WoW! According to Howell Raines the failed NY Times Executive Director, who left shortly after presiding over the Jason Blair scandal in 2003, FoxNews’ ((FNC) Roger Ailes “has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations...”
Raines asks, “Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes...for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration - a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?”
Apparently Howell Raines is either hopelessly hyper-partisan or stupefyingly ignorant of today’s news media landscape...or perhaps both.
FNC, like CNN and MSNBC, the other major 24-hour Cable News Networks offers straight news during the day and Commentary in the evenings.
The mainstream broadcast media (ABC, CBS and NBC, a/k/a the MSM) have long been reliably Center-Left, peopled by a staff that has consistently been over 80% both liberal in outlook and registered Democrats politically.
But recently MSNBC has brought a virulently Leftist and hyper-partisan agenda to an unprecedented level.
MSNBC’s evening crew is the most liberally biased and politically partisan on the air today. Their evening Commentary line-up of Schultz, Matthews, Olbermann and Maddow are all committed (and in a few cases committable) far-Left partisans.
FNC’s evening Commentary crew consists of the fiercely Independent Glenn beck, who has excoriated progressives both Democratic (Carter and Obama) and Republican (Hoover, Nixon, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.), the slightly Left-of-Center, traditionalist Bill O’Reilly, a man who opposes the death penalty, supports a guest-worker program, believes in a strong environmental agenda and regularly rails against “oil companies profiteering at the expense of the folks,” often mistaken for a “Conservative,” by far-Left partisans who revile his traditionalist views and his support for things like Megan’s Law and stricter penalties for pedophiles and the Christmas Holiday. Sean Hannity, a very partisan Conservative and a generally reliable Republican supporter is the lone partisan in FNC’s evening line-up. He’s followed by Greta Van Sustern, a lawyer who usually focuses on crime stories along some other legal issues.
So why have some, like Howell Raines, excoriated FNC without objecting one bit to the far more egregious, hyper-partisan, and out of step with America propaganda they’re nightly spewing out on MSNBC?
Almost certainly because Raines is delusional enough to believe he lives in a Center-Left country, when there is absolutely no indication that is so.
In fact, the most generous poll to date shows self-identified Conservatives (40%) outnumbering self-identified Liberals (21%) by about 2 to 1. America is and long has been a Center-Right nation. This goes a long way to explaining why both Conservative Talk Radio and FNC slaughter their competition in the all important ratings war.
Today FNC has 4X as many viewers as CNN, while the far-Left MSNBC isn’t even on the ratings radar!
Why do you think that is?
Primarily it’s because the American people’s political views aren’t shaped, nor even very much influenced by the media, if they were, then through the 1960s and 1970s, when Liberals held a veritable monopoly status over America’s MSM, America would’ve been a Center-Left nation. It was most certainly not.
In fact, those were the same folks, the same viewers and listeners who gave the likes of Rush Limbaugh and other Conservative Talk Radio hosts the HUGE ratings advantage they enjoyed long before FNC came on the scene.
That too shows that media figures and pundits don’t convert the people, nor even sway them much, if at all. Instead it proves that the people respond to those who espouse views that resonate with their own, they gravitate to the people and views that mirror their own. It really is that simple.
Apparently Howell Raines is someone who sees nothing wrong with a corrupt, pro-BIG government media pushing a vile, largely anti-Capitalist/anti-American agenda on an increasingly unwilling populace. That’s the ONLY way to explain his seeing FNC, a lone Center-Right media outlet, as a threat, while apparently having no problem at all with the far more vile and hyper-partisan MSNBC.
That’s NOT OK and that’s why Howell Raines’ views are recklessly irresponsible and dangerously antithetical to an open discourse where all sides are able to offer their best arguments and the people themselves decide which side to support.
