Slate : Hate Olbermann? Hate Dobbs? Blame Fox News
It’s kind of tragic to think that a media outlet as ridiculous, outlandish, and downright unabashedly biased as Fox News has had such an impact on American mainstream media.
It would be foolish to think that Fox’s phenomenal ratings has not influenced the recent flux of opinion-centric news coverage on both sides of the aisle. The kind of commentary and coverage that has no respect for the intelligence of the audience and must instead force feed them ideas rather than allowing them to come to their own conclusions based purely on the facts.
Of course, the saddest casualty of this sensationalist media is the once prestigious and informative CNN. At a recent screening of Latino in America at the Newseum nearly every audience question had to do with Lou Dobbs.
One audience member in particular pointed out that the entire Latino in America special was 4 hours long but that Lou Dobbs was given over 200 hours of airtime each year. Another audience member asked if in their analysis of media bias towards Latinos CNN spent anytime looking at the bias in their own coverage of Latinos on the network? CNN’s answer, ‘no.’
That response is the Fox effect in practice. CNN is a part of the media, in fact, for quite sometime between 1980 and today CNN was considered the name in American news — both in terms of standards and coverage — but now, CNN is taking a page out of the Fox model by not challenging itself.
In the post-Fox News world why should CNN concede to either audience? Dobbs gets high ratings and the Latino consumer market is growing twice as fast as the general consumer market.
So why not do the least effective thing and give the Latino audience a superficial look at what CNN believes are the issues that affect them the most while still appeasing the minutemen who flock to hear Dobbs rant and rave every night? After all, that’s what Fox would do and Fox gets the viewers.
Think of it this way, what are the odds that at some point in the next year at least one installment of Latino in America could come right after a broadcast of Dobbs’ show?
With this latest misinformation campaign, Fox stands to become the first network to actively try to kill its viewers.
That Rupert Murdoch may skew the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is somewhat beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox‘s successful model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to experiment with a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. It‘s Fox that led CNN‘s Lou Dobbs to remodel himself into a nativist cartoon. It‘s Fox that led MSNBC to amp up Keith Olbermann. Fox hasn’t just corrupted its own coverage. Though its influence, it has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.
Ignore Fox [Slate]