Friday, March 22, 2019

Foxy

There's certainly no reason to go on Fox News unless you're going to treat it as hostile, but I agree people who want to be on the side of good should not be granting any legitimacy to it at all.

It’s not interested in legitimate journalism as much as it’s interested in promulgating right-wing nationalism, and this raison d’etre means that attempts to puncture the bubble are self-defeating. The narrow goal of a liberal, or a credible reporter, who appears on the network may be to present an alternative, factual viewpoint, but within the Fox ecosystem they can only function as foils, cast to lend the network credibility it doesn’t deserve. Journalists who try to break through walls of the Fox News echo chamber can only end up reinforcing them.

There was no golden age when Fox was good, or even much better than now, but the explicit support of white nationalism at a time when we have an explicitly white nationalist president and an administration populated with them, makes it not just bad but dangerous. Very dangerous.