OPINION | No, Watching Fox News Doesn’t Contribute to a ‘Balanced News Diet’
Right-wing media is propaganda. Period.
Maybe Katty Kay needs to spend less time with Anthony Scaramucci.
The BBC journalist and co-host of a podcast with the one-time communications director in Donald Trump’s White House, was at her usual perch Monday as one of the panel on MSNBC’s Morning Joe when she offered viewers dangerous and misleading advice which she dressed up as a self-described “public service announcement.”
She went off on a tangent about the need for Americans to consume a “balanced news diet,” that sounds like wise counsel but in reality creates a dangerous false equivalency and — if folks were to actually follow her advice — only exacerbate the spread of disinformation and flow of far-right propaganda in this country.
Here’s what Kay said, when Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski mentioned Fox News.
By the way, congratulations for getting a balanced news diet. I think in this tribal, polarized world it is actually probably beneficial for everybody to get some kind of balanced news diet so that we start knowing what other people are hearing when it comes to news content.
Kay seems to be suggesting that Americans actually try getting some of their news from Fox News and other right-wing media.
Except that Fox News and its ugly stepsisters in right-wing media hardly qualify as actual news.
Fox, Newsmax, OAN and the like are nothing but open spigots to the sewer of disinformation and the most misleading propaganda.
Don’t take my word for that.
Stuart Stevens — a senior advisor to the “Never Trump” organization, the Lincoln Project and himself a former Republican political strategist — reiterated the point only recently, pointing out that Fox News and others should have zero credibility after they got hit with massive settlements for having so slavishly and relentlessly spread Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election:
Yeah, look, Fox is basically an arm of the Trump campaign, arm of the Republican Party, which is the Trump campaign. You know, I find it difficult to believe that Fox has any credibility after the Dominion lawsuit when you were exposed, they all knew that Trump was lying and they still supported him.
More than that: there is an entire industry devoted to fact-checking Fox News and its ilk, led by organizations like Media Matters, which describes Fox News thusly:
Fox News serves as a propaganda outlet for Republicans and declared itself the “voice of the opposition” during Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration. During the Trump administration, many hosts and commentators are openly pro-Trump and some serve as unofficial presidential advisers.
And its embrace of the Big Lie is hardly the first, or only, stain on the veracity and reliability of Fox News and its competitors on the right.
Tell me again, Katty Kay, how willingly consuming this is supposed to constitute a “balanced news diet”?
Yes, of course, everyone absolutely should get their news from a variety of reliable sources: the keyword here being “reliable.”
But the garbage on Fox News isn’t even information junk food; it’s the news equivalent of consuming rat poison.
What’s worse is that Kay is supposed to be a real, serious journalist. If anyone should know better, it’s her. And her suggestion that folks expand their news consumption without some caution about the reliability of sources in general — and right-wing media, specifically — was irresponsible.
Perhaps her pro-Fox News outburst was just a mistake: just one more example of the verbal incontinence that sometimes overtakes TV news and chat hosts who mentally scramble to fill time and find something to say that sounds intelligent.
If not, Katty Kay is one more “useful idiot” at best, and actively hoping to undermine the truth and democracy at worst.
Please support our work…
Please subscribe…