Recently, Keith Olbermann, on his MSNBC news show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann,
cited Fox News as the "worst persons in the world." He claimed that the
Fox News Channel is blatant right-wing propaganda. He also noted that
President Obama, in a recent TV interview (the same interview,
incidentally, as the now-notorious fly-swatting incident, in which,
according to news reports on MSNBC, NBC, CBS, CNN and elsewhere, the
President demonstrates his "remarkable fly-swatting skills") claimed
that there was at least one news channel dedicated to undermining his
administration at all costs. Olbermann suggests that the President was
referring to Fox News.
Back
in the day when the Republicans controlled both houses as well as the
Presidency, a period that might well go down in history as a modern-day Dark Ages or Reign of Terror,
the Fox News channel was considered to be the bastion of credible news.
So much so that all other news agencies were too afraid even to
question their authority.
Fox News, owned by Australian media
magnate Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., had started on the premise that
conventional news sources like CNN and network news operated on a
principle of a subtle left-wing cultural bias resulting from the
educational and social milieu of their journalists. The solution that
Fox News apparently proposed was to dedicate a news channel to
supposedly "fair and balanced" news coverage. "Fair and balanced" became
their watchword, but it soon proved to be ironic. Over time, their
supposedly objective news coverage has been exposed as right-wing
propaganda that was pretty blatantly pandering to the Bush
administration while they were in power.
This brings us to MSNBC's
news lineup. MSNBC is a news channel that is produced as a joint
venture, as the name suggests, between Microsoft (the monolithic
software giant founded by Bill Gates) and NBC. Their lineup of news
shows supposedly offers us the alternative to Fox News, but, as implied
by Keith Olbermann, what they are really offering us is left-wing propaganda that panders to the Obama administration.
The
tragic consequence of all this government pandering and institutional
propaganda is that the number-one casualty in mainstream news coverage
is credibility. Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins of today, with
their stunning exposés of corruption in high places? Definitely not at either Fox News or MSNBC.
Perhaps
the answer to where we can find credible news sources lies with
CNN--still bland and presenting the façade of objectivity while
concealing a subtle left-wing bias--who now, apparently, resorts to
blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook posts to supplement their on-site
correspondent reports. CNN even encourages you to submit amateur videos
via the "iReport" section on their website, which allows them to feature
the videos on their news shows after a process of vetting and
verification. In fact, in the ongoing Iranian uprisings, where
mainstream journalists are being banned and extradited by the
authoritarian Iranian regime, western news sources are having to rely on
Twitter feeds, blogs and amateur video from Iranian citizens as their
news sources.
This brings us to the argument that mainstream news organizations have recently been making against the Blogsphere, especially in the wake of such recent films as State of Play,
directed by Kevin Macdonald, namely that the Blogsphere is composed
primarily of amateurs who are out of their depth, whereas if you are
looking for cutting-edge Woodward-and-Bernstein style in-depth
reporting, you will find it only at the major news organizations who
have the skills and resources at their disposal to support that kind of
news coverage.
The reality--at least two of the so-called major
news organizations are dedicated to producing partisan propaganda that
pretty shamelessly panders to politicians while the third is
increasingly resorting to the Blogsphere to provide its news sources. As
for Woodward and Bernstein, they are both retired and writing books for
a living.
The moral of the story appears to be, therefore, that
if you are looking for cutting-edge journalism, skip the news networks
and, instead, check out the Blogsphere!