Predictable, Yet Fascinating!

So the other day, I write a post talking about the insufferable lie all our major NewsCorps engage in: the ridiculous fiction that they are just giving us unbiased news and not reflecting the particular biases of their editorial staffs and reporters. I make it clear that, as a free speech advocate, I think people should be allowed to say what they like, just don’t lie to me that they are giving me the unvarnished and unbiased truth, untainted by their ideological agenda. I suggested having something like a color coded bias-o-meter or something, which clearly reflects the particular agenda of the “news” show, etc.

A day or two later, I happen on a pretty funny Daily Show entry (scroll down two) which demonstrates exactly the sort of lie I’m talking about when it comes to the “fair and balanced” lie that FOX routinely tells: a lie every bit as false as “all the news that’s fit to print” in the NY Times. The piece itself is a perfectly good demonstration of the obvious biases of FOX News and can take care of itself well enough. It is also, by the way, a pretty devastating picture of the ridiculously transparent attempts of the White House to dictate to the MSM organs just what news they are supposed to report.

But, of course, that went unnoticed by the sundry folk who instantly appeared in my comboxes to protest that (and you may want to sit down for this) Jon Stewart is biased and he didn’t attack every network but only FOX!

Now, this would really matter to me–if the Daily Show was, you know, an actual news show and did not proclaim itself to be “fake news”. But it’s not. Nor does it, so far as I can tell, ever bother to announce itself to be “unbiased”. It’s a comedy show. And as a free speech advocate, I figure they can go after whoever they like as long as they don’t lie to me that they are unbiased, “fair and balanced”, giving me “all the news that’s fit to print” or ringing other changes on the patent falsehood that they are “objective”.

The funny thing is that an unconscious quarrel broke out in my comboxes. No, not the quarrel between those who insist that FOX *is* fair and balanced and those who say it’s not (though there was that too). No, the real quarrel was between those who try to maintain that FOX is fair and balanced by providing both liberal and Thing-That-Used-to-Be-Conservatism perspectives and those who maintain the far more plausible argument that FOX is fair and balanced by “being conservative leaning because ALL of the rest of the networks are either liberal leaning, or in the tank for the DNC.” That is, in fact, what the network is quite obviously doing, and I would not feel my intelligence being insulted if they simply acknowledged that’s what they are doing. But instead, as is so common with the Thing That Used to Be Conservatism, it’s practitioners mimic the very traits of lefty ideological warfare and try to pretend they are not doing it: in this case, feeding me obvious massaged agitprop while lying to me that they are “fair and balanced”.

The conclusion I draw from this is not “Jon Stewart is fair and balanced”. He is, I repeat, a comedy act. I don’t turn to comedians for news. I turn to them for a bit of laughter. No, my conclusion, as usual, is that Corporate News is much of a muchness wherever you go and that the faster Catholics can form themselves according to the Tradition of the Church and not according to Tribal Pieties, the faster they will be able to discern BS and extract themselves from those tribal pieties. The big unspoken points in all the “Jon Stewart didn’t attack other networks” gripes in my comboxes are a) that’s nice. But doesn’t his documentation of the quite obvious massaging of “news” from FOX still bother you? and b) you are forgetting perhaps, this?:

Meanwhile, the ridiculous spectacle of a White House whinily trying to tell the rest of the MSM what to do once again confirms my impression of the Amateur Administration. They’re like a bunch of kids trying to tell the rest of the gang who is allowed to sit at the Cool Kids table. Dudes: get over it! It’s a free country and our news media get to print what they like, however it’s biased. Fox included. Welcome to the country with the Bill of Rights in the Constitution!