No Real Journalist Wants Anything to Do With Fox News
Recent studies have demonstrated that "consuming content from Fox News is associated with decreased knowledge of science and society." But you don't need research to tell you that; just listen to the professional journalists that have abandoned the network in order to salvage something of their reputations.
Longtime Fox News host Chris Wallace explained why he left in a recent New York Times interview.
New York Times: “I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox.”...
“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” Mr. Wallace said in his first extensive interview about his decision to leave. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”
And Wallace is just the latest to acknowledge how warped the news and opinion programming has become at Fox.
Media Matters: "Carl Cameron, Fox’s chief political correspondent, left in 2017, explaining that “over the years, the right-wing hosts drowned out straight journalism with partisan misinformation.” Ralph Peters said after quitting his post as a strategic analyst in 2018 that “with the rise of Donald Trump, Fox did become a destructive propaganda machine.” Network anchor Shepard Smith, who abruptly resigned in 2019, said “that his presence on Fox became untenable as opinion shows on the network spread falsehoods that hosts knew were lies,” as CNN put it. Politics editor Chris Stirewalt said after he was fired in early 2021 that during the Trump years, Fox became “an arm of a political party.” The list goes on."
Chris Wallace and others have suggested that Fox News began its descent toward National Inquirer status with the election of Donald Trump and his efforts to undermine science, research, and objective truth. However, it's more accurate to postulate that Trump was only possible because of the work of talk radio and Fox News to create an alternative reality of lies, prejudice, and conspiracy theories in America. Trump and his acolytes like Ron DeSantis, MTG, and Lauren Boebert, couldn't exist within a political universe that values facts, evidence, and objective proof. Truth is their kryptonite, but it hardly exists at Fox.
Consider this story concerning a Fox Nation "journalist" who suggested yesterday that evolution is a hoax perpetrated by Jews.
Newsweek: "Fox Nation host Lara Logan pushed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Charles Darwin was funded by the Rothschild family to invent his theory of evolution during an appearance on a right-wing podcast."
Chris Wallace, Shep Smith, Carl Cameron, and the others that have left Fox now seek to restore their journalistic careers in real news organizations, but no one should forget that they were Murdoch's enablers, giving Fox News a thin patina of credibility as it undermined the public's trust in the nation's most important institutions and truth itself.
By: Don Lam & Curated Content
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