I am trapped in a hotel where the only entertainment option is Fox News.
I didn't know how bad it is. They were talking about the Employee Free Choice Act, and even their headline lied. I'm not talking about spin, I'm taking about blatant falsehood.
The EFCA will give employees who seek union representation a choice between a card check and an election. If the employer does not want the union, this is the only way organizing is possible. An election "campaign" is just an opportunity for employer intimidation. Intimidation in this case means firing those leading the campaign on the other side, and their sympathizers.
There are ways to spin this, to claim the effect is something different. You can, at minimum, offer the other side's arguments, even while disparaging them.
None of this was allowed on the Fox air. Instead, worker freedom was said to be entirely on the side of fighting the act, and no one in their right mind felt any different, except a few "union activists" and the "Obama Administration," which need to "pay off" the activists.
This was not journalism. If no facts contrary to what your boss says to conclude are allowed into what you're doing then you are not a journalist. You're a propagandist.
It was Orwellian.
I'm certain that if Rupert Murdoch called Fox & Friends tomorrow, telling him to say the opposite of what they said today, and if Roger Ailes were suddenly retired, then they would gladly say the opposite. While denying what they had said today.
In the last few months there have been hints that Murdoch might, in fact, make that phone call. We have precedent. He switched his UK holdings from anti-Labour to pro-Labour in 1997. (He's probably switched it back recently.)
The time has come for the Obama peole to do some leaning. There are many things government can do, or withhold, from someone like Murdoch. A word or two should be sufficient.
Before today I would never have said that. The idea of government leaning on a news organization to slant the news, or to unslant it, would be anathema to me. As a journalist.
But journalism is a business which follows the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. There is no sense pretending otherwise.
Since Murdoch is not practicing journalism at all, in the sense of a journalist as anything but a mouthpiece for the boss' prejudices, then there is nothing to be said except lean baby lean. That's a 19th century attitude, one whose acceptance means everything I learned at Northwestern, the very idea of a "journalism profession," was a lie from beginning to end. Or has become one.
So it's a lie. But Murdoch made it one. Pulitzer and Hearst and Medill allowed it to become something different, something real, something to be proud of. Murdoch systematically destroyed it.
There can be no thing as a "Murdoch School of Journalism."
