"One ought to examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others."
- Moliere (1622-1673), French playwright
Last month, John S. Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times, gave a speech at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. Mr. Carroll was delivering a lecture on ethics at a gathering in honor of Robert W. Ruhl, the late editor and publisher of the Medford Mail Tribune. Among other things, Mr. Carroll criticized the journalism of the Fox News Network, which he described as pseudo-journalism:
"But we live in changed times. Never has falsehood in America had such a large megaphone...If Fox News were a factory situated, say, in Minneapolis, it would be trailing a plume of rotting fish all the way to New Orleans...It is the netherworld of attack politics that gave us Roger Ailes, the architect of Fox News. Having spent much of his career smearing politicians, he now refers to himself as a journalist, but his bag of tricks remains the same."
Mr. Ailes, to whom Carroll refers, is the Chairman and CEO of Fox News. Somehow, what John Carroll said about Fox and him found its way back to his office, and Ailes responded in this rather scathing op-ed in the Opinion Journal:
"Mr. Carroll's pathetic attempt to smear Fox News Channel will only drive his paper's circulation down, as it should. Fox News Channel's audience in Los Angeles is increasing daily. The Los Angeles Times is becoming less relevant in people's lives, so Mr. Carroll is trying to flog health back to a newspaper by attacking television news."
Well, there you have it--a little mud-slinging from two media titans, both of whom are zealously promoting their for-profit entities by putting the other down. Couldn't they spend their time on more useful and enlightening activities, like giving us the straight scoop on things that matter?
2 comments:
I'm surprised that anyone could read these two pieces and wind up thinking they are both somehow equivalent instances of frivolous mud-slinging.
Anyone who cares about the news media "giving us the straight scoop on things that matter" should be disturbed by the study cited by Carroll on how badly misinformed Fox viewers were on key issues related to the Iraq War.
There's nothing inherently evil about Fox presenting coverage of the news from a highly partisan Republican perspective. It's just that anyone imagining that they are seeing conventional journalism in which, among other things, conventional standards of journalistic ethics apply, is just kidding themselves. - Bruce
I started watching FOX because I was sick and tired of the liberal slant in the major networks and even CNN. It's strange that it is a "slanted" report when it differs from a person's own opinion. There are so many people switching to FOX there must be some reason and to dismiss it as pseudo-journalism is rather arrogant.
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