Jacob Weisberg criticizes bias at Fox News

Fox News is clearly biased, writes Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy, and reporters who value a truly fair and bal­anced press should avoid the net­work on eth­i­cal grounds.

The bias is due to Rupert Murdoch, Weisberg writes. Murdoch brought to Fox News an “Australian-British-continental of politi­cized media” that is “un-American.” On top of that, most crit­i­cisms aimed at the network’s cov­er­age are met with “hoots of deri­sion,” and evi­dence of the network’s bias is “brushed off and ignored.”

The worst thing about it is that Fox News’ tac­tics have demon­strated that biased, politi­cized jour­nal­ism gets good rat­ings, so other cable net­works have fol­lowed suit to some extent. Fox News has “made all of cable news unpleas­ant and unre­li­able,” Weisberg writes.

The answer, for jour­nal­ists at least, should be to ignore Fox News on eth­i­cal grounds:

Whether the White House engages with Fox is a tac­ti­cal polit­i­cal ques­tion. Whether we jour­nal­ists con­tinue to do so is an eth­i­cal one. By appear­ing on Fox, reporters val­i­date its pro­pa­ganda val­ues and help to under­mine the role of legit­i­mate news orga­ni­za­tions. Respectable journalists—I’m talk­ing to you, Mara Liasson—should stop appear­ing on its pro­grams. A boy­cott would make Ailes too happy, so let’s try just ignor­ing Fox, shall we? And no, I don’t want to come on The O’Reilly Factor to dis­cuss it.

Judging from a quick Google search, Weisberg’s arti­cle is being head­lined as call­ing Fox News un-America — which it does — and that par­tic­u­lar head­line is going to drive a lot of traf­fic to the com­ment sec­tion of the story on Newsweek, which is already full of defen­sive com­ments from both sides.

Some of the com­menters have a good point: Other cable news net­works can be just as biased as Fox News but in dif­fer­ent ways. What I think Weisberg is say­ing, though, is that Fox News caused that.

I don’t know the details or the his­tory, but I do think it would be inter­est­ing to research the cov­er­age on CNN before Fox News came on the scene and com­pare that to CNN’s cur­rent cov­er­age. I won­der if you’d a dif­fer­ence in the tone and bias.

Edit — Just noticed that the title on Weisberg’s story page on Newsweek is sim­i­lar to the head­lines I noticed in my Google search, so those provoca­tive head­lines are not really just a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of his essay — they’re an SEO tactic.