When Fox News Attacks:Fox Plays Good Cop / Bad Cop This Week
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JoeUser Forums
This week, Fox News showed both its best and worst qualities.
The Bad
The worst thing about Fox News is it's all-but-open partisanship, consistently giving far more negative coverage to John Kerry than do the other networks, and relentlessly pushing Bush campaign talking points.
This week, the Chief Political Correspondent of Fox News wrote a piece filled with fake Kerry quotes, playing on standard conservative spin points of falsly hyping Kerry's supposed effeminateness, in order to appeal to the homophobia of born again Christians. The article was posted to the Fox News website, but taken down later after the blogosphere started making a fuss about it. To its credit, Fox News apologized for the incident, but that doesn't change the fact that we now know Fox News' chief reporter on the campaign is strongly biased against the Democratic candidate. I've never seen a similar thing happen at another network, or at CNN -- which shows how exceptional Fox News is in its partisanship. Do you remember another network doing anything like this? Please don't claim MemoGate is equivalent -- show me a story with made up quotes actually authored by the senior person in charge of covering political campaigns.
The Good
Fox News cares as much about ratings and drama as they care about anything else. Fox News completely ignored the agreement between the two candidates not to show reaction shots of one candidate while the other candidate spoke. Without Fox News' disregard for the agreement, the nation would never have seen the Bush scowls and eye rolling that revealed his irritability and mounting frustration. Bush came off as a man angry that someone dared to disagree with him -- a quality periodically reported by the White House press, but rarely laid bare to ordinary Americans. Kudos to Fox News for making the debate seem more like, well, a debate instead of the tired joint-candidate-appearance event that was expected -- and dreaded -- by pundits.
The Bad
The worst thing about Fox News is it's all-but-open partisanship, consistently giving far more negative coverage to John Kerry than do the other networks, and relentlessly pushing Bush campaign talking points.
This week, the Chief Political Correspondent of Fox News wrote a piece filled with fake Kerry quotes, playing on standard conservative spin points of falsly hyping Kerry's supposed effeminateness, in order to appeal to the homophobia of born again Christians. The article was posted to the Fox News website, but taken down later after the blogosphere started making a fuss about it. To its credit, Fox News apologized for the incident, but that doesn't change the fact that we now know Fox News' chief reporter on the campaign is strongly biased against the Democratic candidate. I've never seen a similar thing happen at another network, or at CNN -- which shows how exceptional Fox News is in its partisanship. Do you remember another network doing anything like this? Please don't claim MemoGate is equivalent -- show me a story with made up quotes actually authored by the senior person in charge of covering political campaigns.
The Good
Fox News cares as much about ratings and drama as they care about anything else. Fox News completely ignored the agreement between the two candidates not to show reaction shots of one candidate while the other candidate spoke. Without Fox News' disregard for the agreement, the nation would never have seen the Bush scowls and eye rolling that revealed his irritability and mounting frustration. Bush came off as a man angry that someone dared to disagree with him -- a quality periodically reported by the White House press, but rarely laid bare to ordinary Americans. Kudos to Fox News for making the debate seem more like, well, a debate instead of the tired joint-candidate-appearance event that was expected -- and dreaded -- by pundits.

