About Fox News, and how it distorts Truth.

I have been paying attention to the news through several major news outlets over the past year - from the Impeachment hearings, to the Coronavirus, to the killing of George Floyd and the massive upwelling of solidarity agaist racism - and have seen how different outlets report the news.

In particular, I have been paying attention to the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post, while also paying attention to how the news is presented on Fox News, and sometimes the AP or other outlets (mostly online print journalism, but sometimes also video reports).

What has been extraordinarily striking to me, is how Fox News (at least in the written website, which is what I have mostly seen) reports the news upside-down. What I have seen is the consistent pattern of what must be a deliberate attempt to obfuscate, mislead. Literally, it seems that the intent is to report on the trees, not the forest.

If you look at Fox News in what has been posted, the headlines highlight small parts of a story, as if that were the story, in ways that mislead one to false conclusions. If you drill down deeper within news reports, then you will find more of the whole picture... sometimes. Similarly, when there is an important news event - and there there are three or four different 'stories' or sub-headings under a larger heading - usually it is the last article that contains more of the actual facts and that is reported in better context. From what I have seen, the top two or three articles under a major news story traffic in misleading side-bars that would tend to make the unobservant reader think that the (false) picture they were being given was the main takeaway.

I believe in the future, when people look back on this time in the news media, Fox News will transparently be seen as a study in distortion, misinformation, and propaganda, under the guise of presenting truth. And while also being a prime instigator of the movement that accuses others of 'false news', while being perhaps the main purveyor of it. (It will also be seen, I believe, as similar in important ways to how misinformation is wielded by countries whose 'leaders' lean toward autocracy - and abetting those practices by 'legitimizing' some of them here.)

This is not to say that the other publications do not have slants at times in their news reporting. However, it would seem by the pervasiveness of the distortion by Fox News that this is deliberate and intentional and in effect the unwritten policy of Fox News as it stands, whereas with the other publications there is I believe the effort to seek to NOT have bias or distortion the the reporting, as policy and intent, even though it still happens despite those efforts.

There is also vastly better boundary between "fact" and "opinion" in the publications I have read - as compared for Fox News. With Fox News, these are frequently conflated, and so it requires the deliberate work and focus of comparative reading to try to sort out what is fact and what is fiction.

It is not that I have any problem with both "conservative" and "liberal" points of view being expressed. Far from it - it is part of the essential expression and debate by which we can seek to move toward E Pluribus Unum. The 'debates' that have occurred in public culture, however, have I believe been skewed increasingly over the past decades - and where the 'center' has been located has been deeply affected by the misinformation particularly from media outlets such as Fox News. Debates that are based in false information that millions of people believe as true, imperils democracy.

In addition, what is purported to be "conservative" and what is purported to be "liberal", have often gone far from the roots of what these words actually mean, so that things that may be justified as a 'conservative' point of view may actually be other points of view that are actually anti-conservative, clothed as conservatism. The same applies, also, to elements of 'liberalism', so that which undermines a liberal point of view can be disguised as liberalism. This is not to say that these things are necessarily done consciously, for very often these are likely unconscious a not deliberate. But we need to be become aware of what we may not be conscious of. And in addition- we need to call out and address that which is deliberate, conscious, intentional.

We need to have honest debates. We need to seek as best we can to report the news as news, and opinion as opinion. There are ongoing challenges, for news organizations and for all of us. But to the extent that there are organizational efforts to deliberately distort the news - and therefore to distort the essential character of the debates and discussion we have as a people in this country - we are ill served, and such needed to be called out for what they do, and changed.. or replacements for such need to be created.

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Links to these news outlets:

New York Times

CNN

Washington Post

Fox News