Vidiot says:

ImNotBlue,

WTF are you on about? You’re using itals and “Vidiot says” while appending something that I didn’t say at all. Kindly stop, please.

Vidiot says:

Sorry, your comment was so full of poor argument and straw men that it didn’t make sense. It looked like a comment you’d see on WorldNetDaily or YouTube.

I was talking about Fox News’ lack of journalistic practices and standards. You persist in seeing everything through an extremist left-right prism, and if you want to do that, then go ahead. Just don’t expect the rest of us to pay attention to your ill-constructed rants.

Vidiot says:

You seem to assume a hell of a lot about me, when in fact you don’t know a single thing. What makes you think you know my motivations? What gives you the basis with which to criticize my ego and desires? You are, quite frankly, ignorant about me, and your vitriolic personal tone and animosity are puzzling. What nerves did I strike? You have no idea what ideology I support, or my desires to have media outlets fall in line behind it., or “go away.” (For the record, that’s not the case. The cure for speech you don’t like is more speech, not less.) Again with the straw men!

I dislike Fox News not because it tells me things that are “politically inconvenient” for me, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I dislike it because it claims to be “fair and balanced” and is nothing of the sort. I dislike it because it trumpets the quality of the journalism despite having poor writing, lackluster foreign coverage, and very little actual reporting — Fox doesn’t seem advance many stories or dig deeply on them, unless the target of the story has been pre-defined by them as an enemy. I watch Fox News, sure. But I also watch other cable and broadcast networks, read multiple newspapers, wires and blogs, and do my own research on events. To have a prayer of understanding what’s going on in the world today, you’ve got to look at multiple sources and triangulate among them. (By no means am I saying that Fox is the only outlet that’s not doing a good job; just about every major journalistic endeavor drives me nuts from time to time, including the NYT, the broadcast nets, CNN, and more.) But Fox News by far offers the most simplistic, reductionist views of any journalistic outlet out there. I very rarely learn anything from Fox — they seem to amplify the shouting on whatever the right wing is exercised about at any given moment, from the bogus WMDs to why the imperial Presidency is a must to the bogus “War on Christmas” to why Barack Obama is a dirty terrorist Muslim to why the healthcare bill is making us all slaves. I learn far more from other news sources, including other conservatively-tilted ones such as National Review and the Wall Street Journal.

But your vituperative screed gets at something that seems to be a fundamental difference between us. You seem to think that journalism = the promotion of an ideology. I don’t think it’s about that, or at any rate it shouldn’t. I think all the press has varying levels of success: no one can be truly objective, but the key is to be fair. Fox constantly screams that it’s fair, while very rarely backing it up. I’m sure I could dig up a thousand instances that would support my point, many provided by the usual suspects. I’m sure you would immediately ignore them, howl that they’re invalid, or dig up a thousand instances from other outlets that you’re assuming I support that would somehow prove me wrong. But how many journalism awards has Fox won? (Now I assume you’ll tell me that the journalism awards are all run by an evil Commie liberal cabal and don’t matter much anyway.) How many foreign bureaus and correspondents does it have? How many documentaries or in-depth investigations (besides smear jobs on the left, that is, or anyone who dares say anything against Fox) have they produced? Jumping out of bushes with a camera and haranguing someone isn’t journalism, and apparently you confuse argument with haranguing someone here.