Fair and Balanced Clubbing of the Left

Scott Norvell is London bureau chief for Fox News, you know that "Fair and Balanced" organization that pretend to present the news. Fox has long protested that allegations of being a right wing public relations organization were unfair and unbalanced, despite the fact that anyone watching the Fox News Network knows who they are batting for with in five minutes. Well Scott forgot to preach the "Fair and Balanced" creed when he talked to the Wall Street Journal Europe on May 20:

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  "Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly. And those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren't subsidizing Bill's bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don't enjoy that peace of mind.
  Fox News is, after all, a private channel and our presenters are quite open about where they stand on particular stories. That's our appeal. People watch us because they know what they are getting. The Beeb's institutionalized leftism would be easier to tolerate if the corporation was a little more honest about it."

Even though the pen is mightier than the sword, Fox as opted to use clubs. So it is okay to be completely biased and unbalanced as long as your company is privately funded, but if your organization receives any public money--like the BBC or PBS or NPR--then actual fairness and actual balance are required. I guess all those tax breaks and special FCC licenses received due to millions of dollars worth of lobbying in Washington DC don't count as receiving public money.

Oh well, at least the continual beating that the Left takes from Fox will be easier to tolerate now that Fox is being a little more honest about how they treat liberals.

Thanks to Timothy Noah at Slate for passing this one on to us. You can read his article HERE.

I also find it interesting that while Fox is being more honest about their conservative bias, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting--who was appointed by George W Bush--has stepped up his attacks on the liberal bias of PBS and specifically Bill Moyers. In fact, Tomlinson paid a consultant $10,000 to monitor Moyers' show on PBS, Now, and watch for liberal bias. Then he refused to make the consultant's report public even though it was paid for with tax payer dollars. You know that public funding that Fox is so concerned about. He probably pulled the report because it found that PBS coverage is more balanced than most other news sources. PBS seems left biased only if you take right leaning clubs like Fox News as the self-professed "Fair and Balanced" center of the news spectrum.

Meanwhile, PBS which receives only 15% of its money from taxpayers, denies Tomlinsons allegations.

Also, Bill Moyers gave a great speech about PBS recently to the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis, Mo, where he said, "A free press is one where it's OK to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence. " You should read the transcript.

I wish more of the press were interested in evidence and logical conclusions rather than clubbing people who disagree with them to death and feeding the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly. But at least I can take solace in the fact that I am subsidizing Bill O'Reilly's bombast through FCC concessions and tax breaks to the "news" broadcasters.