Fox News and a Decade of Bad Journalism

In this week's media notes, Howard Kurtz led off his piece by mentioning that Fox News' President Roger Ailes still avoids mentioning his place of work much of the time. Considering that Fox News is one of the highest-rated cable networks and habitually beats its competition like CNN or MSNBC, at least according to certain press releases, why does he hide? Shouldn't someone who honestly believe he is giving the American public a "fair and balanced" newscast that supposedly garners such high ratings be proud of what he does? Shouldn't a man be expected to stand up for what he believes in, stick his neck out with pride in Howard Roark-style and say "Yes, I run that because I have integrity and I am proud of what I do?"

Well, it's a moot question, because Roger Ailes either has no integrity or he lost his mind a long time ago. Ailes, you see, marks his network's success by how "mainstream" it is in his own opinion. He furthermore claims in the Kurtz article that "the only reason I know we're doing the right thing is that we're widely criticized."

Come again? If the only way to tell if you're doing the right thing or not is if you're being widely criticized, doesn't that mean that any one who is criticized can claim to be doing right? Shouldn't you know if you're doing the right thing independent of criticism? Pardon my foray into elementary logic, but such a statement is patently absurd. It sounds like something out of a Marx Brothers movie: "do things that'll bring criticism, boys, it's the only way to be sure we're doing right!"

And what about this "mainstream" viewpoint? The point of journalism - at least this is what I've taught - is not to cater to popular whims or thought, not even to think of the mainstream, but to try to tell exactly what is going on. Good journalism should have nothing to do with pandering to self-perceived "mainstream" views. The whole concept of "mainstream" is one from popular entertainment, so why is a major network head using it to describe his network's operating principles? Is the movie Network becomming more socially relevant every day?