Planet conservative: When alternative narratives become alternative realities.
Yesterday, Charles Krauthammer accepted the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, an annual award given by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. In his acceptance speech, Krauthammer lauded Murdoch and Roger Ailes for creating an “alternate reality” for its viewers:
KRAUTHAMMER: What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.
A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn’t even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by the rise of Fox News.
It’s so healthy for a democratic countrty when voters act on the basis of an imaginary world.
Dean Esmay 1:38 am on June 12, 2009 Permalink |
Meh. except that’s not what he meant. The New York Times, and the media in general that followed them for years as their main source of What’s Important, has been shown repeatedly to distort, spin, and ignore facts they don’t like. The era when this was considered so normal, they got to just decide what reality is, and ignore anything they didn’t like, is now over. And that’s all Krauthammer was saying.
I guess you have to know something about the conservative movement to understand this. It’s honestly a movement that’s had a classical liberal wing for a logn, long time, and their biggest complaint has long been that the news media doesn’t represent reality–because it didn’t for decades even though everyone acted like they did.
[shrug] Not hard for me to understand. The mythical era when we had a press with shiny halos who could tell us what was factual and what was not NEVER EXISTED. What the growth of things like Fox News did was simply reveal that.
It’s really breathtaking that anyone thinks they can, in this complicated world, simply define for the rest of us what’s important and what’s not, and where they think it’s great if a group of professionals called “journalists” get to tell us what the facts are and ignore anything they think aren’t important facts.