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Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to do this right, so I’m going to have to move quickly.
Read this article:
(Article Link)
Now, as a conservative, I’m going to explain why this article shows exactly why we can’t stand the treatment FNC gets in liberal and “mainstream” outfits. Before I get started, I’d like to say I love David Foster Wallace, who this article is “based” upon, and I don’t speak anything against him. In fact, the few times he was actually quoted in this article the quotes were right on the dot true and insightful.
1. Conservatives were called “Joe Sixpacks”
2. The author called Shepard Smith, a regular news reporter on FNC, a “tabloid” journalist and compared him with opinion-based hosts like Greta and O’Reilly
3. The author blatantly confused statistics. He compared the PRIME TIME performance of one cable channel against the NEWS TIME performance of three network channels (cough, cough not everyone has cable) and deemed the one-channel performance sub-par. FNC’s prime time competes against the networks’ CSI and Bachelor-whatever. The network news shows compete against reruns of The Parkers and the general cable news shows. Who’s biased and who reports the facts straight up?
4. There’s a reason Wallace didn’t make the link to FNC and the author did. It’s because the information I saw quoted from Wallace’s work did not indict FNC. It indicted the personalities of some people on the prime time lineup, but they don’t pretend to be reporters. They’re commentary. If you watch Greta or O’Reilly as a mainline news show you need to have your head examined. Wallace is a real journalist (I’ve read a fairly large body of his other work, including journalism), and he wouldn’t make a false connection like that.
5. Actually, O’Reilly (in my opinion) wouldn’t “damn” the mainstream media for analysis. In fact, FNC would probably welcome seeing more analysis in mainstream news. What conservatives hate about the MSM is that it FILTERS content. You don’t hear about the Oil-For-Food scandal on CNN until the last minute because they don’t want it to be the story. FNC actually IS criticized by the MSM for HAVING COMMENTARY. If FNC is guilty of filtering (I’m sure it happens), they should be harshly criticized, but their complaint against the MSM should not be mischaracterized like this.
Anyway, rant over for now. That really hacked me off.