're going to boycott -- I mean, all my friends in
the 1st Amendment crowd would be up in arms" -- Susan Estrich, Fox
Political Analyst
Free speech is a right. An audience is a
privilege. Also, the First Amendment does not protect libel or slander.
The White House is not trying to silence Fox News. What they are
trying to do is shame them into doing a better job of fact checking.
Perhaps the Bush administration did not go after MSNBC because their
viewership was so low. The Bush White House certainly did, however,
react to the spate of documentaries that came out in 2004 that were
critical of the administration. For the record, I think that some of
Michael Moore's claims against the Bush White House were equally as
egregious as some of the claims Fox News has made against the Obama
White House. The difference is that Moore never claimed to be "fair and
balanced", nor was he ever given a primetime show on MSNBC. I don't
recall any liberal parents pulling their kids out of school so they
didn't have to hear Bush's speech. Bush received 1/4 as many death
threats as Obama. If anyone talked of secession or questioned Bush's
citizenship or religion during his administration, it certainly was not
aired on national TV.
I will defend to the death the right of Fox
News to say whatever they want, but as long as they call themselves a
"news" channel, I will also hold them to the same standards of
journalistic integrity to which I hold any other hard news outlet. That
means clearly delineating op-ed pieces from hard news. That means fact
checking sources. Same goes for you, MSNBC.
I don't think
re-instating the Mayflower Doctrine as law, as some have proposed, is
the answer to this. One of the reasons why that doctrine was repealed
was that it caused broadcasters to avoid controversial issues
altogether. This is not what we want. However, I do believe that any
cable network that claims to be an outlet for news should be subject to
the FCC's public interest requirement, and a network's fulfillment of
this requirement should be measured against the pre-Reagan "trusteeship"
model rather than by market success. I also believe that FactCheck.org
or another independent, non-partisan organization should certify news
programs based on their fact checking record.
