News Media As Fan Service

I’ve never really watched FOX News very much over the years. It wasn’t because I disagreed with their views, I just wasn’t very interested in it. The same goes with MSNBC, again I think they have a right to air their views, I’m just not interested in very partisan news of either the left or right. Having a slant to the news isn’t a bad thing. The problem is when facts and opinion collide, or when opinion starts to challenge the newsgathering aspects of a network. We all now know that FOX News was quite aware that former President Donald Trump was lying by saying that he won the 2020 Presidential election. It’s opinion celebrities knew the truth but never shared that with their viewers and chastised journalists who did challenge the lie. It’s hard not to look at the revelation of Fox News officials knowingly lie to its audience about who won the 2020 election with a sense of anger and a sense of condescension. In many ways, it confirms everything critics believed about the cable news network and its audience for years: that it undermines democracy and that its viewers are people who are easily led to believe things that just aren’t true.I think it’s important to step back from the Schadenfreude for a moment and ask why did this happen? Why would a major news network knowingly lie to its audience and even threaten journalists at the network that did their jobs by telling uncomfortable truths? To understand this we need to see that what happened at Fox didn’t happen in a vacuum. The reason Fox lied to its audience was because that’s what its audience wanted. The deliberate falsehoods were the result of a large swath of the American populace no longer believing the wider media listened to them. In fact, a large portion of the American public doesn’t trust the media anymore and that is not good for American democracy in the long run. None of this means Fox is innocent and this isn’t an attempt at whataboutism. But you can’t understand what happened at Fox unless you understand that the news media in America is broken at a time when we need a media we can trust.

Click