To all real journalists: Stop being such cowards!

[babylonsister]

To all real journalists: Stop being such cowards!
Fox News' Park51 fear mongering shows that Rupert Murdoch's channel has dropped even the pretext of professionalism
By Gene Lyons


"These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith, and it's important for my fellow Americans to understand that."
-- President George W. Bush, at the Islamic Center of Washington, Sept. 17, 2001


They've finally made it official. Although you're not likely to see it reported on Fox News, media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., parent company of Fox, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc., recently donated a cool $1 million (that's $1,000,000) to the Republican Governors Association. While corporate donations to political parties are common, media conglomerates are normally careful to give to both parties for appearance' sake.

Not Murdoch, however. Any questions?

Conflicts of interest don't come much more obvious. Appearances be damned; Fox News is a partisan propaganda outlet. Actually, as Media Matters columnist Eric Boehlert has recently suggested, the GOP isn't so much running Fox News as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other talk-radio ranters are stampeding the party.

Back in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, Russians had a cynical proverb describing their country's party-line press. Playing on the names of the two main newspapers Pravda ("Truth") and Izvestia ("News"), the joke was that there was no Truth in the News, and no News in the Truth.

We're not there yet, but not for lack of trying. Rushing to fill the power void on the right after the Democrats' 2008 takeover of Congress and the White House, Fox News and its allies have grown ever bolder and more irresponsible since President Obama's inauguration, dropping all but the thinnest pretext of professionalism and often enabled by the "mainstream" media's institutional cowardice.


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http://www.salon.com/news/fox_news/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/08/25/fox_news_mosque_lies