Thu, Oct 07, 2004 - Page 9 News List

Fox - anything but the truth in news reporting

As a recent report on US presidential candidate John Kerry showed, the news channel has turned a casual disregard for facts and accuracy into a way of life. So why are people willing to laugh it off?

By Zoe Williams  /  THE GUARDIAN , LONDON

This is the channel that tried to retitle "suicide bombers" as "homicide bombers," worried that "suicide" might make viewers sympathize; when an expert refused to adopt the new term, on the basis that all bombs were homicide bombs unless they missed, Fox stopped using him.

A recent poll cross-referencing viewing habits with political awareness found that regular Fox watchers were, depending on the issue, between three and seven times more likely than public-network audiences to harbor factually incorrect beliefs (such as "weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq").

Such a fantastical version of the concept of "news" is only compiled by such polemicists as Al Franken and Robert Greenwald (whose documentary, Outfoxed, has a US theatrical release after its astounding sales on Amazon). So it's not as if the rightwing US media is engaged in an unchallenged monologue, and frankly, it wouldn't be anything like so funny if there weren't evidence that other people were also gawping at it in wonder.

But in the end, the qualities that the leftist media envies and despairs at -- not the brash populism, but the gleefully casual disregard for the truth -- will sink it. Lies like Cameron's make Fox ever more cartoonish. And as cartoons go, it's never going to be as good as The Simpsons.

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