Journocracy

GUYS, Fox News has got a clear con­ser­v­a­tive bias, and The Times Is ON IT. Wait hang on, they aren’t… More on that later. Before we return to the cold, dark heights of Bull­shit Moun­tain, we’re going to the British Isles.

In Britain, the lead­ing news net­work has been in a dif­fi­cult place recently. Unlike Fox News, the BBC has been pub­licly called out for mal­prac­tices. A recent scan­dal broke out around its role in the Jimmy Sav­ile sex­ual abuse case. The accu­sa­tion, that the BBC had cov­ered up alle­ga­tions of sex­ual abuse against Sav­ile dur­ing his time at the chan­nel, has led to the res­ig­na­tion of direc­tor gen­eral George Entwistle. For some this was enough to call for the end of pub­lic broadcasting?

Well no, because that’s exactly the ben­e­fit of a pub­lic broad­caster. They can be called out for their behav­iour by the public. Not so for Fox, they are account­able to — reg­u­lar read­ers all together now — their share­hold­ers, i.e. the Sith Lord. So when another incred­i­bly cred­i­ble story about Fox News came out this week, no one even blinked.

Bob Wood­ward broke the story this week about Fox secretly nego­ti­at­ing with Gen­eral Petraeus in 2011, then com­man­der of the Afghan forces, based on a leaked tape. While the actual con­tent might not be very sur­pris­ing, the tone is noth­ing less than repulsive.

What we hear is the audi­ence of an obe­di­ent Fox ser­vant with King David. She starts by mak­ing sure His Majesty is pleased by the cov­er­age he’s get­ting from her sta­tion. Then she pleas for him to return home a hero and run for pres­i­dent. He ends up refus­ing because he’s more inter­ested in tak­ing over the CIA, as “covert ops is the real growth indus­try”. King David, Lord of the Drones.

That’s not the most dis­turb­ing part of the story though. After all, Fox suck­ing up to the mil­i­tary isn’t that big a sur­prise. But the other media not report­ing it…

As men­tioned ear­lier, The New York Times decided to leave the story out of their main edi­tion, and hide it in a small para­graph on an insignif­i­cant blog, together with Kate Middleton’s preg­nancy. (Insert bath­wa­ter joke.) Even the Wash­ing­ton Post, the paper that broke the story in the first place, made sure it was out of the news the next day. The rea­son is clear. Both con­cerned news­pa­pers are listed on the New York Stock Exchange, as NYT and WPO. (Any­one thinks that sounds like two Star Wars droids?) And mar­kets just don’t like controversy.

Sud­denly the pub­lic model of the BBC doesn’t look so bad after all. There are caveats though. Pub­lic broad­cast­ers like Rus­sia Today, CCTV News, and even Al Jazeera have been known to speak the word of their gov­ern­ment. But an open, demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety like the U.S. should be able to avoid it. So in 2016, the mes­sage will be sim­ple: Vote Big Bird, not Petraeus.

(This article was first published 8 December 2012 for the Distilled blog)