Liberals bemoan the Fox News Channel’s rise in popularity. The 24-hour news channel’s ratings handily beat both CNN and MSNBC. But all of this good fortune has come with a clear conservative bias. This raises the question, how can we reform Fox News?
The answer: Don’t. No amount of grandstanding and reformation calls will take away Fox’s share of the market, which is bolstered by a strong base of strong conservatives. Instead, the most effective method would be for less conservative networks to take a strong liberal bias. Why let Fox unduly influence swing voters?
Imagine Phil Donahue reporting from Iraq. The crawl screen rolls along the bottom: “Ultra-Conservative Alito Sneaks into Court – Woman Gives Birth to Three-Pound Mushroom.” A bomb explodes in the distance. Donahue pulls out his pistil (and other parts of his flower).
He surveys the damage. He shakes his head. “What a meaningless war,” he says. “If only these soldiers had a fully functioning welfare system that would allow them to just stay home.” That’s not only gripping television; it’s great news.
Hell, let’s even change the way we make trash journalism. Scrap the RedEye. Let’s hand out a RedEye and a BlueEye and let people choose the paper that’s best for them.
They can even carry different ads targeted to the readership. On the back cover of one, a full-page advertisement for a new birth-control pill, and on the other, chafe-free chastity belts. The liberal media corporations will make money out the nose. And when they have enough, they can battle conservatives on their most sacred ground – talk radio.
Let’s throw Jimmy Carter into a booth with some amphetamines and the front page of the New York Times and set him free on the airwaves. He’ll pepper the guests with questions and spices. “Caller one disagrees with my point. Oh wait, he’s a truck driver. I don’t know if you knew this, but I was freaking president!”
Still, the liberal movement can’t be too obvious. They need a good slogan to hide behind. “Fair and Balanced” is already taken, but the most cursory glance at my thesaurus says “Pale and Stable” will do nicely.
But a slogan can only do so much. To really establish a facade of parity, the liberal news network will need some sort of pundit death-match. Ever since the Nixon-Kennedy debate, we’ve known that the best way to judge a viewpoint is listening to it for 15 seconds.
But any liberal network must avoid approaching impartiality too closely. So perhaps they can choose pundits like Bill Clinton for the left and Dennis Kucinich for the right. It sounds crazy, but they’ll flow through topics so fast that no one will notice any problems.
The fact of the matter is that everyone benefits from a media that is completely impartial. But that’s absolutely impossible. Fox News and (if we’re honest with ourselves) the New York Times both hold strong biases. The only way to neutralize these prejudices is to embrace them.
There are still only two things everyone needs: bread and circuses. Let the liberals and conservatives fight about the bread. Let the media provide the circuses.
Josiah Jenkins is a Weinberg junior. He can be reached at [email protected].