by Peter Barry Chowka
In recent months, the hatred of Fox News from the left has been almost matched by trending memes – from the right! Examples include (to paraphrase) “Fox News has turned left.” “Fox News is being run by Disney.” “The woke wives of the Murdoch sons are running Fox.” “RINO Paul Ryan is running Fox News from his seat on the company’s board of directors.” And so on.
All of that is false. Total BS. How do I know? Unlike most of the new anti-Fox critics, I actually watch the Fox News Channel (FNC). I take notes. I have monitored the channel closely since its inception 24½ years ago. And I have the tapes and digital recordings of Fox News going back to year one – thousands of hours’ worth – to prove it.
This fake “Fox News has moved left” meme started about three years ago. I addressed it in several articles at American Thinker in 2019, including here and here.
The fact is that Fox News has never been more conservative than it is right now. In the past, Fox News featured a variety of leftists and non-conservatives on its prime-time schedule. For two decades, Bill O’Reilly ruled the roost at 8 PM ET. He claimed he is not a conservative – instead, he described himself as a “no spin guy” who complimented Barack Obama for being “a stand-up guy.” Also in prime time on the channel starting in 1999 was Paula Zahn, who joined Fox after a stint at CBS News. She went on to host a program at CNN after she left Fox. Megyn Kelly, who outed herself as center-left after she went to NBC in 2017, was another prime time star at Fox News for a number of years prior to jumping ship.
Meanwhile, since the fall of 2017, following a year of turmoil and uncertainty, FNC has had the most rock solid conservative opinion show lineup ever in prime time on any channel, featuring hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. All three of their (usually) live shows (8-11 PM ET) are repeated for West coast viewers starting at 9 PM PT. On weekends, FNC’s superb hosts include Mark Levin (whose Sunday show features the best long form interviews on television), Jesse Watters, Jeanine Pirro, and Greg Gutfeld.
The conservative critics of Fox News cherry pick a limited number of recent incidents and claim that they define FNC, including Melissa Francis shutting down a discussion of George Soros on Outnumbered (Soros’s influence has been covered at length on Tucker Carlson’s and Steve Hilton’s programs, among others); the Fox News Decision Desk’s early election night call of Arizona for Joe Biden – a prediction that held up (subsequently one of the experts who engineered that call has left the channel); and the sudden departure on February 5 of popular Fox Business host Lou Dobbs (reportedly in the works for some time, with one of his time slots given to Larry Kudlow, Director of the National Economic Council from 2018 to 2021 and a staunch defender of Donald Trump).
These and other conservative critiques ignore the bigger picture of what Fox News has achieved during its quarter century of challenging the mainstream media and what it is doing now.
A little history
Unfortunately, these days most people still rely on the old media a.k.a., the legacy media or the mainstream media (MSM) for their news. So it has been for the past century. Last year was the 100th anniversary of radio – an important anniversary of broadcasting that I didn’t see mentioned anywhere. Radio morphed into TV, and now most videos are being viewed on the Internet. The more that technology advances, the more “mediated” (filtered and manipulated) the reality it depicts has become.
Commercial television broadcasting that the public could access on home receivers began in the U.S. in 1948, three decades after the introduction of broadcast radio. For the next three decades, there were essentially three TV channels: the mainstream alphabet networks (with PBS added in the 1970s) and their well-funded news departments. Some larger cities had at most six or seven channels. Television news since its inception was always a bit left of center, but the networks and local channels, and the rest of the MSM, still tended to adhere to a modicum of traditional journalistic standards.
There were examples of fake news, however. In 1964…
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