It is neither difficult nor uncommon for the ideological dishonesty that pervades Fox News to be exposed. Just this week the intrepid Jon Stewart was on there criticizing them on their own network. Last weekend Paul Krugman personally confronted Fox News president Roger Ailes with one of the innumerable examples of his network’s commitment to right wing spin at any cost. (Ailes is no slouch, he ignored Krugman’s example and went right back to his talking points.) Outside of its core audience you’ll have little trouble convincing someone that Fox has a distorting effect on the news, misinforms its millions of viewers, and is as uncaring about the damage it does as a far gone alcoholic. But while Fox News may not have any integrity, they do have a viewpoint. CNN has neither integrity nor a viewpoint, and that’s why they do considerably more damage to our politics than Fox does.
Whatever else can be said about Fox News they advocate for a point of view that is common to millions of Americans. They spread and reinforce that viewpoint, no doubt about it, but it would still exist without them. And while they push their ideological narrative in the shallowest possible ways (through mindless repetition from the mouths of skinny blond women), that is less a conscious choice than it is a natural consequence. Their kind of messages work best in the shallow end of the news pool. (Last week we saw what happens to those talking points when they are dropped in the deep end.) CNN, on the other hand, seems to traffic in shallow gossip news for no reason other than vacuous emulation.
CNN’s wholesale adoption of endless “analysis” in place of actual news or reporting is a gimmick without a motive. They try to present themselves as objective and even handed (“we’ve got people from both sides!” screams their advertising), but eschew the intellectual heft and gravitas that those things require. Consider the embarrassing incident from last year when they fact checked a Saturday Night Live skit while rarely or never doing the same to their actual guests. If they wanted to be trusted by the public that’s the kind of thing they’d be doing all the time. But that would mean they’d need to abandon the petty back and forth that has become their bread and butter.
They have excellent production values, talented on air employees, and plenty of budget for research and fact checking. If CNN had a daily program dedicated to comparing the statements made on the three political channels to verifiable facts it would set them apart from the crowd. It would also give them a genuine claim to being what political journalism is supposed to be: impartial. But these days CNN prefers the appearance of impartiality that comes with staffing and booking an equal number of lefties and righties, which is why they’ve got the empty suit that is Wolf Blitzer on for three hours, five days a week (plus an hour on Saturday) with a show whose title implies perpetual emergency.
That wholesale desecration of anything that could be called journalism can in some way be justified if you’re advocating for a position. But it cannot be justified if your primary claim is that you’re the middle of the road network. The entire premise of CNN is a contradiction: we do political journalism right by not doing it all.
What’s so galling about this is that no national outlet save The Daily Show ever gives CNN the same level of coal raking that Fox gets. For proof, we can look to The Daily Show itself. On November 3rd of last year Stewart et al. ran one of the most brutally accurate satires of CNN ever to grace television. It was largely ignored by the left side of the internet and as of this writing that specific clip on thedailyshow.com has been viewed 116,011 times. Two days later, on November 5th, Stewart did an impression of Fox News’ latest star, Glenn Beck. That item was linked in more places on the left side of the internet than I can count and as of this writing that clip has been viewed 871,050 times.
Partly we can chalk this up to the combined star wattage of Stewart and Beck, but there’s something more as well. From Media Matters on down the reality based community takes glee in pointing out the foibles of Fox News. They represent the enemy and it feels good to expose their hypocrisy and aversion to facts. But Fox will always be that way because that is the very purpose of having a right wing network. CNN is just as bad but their mushy lack of an ideology makes them a less satisfying target, even though there is at least some hope of redeeming them should the critical fire ever be trained more heavily their way.
Fox argues in their chosen way, that’s their prerogative and while it serves their base it has little appeal to the majority of Americans. But CNN lowers the entire debate by engaging in the same sensationalist crap while cloaking it in claims of impartiality. The existence of the former is probably unavoidable (if Fox News ever went under something would replace it), but the latter is a bleeding wound on the way we conduct politics in this country.
