It's rare for Fox, Rupert Murdoch's American news channel, to admit that a story is total fabrication, but a recent report on Senator John Kerry was so wild, and its falsity so easily verifiable, that an apology was the only option. The story was written by Carl Cameron, who has been following Kerry's campaign trail. He attributed to him this remark: "I'm metrosexual -- [Bush is] a cowboy," following it with a swift, if curious, left hook to the candidate's sexuality by saying that he liked manicures.
In my wishy-washy liberal way, I can't see either comment doing much damage to Kerry's standing among the right-thinking electorate, but the fact remains that he never said these things. In its apology, Fox claimed that the reporter was acting out of "fatigue and bad judgment, rather than malice," which is hilarious in itself. Imagine Andrew Gilligan [the BBC reporter who said that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had cooked the books on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction] saying: "I would have been more careful, only I was just too tired."
Bad judgment is self-evident, since this was never going to pass unchallenged; and yet the vignette demonstrates so well why rightwing bias is considered the comic, likeable face of partisan American infotainment, while the leftwing is thought so humourless. The misreporting works on so many levels -- for the numbnuts who find "metrosexuality" a fancy, urban way of saying "poof," no amount of complaints from Kerry, nor apologies from Fox, is going to make any difference. Those who believe Kerry was libelled, yet don't like him, will delight in his tangles as he tries to refute the remarks without alienating supporters who see nothing wrong with being metrosexual.
Those who support Kerry, believe in accurate reporting and resent the slurs still find themselves in a sticky position: what, after all, do these quotes mean? They mean Kerry's a little bit gay. Is there anything wrong with being gay? Well, of course not, except Kerry isn't. Well, if there's nothing wrong with it, and he isn't anyway, what's wrong with a little joke?
There's no similar squeeze the left could put on US President George W. Bush -- they could call him dumb, but nothing would trounce Bush's own verbal pratfalls. They could call him an ex-alcoholic or a Bible-bashing nut-nut, and he'd put his hands up and only make people like him more. But the truth is, even if the left found the most cunning lie in the world to spread about Bush, as a culture it lacks the devil-may-care, pubescent mischief that characterizes the right.
The main beef leftwing commentators have with rightwing stations, particularly Fox, is that they don't trouble themselves with the truth -- not even a Republican spin on the truth; they simply muddy all issues to such a degree that opinion and fact become indivisible and, as a result, all opinions achieve equal validity.
For the left, then, facts are paramount, and to mimic the rightist habit of false attribution would be entirely to undermine the crux of the argument. Over time, this has given them a reputation for being long on rectitude and short on fun.
Mostly, Fox is no fun either -- it's boring, repetitive junk, full of weird euphemistic language and tips on how to get pet smells out of your car. But often it is compelling, simply because its position-taking is so naked, so unrelated to proven truths, so coarse and, above all, so lacking in logical rigor that it thrills you with amused outrage, like playing Monopoly with someone who eats the money.
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