Yellow journalism and FNC

Fox has ridden the coattails of the Tea Party protests since their inception - anchors promoted the events on their shows, attended the events, and the network discussed them with an ideological singularity that could only have come from higher edict. In short, the Tea Parties became an ideological bulwark for Fox - both a justification of and a continuation of the newfound protest spirit of the conservative wing of the Republican party. The network even put out a full-page ad falsely accusing its competitors of not covering the events, hardly a desperate move when the network's diehard viewers wouldn't be caught dead watching CNN long enough to watch them refute the claim:



News networks attempting to influence the news for their own benefit is nothing new, though it's something we like to imagine has ended in modern journalism. Fox finds itself in a unique situation - its cavalcade of cartoon commentators allows it to indirectly (and directly) promote events while maintaining the illusion that these protests are entirely the spontaneous actions of Americans. The network is able to attend the events and attempt to influence public perception of them further through coaching and slanted reporting, and finally actively insinuate bias against networks who don't report the story they way they do. All of our networks are run by megacorporations, indicating that certain stories will not be told and certain angles not covered, though Fox's explicit promotion and direction of the corporate agenda (in this and other stories) is more directly alarming and transparent.