300 instances; 40 states RT @adamserwer 32 Fox News hosts have campaigned for Mitt and the GOP this election cycle mediamatters.org/blog/2012/11/0… …
— Rodger Payne (@RodgerPayne) November 1, 2012
It reminds me that Rupert Murdoch is a foreigner. How so? The conventional North American understanding of the media--TV, newspapers--is that the news outlets are supposed to be relatively non-partisan, with some columnists providing spin and biased perspectives but the news was the news. However, in Europe and apparently Australia (I am guessing here), media outlets are tied to parties, so that they present their slant on the news, so the Guardian is known as being a left-wing paper, for instance. Murdoch, as an Aussie with imperial aspirations, gives us a Fox News that is very much in the European and Australian tradition, tied to one party so that talking points seem to be identical, and, yes, having their talking heads campaign for Romney. Fox pretends to be as biased or unbiased as other North American outlets. CNN is still trying, more or less, to play it the old way as are the network TV news outlets. The latter because they are more tied to old notions of broadcasting rather than niche-casting, I guess. MSNBC thinks it is like Fox, I guess.
Anyhow, the challenge of all this is that we have expectations for Fox that Fox does not really care about, but Fox does pay lip service to being neutral to fit into the American tradition. I guess Fox is here to stay, so I can only be mildly amused at the irony that the foreign way of doing media sells itself as being more American than the native forms that are truer to traditional, American media norms. Yep, Fox News is really quite foreign. Oh well.
