I know that none of the cool kids really like Fox News. But the coolshame won’t work on me here because I actually do think that O’Reilly is insufferable, and than Hannity has morphed into an incarnate talking point.
But at the same time, I do get my daily (televised) news doses from Special Report with Brett Baier, a program I find quite helpful. And this leads me to say something in defense of the existence of the whole network. This is a defense that is becoming more and more obvious with each new big item in each news cycle — the most recent being the appalling behavior of the unions in Wisconsin. We now live in a country where a story like this can break, and you can turn to two different channels and get two completely different perspectives on it. Didn’t used to be that way.
I grew up in an America when the news was controlled by CBS, NBC, and, bringing up the rear, ABC. All three were cut from the same beige liberal cloth, and it really was one foundational perspective all the time. Beleaguered conservatives got their information from underground outlets — speciality book publishers, and low circulation magazines. This was even before talk radio. Now there is the radio, the Internet . . . and Fox News.
Now these new guys have their biases and blind spots, some of them glaring. And some old-timey people on the left lament their polarizing presence, but what they are actually lamenting is the new and unpleasant reality of having to debate people — something they are clearly not very good at.