Monday, October 19, 2015

Why We Need Fox News

Ben Faith
bf246411@ohio.edu

Fox News, the "Fair and Balanced" news station, is known for it conservatism. The issue with Fox is with their trickery of their viewers.  You would expect with names like Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Sean O'Hannity that Fox might employee mostly leprechauns, and after watching a few hours of Fox News, you might still think that.

Every national media outlet will lead with the same five or so stories, and those top editors pretty much decide what's going to be trending in national news. These top sources might be the New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC but we're missing one other popular news outlet, Fox News. Why doesn't Fox News follow the national trends of what is important vs what isn't? Because Fox doesn't care about what other news outlets say. They want to show you what they think, and how their viewers should feel about these stories.  Still, Fox News is legitimately important to the "Fair and Balanced" national media. 

Will Ferrell dressed as a Leprechaun in March of 2015 
Fox News follows their heart, and they really put out the stories that they want people to read, instead of what's the best trending stories at the time. Watching Fox News is not like watching regular news, it offers a new experience of social commentary, subjective news and objective news weaved into this one basket of oligarchy, democracy and something new that is left to be undiscovered. News viewers wants their news to have the appearance of being unbiased, so that when the news goes with what they believe, they feel justified in their personal views. It's the opposite of what news should be, that's the beauty in Fox News. 

A great example of #FoxNewsThings is their use of certain language, such as the term "Obamacare". 
Most media outlets started using the term after the administration started using it, but Fox has used this borderline-derogatory term non-stop since it was first coined by a heath care lobbyist. According to a 2013 Maynard Institute article, both NPR and AP have decided to stop using the term as it is still on the line of being a word of opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Although their discussion of "Obamacare" has gone down in recent times, to this day Fox News is still using the term.In my opinion, other news sources should follow NPR and AP and stop using the word unless in a quote or something. 

Fox News is important, because they teach other stations important ethics by being an antithesis of the perfect journalist. You should fact check your data, remain unbiased in your interviews, and you should report on issues that are important to the people. For a conservative, Fox may not seem that bad, but when other news sources else calls Fox "News", you know there is a problem.


No comments:

Post a Comment