In his role as the donor class’s darling, Marco Rubio has enjoyed support from the Republicans’ media arm, Fox News. Throughout the primary, Fox provided Rubio with friendly interviews and key bookings, including the first prime-time response to Barack Obama’s Oval Office address on ISIS. Many of the network’s top pundits, including Stephen Hayes and Charles Krauthammer, have been enthusiastic boosters. Bill Sammon, Fox’s Washington managing editor, is the father of Rubio’s communications director, Brooke Sammon. But this alliance now seems to be over. According to three Fox sources, Fox chief Roger Ailes has told people he’s lost confidence in Rubio’s ability to win. “We’re finished with Rubio,” Ailes recently told a Fox host. “We can’t do the Rubio thing anymore.”
A reasonable person might begin the discussion by wondering why a news outlet, one that prides itself on its self-proclaimed “fair and balanced” approach, would even be in the business of supporting political candidates. Since when does “objective journalism,” which is really what “fair and balanced” is supposed to be about, have anything to do with tacitly endorsing politicians?
If you believe Fox News Channel to in fact be “fair and balanced,” the Tooth Fairy is holding for you on line two. FNC, about to celebrate 20 years of camouflaging Right-wing propaganda as hard-hitting, objective journalism, is as much about being “fair and balanced” as Timothy McVeigh was about peaceful conflict resolution. FNC has been the unofficial but de facto propaganda dispenser of the GOP since it came on the air in 1996, and it makes no attempt to camouflage it’s Far Right-wing ideology. The fact that a “news” outlet has an official ideology is disturbing enough. That is uses its position to spread lies, disinformation, and half-truths camouflaged as “news” without even the barest pretense of impartiality accounts for why the American Sheeple have become addicted to stupid. (And NO, MSNBC is not the Liberal equivalent, no matter how much one might attempt to argue otherwise.)
If you watch FNC and believe it to in fact be “fair and balanced,” YOU are what’s wrong with this country. The problem isn’t Muslims, or illegal immigrants, or gays, or socialism, or any other the other bogeymen being pilloried by FNC talking heads; it’s with people who refuse to consider information critically but are ready, willing, and eager to react emotionally. If you’re one of the millions who prefer to be told whom to hate and fear and believe whatever you hear on FNC to be the gospel truth, you’re responsible for dragging America into the mud.
Congratulations; your willingness to do as your told by the propaganda peddlers at FNC has led to have exactly the quality of leadership we deserve. Who knew our standards we so abysmally low?
