Keller’s Elitism is America’s Poison

Flopping Aces ^ | 05-09-12 | Wordsmith

[Starman417]

Former NYTimes executive editor (from July 2003 until September 2011) Bill Keller regarding FOX News in an op-ed over the weekend:

It is the most reliable profit center, expected to net a billion dollars this fiscal year. It is untainted so far by the metastasizing scandals. It is a source of political influence more durable than Murdoch’s serial romances with British prime ministers. This year the Fox News Primary probably did more to nominate Mitt Romney than New Hampshire or Michigan.

And yet I would argue that — at least for Americans — Fox News is Murdoch’s most toxic legacy.

Ouch.

Put down the coffee and make sure you have none of it in your mouth when you read this next part:

My gripe against Fox is not that it is conservative. The channel’s pulpit-pounding pundits, with the exception of the avuncular Mike Huckabee, are too shrill for my taste, but they are not masquerading as impartial newsmen. Nor am I indignant that Fox News is the cultural home of the Republican Party and a nonstop Obama roast. Partisan journalism, while not my thing, has a long tradition. Though I do wonder if the folks at Fox appreciate that this genre is more European than American.

My complaint is that Fox pretends very hard to be something it is not, and in the process contributes to the corrosive cynicism that has polarized our public discourse.

I doubt that people at Fox News really believe their programming is “fair and balanced” — that’s just a slogan for the suckers — but they probably are convinced that what they have created is the conservative counterweight to a media elite long marinated in liberal bias. They believe that they are doing exactly what other serious news organizations do; they just do it for an audience that had been left out before Fox came along.

I would never suggest that what is now called “the mainstream media” — the news organizations that most Americans depended on over the past century — achieved a golden mean. We have too often been condescending to those who don’t share our secular urban vantage point. We are too easily seduced by access. We can be credulous. (It’s also true that we have sometimes been too evenhanded, giving equal time to arguments that fail a simple fact-check.)

But we try to live by a code, a discipline, that tells us to set aside our personal biases, to test not only facts but the way they add up,

*Sniff-sniff*....smell that? It's the stench of elitist bull****.

Just what planet is Keller from that he is so oblivious and lacking in self-awareness?

to seek out the dissenters and let them make their best case, to show our work. We write unsparing articles about public figures of every stripe — even, sometimes, about ourselves. When we screw up — and we do — we are obliged to own up to our mistakes and correct them.

By doing what? Burying the corrections on page A12?!

[x]

Keller may not know anybody who'd second guess him about his own biases.

That's the beauty of declining circulation figures: eventually anybody who might know better doesn't see the newspaper.

[WashingtonSource]

Excellent!

[higgmeister]

My complaint is that Fox pretends very hard to be something it is not, and in the process contributes to the corrosive cynicism that has polarized our public discourse.

What amazing balderdash! Nihilist legacy, modern-day Liberal beliefs are the primary source of Anti-American cynicism for over a hundred years!