I have many friends who work for Fox on the local broadcast side. Therefore I am so happy the corporate leaders are making responsible decisions for their employees to keep they and their families safe by ordering non-production staff to work remotely through the end of 2020.
Though the ownership is the same as the broadcast division where my friends work, this division is totally separate from Fox News Channel in the Cable side of the business. This confuses many viewers and understandably so.
So, imagine I had two shows. One promotes the joy, satisfaction and safety of authentic travel, we’ll call it “Raw Travel.” But another, we’ll call “Fear Travel,” promotes the downsides, fears and risks of travel, thus counteracting Raw Travel’s basic mission of encouraging people to travel. Both are technically true on the surface, but only one is exploitive, full of exaggerations and carefully crafted and distorted “facts.”
By producing both, I could simultaneously appeal to as many different viewers as possible and hedge my bets, rather than work to convert people from a illusory state of mind to one of reality, love and adventure with my one show, one mission (inspirational travel) concept. Two shows with two competing messages would be shrewd, if ethically ambiguous business position.
I don’t do it, because the positives of travel far outweigh negatives, and I couldn’t in good conscious tell people something I know to be mostly false. But alas, I’m not a large corporation responsible to shareholders to maximize profits. I don’t even REALLY need the money, I just need to be able look myself in the mirror and like what I see, and I do. I get that life is short and there has to be more to it than simply making money. I learned that lesson some time ago, the hard way, as most lessons are most effectively learned. But alas, no matter what the Supreme Court may tell you, corporations are NOT people. They can be hypocritical in many ways people would never consider.
Fox Broadcast stations typically call things down the middle, or at least reflective of their local market’s general leanings. But it’s no secret that Fox News Channel has a severe political leaning and I don’t have to tell you which way. Their opinion oriented “journalists” stomp, scream and holler about “the mainstream media,” as if they weren’t part of a very successful, multi-billion dollar, publicly traded corporation. Nothing wrong with success, but there is with hypocrisy.
Now that the corporate leaders of both sides of the company have committed to do the right thing for all their non-production employees, their cable news outlet, Fox News Channel, needs to walk THAT walk ON-AIR. Their “talent” needs to stop downplaying Covid 19, and stop spreading misinformation and encouraging conspiracy theories. They need to do the right thing for our nation by leveling with their sizable audience about the truth of the very scientific facts that lead them to this decision to protect their very own employees for the remainder of 2020.
Geraldo Rivera
If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you don’t have Covid 19 – That’s according to Fox news Channel’s Geraldo Rivera.
Corporate hypocrisy, especially in the name of political ideology is not a good look for a “credible” news organization, even if it is thinly disguised as opinion or “free speech”. If the cable division showed the bravery, heart, fair mindedness, and journalistic integrity present at the broadcast level of this very same company, what a difference it would make in the lives of so many? How many thousands of people would be alive today? How many livelihoods might still be around for when the inevitable recovery occurs? This is a strange knee-capping of our nation and economy to preserve political power is it not? All from an outlet that claims to “love America.” Maybe they do or maybe they don’t, but it seems they love money and power more.
But that is what is ironic about Fox News Channel’s stubborn downplaying of a once in a one-hundred years (or at least, we hope) pandemic. They downplay, people get careless, don’t wear masks, believe in crazy conspiracy theories, undermine our experts, etc., and the damned thing sticks around longer, killing more people and digging an even deeper hole for the economy, not to mention the President they so strangely support through sickness or in health until death do they part, a strange marriage indeed.
FNC needs to join it’s sister division, the broadcast division, and act like a responsible member of the media for the good of the economy, the media business, the FNC brand’s long-term prospects at credibility (that particular horse may have left that particular barn however), and most importantly, for the people of this nation of which they hold significant sway. Because of this significant sway, they thus have a responsibility to report factual truth, not opinion.
Older folks, the many other folks with pre-existing conditions, (well over half of the US population when you read the fine print of what is a pre-existing conditions) who make up the vast majority of FNC viewers, deserve to be told the actual and factual truth so they can make the right decisions to protect themselves, just as Fox sees the wisdom in protecting their own employees. What’s so hard to get about that?
There’s a lot of catching up to do for the US to get to infection and death rate levels down like the rest of the developed world, so there is a real sense of urgency here. But there are ratings and thus money at stake. So, while I continue to hope for the best, I am sadly expecting the worst.
As usual, I desperately hope I’m wrong. But I’m not going to hold my breath… not even for 10 seconds… Geraldo.
READ THE ARTICLE FROM DEADLINE.COM BELOW:
Fox Non-Production Staff Will Work Remotely Through Year End As COVID Spike Postpones Return
