The Fox News Two-Step

If you're a Fox News consumer and believe sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, even The Wall Street Journal, are shady and unreliable:

First, I'm sorry, you're just wrong. Those organizations are consistently doing the best journalism on the planet, the most ethically. In fact, in these times when good journalists are under attack and receiving death threats for just doing their jobs, those organizations are going overboard, triple- and quadruple-sourcing stories and fact-checking exhaustively.

Second, here's how Fox has deceived you into believing that those sources are unreliable and that some of their most important stories have been false, in case you're interested. Behold, the Fox News Two-step:

When a story unfolds that's uncomfortable for the right,

1) Fox News reports quotes and reactions from right-wing stars demeaning and denying the story, and debasing the journalists who broke it.

2) That's it. They do no actual reporting of the facts of that story. Well, maybe way down in the "print" news a person could find the real story. Other than that, they just let it fade from the news cycle.

The two-step: Run denials only, let it fade.

The headlines look something like this: "News Source X runs false, dangerous story about president, undermining US interests, says Right-Wing Opinion Leader Y. He should sue for libel, says Opinion Leader Z."

Because regular viewers and readers of Fox News are busy, like the rest of us, and seldom have time to read full articles, and because they trust Fox, that headline, to them, becomes the takeaway, and forms the basis of their beliefs about the story. And about News Source X.

I've found myself defending the Fox hard journalism side recently, mainly because detractors often fail to distinguish the Fox "entertainment" side--Hannity, Carlson, etc.--from the journalism side, and because the journalism side at Fox, especially by comparison, is largely ethical.

But the two-step -- Print Denials, Let it Fade -- is the work of someone on the Fox journalism team. They obviously believe it's ethical because it involves telling no untruths: They're simply reporting what someone said, and leaving it to their readers to discern that their "story" contains no factual reporting, and likewise leaving it to readers to get the facts, if they want them, elsewhere.

I think that's wrong. It's not ethical. The Fox journalist or journalists who do the two-step are complicit in a deeply destructive scheme to deliberately deceive millions of Americans.

Since you've read this far, Fox News consumer, another word: Are my preferred sources biased leftward? Of course. (Well, arguably not the Wall Street Journal).

But there's a huge difference between being biased and deliberately spreading misinformation. You can tell the truth despite your bias.

In fact, if you want to tell the truth, there's no other way except to own your bias and strive to tell the truth anyway, assuming you're human. There's no such thing as a bias-free human being, and thus no such thing as a bias-free news source.

If someone tells you he's completely objective, look out. That person is playing you, taking you for a sucker. And/or he might be a wee bit crazy.

There's no equivalence here, where Fox is only doing on the right what the New York Times is doing on the left. Absolutely not true. Demonstrably false. Also, on the part of some opinion leaders on the right, a deliberate lie.

Many, probably most, of the stories that make people on the left look bad that you've heard Fox News and "entertainment" running with were broken by these left-leaning sources I've named.

Why would a left-leaning organization break a story that made their "side" look bad? Because to those sources, the truth is a higher value than political expediency. For a real journalist, reporting the truth, the best you can ascertain it, if it's newsworthy--well, that's the job.

Many Fox journalists try their best to do the job, I think, but they're underfunded and understaffed, and break few stories in their own right. They're also constrained, obviously, in what they report and what they don't by the political preferences of their bosses. My preferred sources consider that sort of constraint unethical.

Because of those constraints, Fox journalists "break" a story, by and large, only when a right-friendly source calls them, saying they have a story. Is that thing a story? Maybe, maybe not. Who has time to check? So they report the quote. That's a pretty low-rent, dodgy way to do journalism.

Do my preferred publications get things wrong? Of course. And when they do, they immediately print retractions (and on their web sites, they leave the retractions up even after they correct the article).

On the other hand, if a journalist working for one of these organizations deliberately reports an untruth, that journalist is fired.

These organizations fact-check even opinion pieces. The New Yorker, another ultra-careful source I subscribe to, even fact-checks the *poetry* it prints. And yes, even the fiction.

Contrary to one recent line of cynical pap, it's not impossible to find out whether things are true or false, even in 2019. It can be done. All you have to do is own your bias, look it up, be careful, use your head. If you don't feel up to it, ask someone you trust to help you.

I've been surprised and dismayed a few times recently, after I've pointed out that a Facebook friend was spreading a politically expedient lie, to hear them say that they thought it was okay that they were lying a little, since their opponents lie so much, or because the point was valid despite the information being false.

That's toxic. Those friends have reached a place where their political loyalties are more important to them than what's true.

They've been led to that place on purpose. It doesn't have to be that way. We can do better.