"Fair and Balanced" my @$$

This morning at work, I was watching Fox and Friends on Fox News (not by choice, mind you, a coworker turned it on). I’ve been a strong critic of Fox News, especially since they claim to be “fair and balanced,” but I figured I would give them a fair shot before completely knocking them down. Fox and Friends tried to blend two different formats together, basically the feeling of the Today Show with the commentary of Morning Joe. It seemed pretty good, that is until after 15 minutes of watching Steve Doocy went in to a rant about how the media watchdog group Media Matters is “trying to take down Fox News” and should lose their tax exemption because of that. The evidence to support that claim is that Media Matters does thousands of stories about Fox News while only a handful about NBC, ABC, and CBS News. There’s a couple simple reasons behind that, it’s because Fox News isn’t news and their bias is so strong that nothing can be taken as truth over there and that the other three networks mentioned only do nightly news programs, so they have very little if any bias on the reporting. Granted NBC News does have MSNBC, but that network wasn’t mentioned specifically, same with CNN. Plus, MSNBC doesn’t try to pass itself off as a network devoted to news, especially since their slogan “The place for politics.” It’s quite obvious they’re a news AND commentary network.

I mentioned earlier that Fox claims to be “fair and balanced” which is far from the truth; Chris Wallace even admitted that it wasn’t true when he interviewed Jon Stewart. Wallace said that Fox covers the other side of the story, implying they have their own bias. Insert a big “duh”. All you need to do is watch Fox and Friends or anything in the primetime lineup like O’Reilly or Hannity to figure that out. Gretchen Carlson went on to defend the “fair and balanced” banner by saying that during 2008 presidential campaign, out of all the networks, Fox had the most even distribution of positive and negative comments about John McCain and Barack Obama. I highly doubt that’s true unless she was implying that for every good thing they said about McCain they said something bad about Obama. And granted, the other networks laid into McCain, but how could they not because as Keith Olbermann says about Palin, “that woman is an idiot,” but that’s a discussion for another day.

My point , or rather points, are that 1) Fox “News” needs to cut the “fair and balanced” crap out because it’s clear that they’re biased and their commentators even admit it and 2) they just need to grow up and quit complaining that a watchdog group is going after them. When you say something is fact and is then proven false, you need to own up to that and admit you were wrong, and not whine about it. Nobody takes a whiner seriously, except for other whiners. I hope to see the day that Fox “News” is completely exposed for the fraud that it is and is shut down. In the mean time, they should change their logo to this: