The Difference Between CNN and Fox News

Before we get into tonight�s blog, I just had a random thought. Info Wars and Alex Jones are dangerous. I dived into their YouTube channel today to see what they had been up to and if Jones had ranted recently (I love his rants. Truly a national treasure.). I was quickly reminded of the active brainwashing occurring on the �alternative news network� and how it so effortlessly lies and espouses harmful rhetoric. It wouldn�t be a big deal except for the fact that the network has millions of followers and faithful listeners.

This normalization of completely false and ridiculous claims is something that I warned about in my column in the Summerville Journal Scene back in December. The battle between fact and fiction is currently being controlled by fiction as facts retreat and desperately try to regroup. The President and figures like Alex Jones have effectively stripped outlets like CNN and MSNBC of all credibility after calling them �fake news� for years. They have allowed people to simply choose to not believe what they hear if it contradicts their beliefs. As a result, millions of people have chosen to ignore the qualified and professional writers and journalists from conventional news outlets and instead devote their attention to a man who claimed that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria in Washington D.C.

The pizzeria in question didn�t even have a basement. But that wasn�t important to Jones and a few weeks later a man went to that pizzeria with a rifle to investigate the scene and almost killed people after he fired a number of shots inside the restaurant. Even though Jones was blamed widespread by multiple news outlets for his fiery rhetoric that inspired the actions of the man who decided to investigate the pizzeria, he came out of the incident even more popular than before. He apologized in a heavily scripted and awkward video but quickly claimed in other videos that the �mainstream media� was exaggerating the story to overthrow him. His supporters reacted with raucous anger at the mainstream media and quickly forgot the significance of the hoax pedaled by Info Wars.

On the subject of mainstream media, let us jump into tonight�s main story: the media. Last week I looked into the sensationalism of CNN and MSNBC and how Hurricane Irma was a perfect example of that sensationalism. I purposely did not include Fox News in last week�s blog. That is because they are not a sensational news network. That is about the only good thing I have to say about Fox News. They are not going to do crazy things just for ratings. And they don�t need to.

Fox News is the only mainstream media outlet that voices conservative arguments and views. Liberals get to choose between CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS etcetera, etcetera for their news. So, while there are about an equal number of conservatives and liberals in the US, the liberal�s viewership of the news is split up between all of those news networks while conservatives primarily tune in to Fox. Therefore, Fox generates a lot more ratings than their liberal leaning competitors.

A common mistake among people that study the media is that they equate the conservatism of Fox to the liberalism of CNN. The two are not equal. One of my favorite Jon Stewart moments was when he went on Fox News to debate Chris Wallace back in 2011. In that interview/debate Stewart compared mainstream media and Fox News by saying, �the bias of the mainstream media is toward sensationalism, conflict and laziness.� He claimed that Fox News pushes, �a purely ideological partisan agenda.�

He�s right. Fox News hides behind the cloak of being a �news� network while pushing an agenda sprinkled through a significant amount of opinion shows. Fox has Hannity, Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Five, and Fox and Friends. They used to have Bill O�Reilly, Greta van Susteren, and Megyn Kelly in their primetime slots as well. These heavily opinionated hosts are added in between actual news segments and to the average viewer, it�s sometimes hard to differentiate between opinion and news because they are placed side by side and often mixed together

There is a difference between sensationalism and politically motivated rhetoric. Take for example the hearing that Hillary Clinton had to sit through in 2015 over the Benghazi scandal. CNN and CBS covered that story like it was the Super Bowl and hyped it up for weeks before and after it happened. For something that makes Hillary Clinton not look so great, you would think that these news outlets (if they were liberal propaganda) would try to downplay the story and find something else to talk about. CNN had live coverage of the eleven-hour hearing all day long with commentary throughout the entire event along with the famous countdown timer that counted down the days leading up to the hearing.

Another example is Charlottesville. The riots in that town were blown out of proportion by the mainstream media. And while the events in that town were horrible, most Americans are not as violent or extreme as the people involved in those demonstrations. The media hyped up that single event and spent days talking about it. When a series of demonstrations between anti-Trump and pro-Trump groups occurred in Boston a week later, there was wall to wall coverage of the demonstration complete with helicopter shots and reporters on the ground. There was one scuffle where a few people were arrested and videos of that scene were replayed over and over again on a lot of mainstream outlets. Overall, there were two relatively peaceful protests that occurred that day in Boston.

While this was going on, Fox was trying to figure out what position to take. Hannity and Carlson came across as reactionary and proceeded to blame Antifa and Black Lives Matter for the violence just as much as they blamed the KKK. It didn�t seem like Fox wanted to cover the story very much because it didn�t fit their narrative and they were only talking about it out of obligation.

When I sat down to write a blog tonight, I intended to talk about healthcare but somehow that turned into a rant about the media. Oh well. That�s all for this week. 

Here's the Jon Stewart debate I referenced earlier. I highly recommend it.