This is a slight anecdote about my experience with Fox News.
I still wouldn’t describe myself as a leftist, but I was once a lot more right-wing than I am now. I ceased to be a Republican years before I ceased watching Fox News, and I never much cared for doctrinaire Republican positions, but if you look at the average Trumpnik voter today, most of them can’t stand the institutional Republican Party either, which is a huge part of why Trump won the nomination. Most of these guys don’t think of themselves as ideologues, but as “regular folks” who sometimes align with socially conservative or fiscally libertarian positions, and in any case prefer both to the liberal-left spectrum of politics. So if that also resembles the average Fox News fan, that might not be a coincidence.
But since I was hardly doctrinaire, I was capable of seeing outside the reality tunnel well enough to see that life wasn’t the way that certain media outlets presented it. So I was like most Fox fans in the respect that I was right-wing but not really Republican. But by the same token I’d also been listening to enough talk radio to notice the general decline of standards for that medium. Like, when Rush Limbaugh’s voice started getting high-pitched and awkward for reasons that weren’t made clear until he admitted that he’d lost his hearing, shortly before being obliged to announce that he’d been addicted to prescription drugs, which may or may not have led to his hearing issue. And then there was the day just after the 2006 midterms when Republicans lost the House and Rush admitted that he was sick of “carrying water” for the Republican Party.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rush-tells-his-audience-i_b_33690 (original link no longer on Rush’s site for some reason)
So at this point in my life, transitioning from the second Bush Administration to Obama, I was still sympathetic to the right-wing media but losing my illusions about it. And having heard so many liberals say how unfair and unbalanced Fox News was, I decided to do a little study. I just happened to have a weekday off, and decided to use it watching Fox News the entire day, to see just how biased it was.
It started with the morning-show team doing one of their little support-the-military bits by having their show on the deck of a Navy warship. It bored me, frankly. I don’t remember too much about that time of day, but I must have switched to another channel. I knew that Shepard Smith would be coming on with actual news around mid-day, so I switched back on to Fox News.
As it turned out, the day I decided to perform my little study – November 5, 2009 – just happened to be the same day that Army psychiatrist Malik Hasan decided to attack his base at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and injuring at least 30 others.
And at this point, it was early afternoon my time, later afternoon Pacific time, and the pundit shows that Fox makes its bread and butter on were not scheduled yet. So you had Shep Smith and the team of field reporters covering the events in real time.
And I discovered the dirty little secret of Fox News: when there is actual news to report, they actually report the news. They had a very good staff of professional reporters, and they stuck to the facts.
It’s just that as with CNN, which pioneered the concept of the 24-hour news channel, eventually you run out of actual news to report without reiterating everything that’s already known or been revealed. So your coverage moves from the Who, What, When, and Where to speculating about the How and Why. And once the shooter was identified as a Muslim of direct Palestinian descent, who had made it clear to his superiors that he did not want to deployed to the Middle East, news networks started asking if there was a connection to the War on Terror. And when you’re Fox News, and you’ve built much of your reputation (and audience base) capitalizing on the War on Terror, you play that up even more than the other networks. So as it approached 5 pm Pacific, you had more and more talking heads on Fox asking if Malik Hasan was in effect a terrorist. So of course by the time The O’Reilly Factor came on at 5 (8 Eastern), that was the main line of argument, and it basically carried over to the coverage in the following days.
I only realize in retrospect that I quit watching Fox News even as regularly as I had been after that. It wasn’t any one particular thing, it’s just that it felt like I’d seen the wires behind the magic trick. They would of course get far more partisan as Trump, the Platonic Ideal and result of their approach to the world, took over the Republican Party, which meant that they were financially obliged to be even less of a pure news outlet than they were.
More’s the pity, because they still could be. Shep Smith is an example of the Fox News approach done right: folksy, somewhat right-of-center, but geniunely fair and balanced. Chris Wallace is also a professional news man. Pundit Andrew Napolitano is a former judge who, like the late Antonin Scalia, is a hardcore conservative Catholic on many issues (namely abortion) but is also a principled libertarian on legal issues who has not been afraid to criticize conservatives, including the Trump Administration. It is clear that you could have an obvious political slant (like MSNBC, or as I call it, MSDNC) and still do real journalism at the end of the day. And I think that Fox News had managed to build a certain level of success in the days before Trump because it attracted people like Wallace and (ABC veteran) Brit Hume who may have been politically incorrect but also had standards.
But, as with everything else on basic cable, that’s no longer the point. Every channel from MTV to SyFy is relying less on the innovation it started with and more and more on reality TV, because that’s a cheap way to monetize their outlet. So you have all these shows with pretty people bitching at each other like they’re still in high school. Why would Fox News be any different? CNN is certainly not becoming any more newsworthy, and they never claimed to be conservative. So it stands to reason that as all 24-hour news channels shift to entertainment value, the one which started with a conservative slant would, like every other conservative medium, become that much more involved with sensationalism and reality-TV style tribalism than serious news or even a serious conservative viewpoint, which at one time might have existed.
Fox News has the resources to be a valid news network if they wanted to be. But that’s not really their job.