A former producer, Charlie Reina, who worked for the Fox News Channel for six years, wrote a scathing letter about the way the station reports its news. His letter, found on Poynter Online, is not surprising to anyone with half a brain that has ever watched Fox News.
Before I go any further with this entry, I should make it clear that I am not fair and balanced about my feelings towards Fox News. I believe that FNC is the scourge of journalism, and one of the most frightening cogs in the right-wing propaganda machine. If you watch Fox News then you are not getting the real story, you are merely being hand-fed a greasy story that they want you to suck up. (See further evidence of my feelings towards Fox News in my October 12 entry, ‘Fox News Breeds Ignorance'.) I know that many people argue that most news organizations operate with a subjective viewpoint. I disagree, obviously there is always a level of subjectivity in journalism, but I have never seen such a persistently unfair and askew view of the world as is portrayed daily on the FNC, and Charlie Reina’s letter just illustrates the staggering lack of journalistic integrity that this “news” organization projects into our homes.
It has been made abundantly clear that the right believes that the left has been controlling the media for years, and it turns out that the right’s frustration with this myth had driven them so far into mass paranoia that they reacted with Fox News. Namely, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes reacted. Reina says that Fox is “a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, "Roger's Revenge" - against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades.”
Ailes has worked for Nixon, Bush I, Limbaugh, and now he is the president of Fox News. If that doesn’t sound crooked to you, then your eyes must be crossed.
Reina goes on to give a solid example of Fox News outlandish “news” tactics:
For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get "as much information as possible" about his decision.
Executives of FNC apparently send out memos every morning to all staff, and these memos address “what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered.” These memo are considered the “bible” of Fox News reporters and anchors. Where did Fox News get the idea for these executive memos? I’ll let Reina tell you since he worked there.
The Memo was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally or not, has ensured that the administration's point of view consistently comes across on FNC. This year, of course, the war in Iraq became a constant subject of The Memo.
Here is another golden moment from a past memo:
One day this past spring, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be "whining" about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent's report on the day's fighting - simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.
Reina ends his letter with a warning to those of you who still are under the illusion that Fox News is a fair and balanced resource for news.
These are not isolated incidents at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom makes a move unmeasured against management's politics, actual or perceived. At the Fair and Balanced network, everyone knows management's point of view, and, in case they're not sure how to get it on air, The Memo is there to remind them.
I do not write this blog just for kicks. I do not sit at my keyboard stroking keys so that I can stroke my ego. I am here, writing these messages, because I think something has gone horribly wrong in this country, and I feel that in a democracy every citizen has a duty to stand up when they believe something is wrong. Well, something is wrong.
Fox News has the highest rating of any other news network in this country. That truly terrifies me. If such a subjective and obviously extreme, politically driven channel is distributing news and they have the country's ear, then they can have a huge impact on the direction of this country. They have already fooled most of the country by repeatedly saying that WMD’s have been found in Iraq. I fear that this lie, among many others, is just the tip of the iceberg. If our government reports our news, then we no longer live in a democracy. If you don’t believe that the Republicans, and more accurately the Bush administration, are feeding news to the FNC then you are painfully naïve and you will probably find a home with the rest of the morons in this country who sit down every night to eat heaping piles of Fox's greasy, hate-filled lies. Eat it up, stupid! Eat it up!