What do you do as a news broadcaster when the biggest news of the day is going to enrage your viewers, who will in turn blame you for covering it? Simple: You don't cover it at all.
That's what One America News, Newsmax, and Fox News all did today while mainstream outlets covered the Select Committee hearings on 1/6 in breathless intensity.
OAN did a slipshod report that left out what actually happened in the hearing, made factual errors, and got up-close and personal with the GOP spin machine. Before and afterwards, the network lit into Cheney and Kinzinger, the committee's two Republicans, and broadcast GOP lawmakers spinning at a pace that would make anyone dizzy.
Fox and Newsmax did play the hearings, complete with police officers showing how they felt as they battled the crowd, but they bracketed their broadcasts with complaints about the hearing. Newsmax interviewed a father and son who went into the Capitol building and said that it was peaceful, with "cordial" police. (Were they in the wrong building?!)
We all go a little nuts with this kind of coverage because it seems divorced from what we know to be true. It's a lie, or sounds like it.
For perspective, though, in the glory days of newspapering when there were multiple papers in each city, each paper would have a distinct point of view. It was easy to find a viewpoint that didn't annoy you. The paper would be Democratic or Republican or at least a shade of left or right. You could say a lot about a person if you noted that he or she took the Press-Democrat.
When that all started to vanish, objectivity became the holy grail of the newsroom. Eventually, everyone realized that objectivity was a pie in the sky, but by then we were all doing the same thing as people did a hundred years ago, picking our news sources by how comfortable we were with the way they covered the news. It's a lot easier to seek out another point of view than it used to be.
Nevertheless, the standards journalists set for themselves do not include the distortions and gaffes of One America's coverage on Tuesday.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/27/media/fox-news-oan-newsmax-january-6-hearing/index.html
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