Conservatives Need to Call FOX Out

Democracies die when their citizens lose touch with truth and reality. People can’t have honest discussions about what we should do unless we have an understanding of how things currently are. If we are going to Save Democracy, we need to start being honest about our media.

FOX News is hurting democracy.

I know that seems partisan, but I don’t mean it to be. I have many conservative friends and relatives and often explain conservative positions to my liberal friends. I think conservatives add a critical perspective to our national dialog and they have been right about many issues over the years.

But FOX is hurting democracy. Yes, MSNBC is clearly partisan, but their advocacy is still based on reality. It may be a stilted view of the truth, but there is some relationship to truth. Things are not made up wholesale. But they are on FOX.

Margaret Sullivan, a Media Columnist said it well:

What Fox News has become is destructive. To state the obvious: Democracy, if it’s going to function, needs to be based on a shared set of facts, and the news media’s role is to seek out and deliver those facts.

Most news organizations take that seriously, though they may flounder badly at times. When they do, they generally try to correct themselves — that’s why you see editor’s notes, lengthy corrections, on-air acknowledgments, suspensions and even firings of errant news people.

Not at Fox News.

We all know that FOX is completely one sided. If anyone doubts this, all the need to do is watch this compilation comparing how they trashed Obama for trying to talk with North Korea versus how they hailed Trump for doing the exact same thing. It is honestly embarrassing. You could argue that MSNBC displays the same type of hypocracy, but that doesn’t seem to have documented to the same degree.

But FOX goes to the next level. FOX just makes things up.

If any news network reported that Trump has had 6 wives, we’d all agree that was false and that it would be bad to report that. But FOX news literally just make up facts all of time. Many of them are documented here

Fox viewers are consistently the least informed viewers of television news. Fox viewers are much more likely to honestly believe things that are simply not true. This was originally reported in Business Insider in 2012. In 2016, FORBES ran a story entitled “A Rigorous Scientific Look Into The 'Fox News Effect', where the author wrote “I have done similar surveys, both of current events and more general knowledge. In my research too, Fox News viewers scored the lowest of over 30 popular news sources.”

If we are going to Save America, we need conservatives and Republicans to start calling FOX out for its falsehood. FOX champions the false us vs. them dichotomy that is wrecking our nation. And while MSNBC does this some, albeit with less hypocrisy, FOX does it by simply making up lies.