The Fox News frame

Today was a fascinating day to be a media watcher and scholar. As I tuned in most of the day to watch Fox News Channel’s wall-to-wall coverage of America’s Tea Party events all over the U.S., I found myself marveling in the role FNC was playing in this event.

At some point in the past month, FNC went from coverage to full-on promotion. In the past week they heavily promoted the live team coverage from tea party events from all over the U.S. As we got closer to today, more phrasings such as “come celebrate with us” came out of the mouths of FNC anchors.

It was clear as this thing went along that Fox News was going from news gatherer and broadcaster to a stakeholder in this nationwide event. I won’t debate the logic of the protest itself, but the event was pretty newsworthy on the whole. But as for Fox News’ behavior, I found myself thinking of what I teach my students. Straight from Kovach & Rosenstiel’s excellent The Elements Of Journalism:

“[Journalism's] practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.”

It’s one thing to cover a rally, but watching Glenn Beck lead a rally in San Antonio, TX, today (with Ted Nugent!) was breathtaking given his position on, you know, a news network. Watching Neil Cavuto get a general idea of crowd count in Sacramento off air, and then minutes later grossly exaggerate the total on air (see video, via Daily Kos) was stunning.

There was no independence in coverage, obviously. I’ve written before how Fox News has changed the landscape in media, but it bears repeating. By adopting the phrase “fair and balanced” and setting itself as an alternative to the “biased” mainstream media, and then repeating it over and over, Fox has reframed the debate on bias. Now what is biased is judged based on what Fox News is rather than what unbiased news is.

And this is a ridiculous debate anyhow since all news is biased, but the game has changed nonetheless. Fairness and balance are problematic ways to judge the news in general because it leads to awkward attempts at balancing. Today’s Tea Party coverage is an example. Fox News gave it the coverage it gave primaries last year, maybe even a few steps beyond that. In those cases, millions of people were going to the polls to vote.

By many accounts, including one in conservative media, there were a couple hundred thousand people out there. I’m going to assume that number will be revised upward, so let’s be generous and say it’s triple that amount: 600,000 people. Bear in mind that’s an average of 12,000 people per state, and about 129 million less people than the number that voted in last year’s presidential election.

Walter Lippmann wrote nearly a century ago in Public Opinion that people depend on media to tell them what’s going on in the world concerning places and events they can’t see themselves. Thus any kind of distorted view of the world leads to distorted decision making, and this is bad for democracy because it depends on citizens making informed choices. Kovach & Rosenstiel expand on this when they talk about journalists being “mapmakers” in our community and world.

“[Journalism] must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.”

What this means is that, yes, you cover big events and try to give as full a picture as possible, but not at the expense of proportion. By covering today’s events wall-to-wall on Fox News, the network gives viewers the impression that this is a big deal. I mean, a really big deal.

Again, it was certainly an event worthy of nationwide coverage. But on the level of major elections that, in spite of whatever protest is held, is the actual chance for these citizens to directly influence government by way of choosing elected officials? Something is out of whack.

I admire any effort to stand for what you believe in so long as the goal is productive discussion rather than anger or violence, and so what happened at the Tea Parties today was mostly a net good for democracy (other than the few crazies out there, and that happens at pretty much any event like this). But it’s a net loss for Fox News, which distorted the importance of what was happening so much that it definitely hurts the channel and potentially hurts the credibility of the protesters in the long run. Movements take time to gain steam, and as they do they should garner more news coverage, but they don’t need welfare from the news channels to get the attention they deserve.

This, of course, was a strategic choice by Fox News. But covering this thing so heavily, the Glenn Becks, Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys could go on TV tonight and claim that the media “ignored” the Tea Party events. And given how Fox News chose to define “coverage” – full team coverage, leading rallies rather than covering them, devoting more resources than they devote to major news events – this is an argument that probably rings true with the loyal viewers. Against the new standard set by Fox News, what network or publication could possibly measure up?

But it’s a classic straw man argument, because Fox News is out of thin air defining what constitutes acceptable coverage and then judging every news outlet accordingly. It’s the reframing of the debate over news and fair coverage, something Fox News has almost perfected in the age of news/propaganda. It’s a dishonest and cynical approach to news, and certainly not “fair and balanced” to a public that needs a fully contextual viewing of what went on with these protests today.