Whose Ox Would Jesus Gore?

We’ve carped a lot lately about that annoying person who
claims that “the mainstream media” does not cover this story or that
story. Our boilerplate response is that this person has simply not
looked hard enough. (Hint: Most public libraries now provide free web
access—when they are open.) As an afterthought, we often ask: What
story were you looking for, precisely?

If
you honestly believe that newsrooms are driven by national politics,
that reporters at real news organizations are secretly trying to get
you to vote for a Democrat, then we think you maybe don’t understand
journalism very well. The only bona fide, premediated prejudice that we
know of is to be the first to report a credible story.

This is
why so many media people are so bent out of shape about the Fox News
Channel. Fox has successfully convinced its viewers that all other news
outlets have a liberal bias. The only formulaic way to distinguish
yourself from all other news organizations in one stroke is to be what
all the others are not—subtly but unmistakeably partisan. (You want an
example of a news organization that does the same thing on the lefty side of the equation?)

The
other day, we got into a conversation with a particularly smart
neo-con. He seemed smart to us, anyway, because he was willing to talk
about facts rather than opinions—a rare bird indeed. We said, “Facts
are not partisan. The truth is not, itself, predisposed to one
particular party or another.” He seemed to disagree. We proceeded to
talk facts, and we found that the facts themselves were frequently in
dispute, even when they came from what any normal person would consider
a neutral source. It was news to us, but even the University of Maryland folks who found a majority of Fox viewers believe the opposite of the reported facts—are being attacked.

(Typically,
convoluted arguments are fomented about particular semantic and
syntactical questions. If you have no stomach for this kind of
tit-for-tat, skip to the next graf. Sometimes you have to get dirt
under your nails to gainsay an idealogue. An example: PIPA found that
most Fox viewers believe Saddam Hussein solicited uranium from Niger,
whereas this is simply not true, and has never been proven. But if you
are a neo-con, you say this: Niger does not equal Africa! There are
studies—the Hutton Report, the 9/11 Commission—that show British
intelligence suggested it was solicited from somewhere else in Africa.)

“It depends on whose ox you’re trying to gore,” said our neo-con friend.

See,
that is precisely the problem. There is no ox to gore. Reporters at
real news organizations don’t give a toss for anything but the
late-breaking, exclusive-scoop, over-the-fold story with their byline
on it. To put a point on it, with our example: Either Hussein went
looking for uranium in Africa, or he did not. If he did, it would have
been reported that way. The sketchy intelligence President Bush may or
may not have believed and based his actions and his speeches on is
irrelevant. There is no independent, verifiable proof that Hussein ever
went looking for uranium in Africa, which is why it has never been
reported by a news organization. So why do Fox viewers believe this
untruth?

It is interesting to find neo-conservatives now arguing
so vehemently on the side of epistemological relativism— that there is
no news, that there are no facts, that can be communicated WITHOUT some
sort of normative spin, without an “ox to gore.” Call it the Heisenberg
principle of journalism— we cannot observe and record reality without
promoting (or denigrating) George W. Bush.

We can’t speak for
neo-conservatives, but we guess this is now the state of things: A
“truth” is a self-evident moral proposition like “abortion is wrong”
which does not require any physical evidence. Observable, recordable,
verifiable, repeatable scientific facts, on the other hand, are
rudderless things that make no sense until they’ve gotten a hard shove
to the left or the right. What a strange world we live in!

Still, there is an easy solution. One word, actually: OMBUDSMAN. Fox News still doesn’t have one.—The Editor in Cheese