Or: Fox Management requires journalists to abandon sense, and instead mindrape their audiences.
That thud you heard was my forehead, hitting my desk.
A Fox News managing editor (one Mr. Bill Sammon) sent an email mere hours before the Copenhagen Climate Summit demanding that every time climate change was mentioned, reporters IMMEDIATELY said something to cast doubt on the veracity of global warming. From the Media Matters exposé:
"In addition to the email, it said Fox had tried to delegitimise the work of climate scientists in its coverage of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia. The network had displayed a pattern of trying to skew coverage in favour of the fringe minority which doubts the existence of climate change, Media Matters said."
The email reads: "We should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."
It goes on to say: "It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."
...it's not your place as journalists to assert SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN FACTS as facts?!
I think I just threw up a little.
They were also at it in 2009 over the health care debate!
"At the height of the health care reform debate last fall, Bill Sammon, Fox News' controversial Washington managing editor, sent a memo directing his network's journalists not to use the phrase 'public option.'
Instead, Sammon wrote, Fox's reporters should use "government option" and similar phrases -- wording that a top Republican pollster had recommended in order to turn public opinion against the Democrats' reform efforts."
I mistakenly laboured under the impression that Fox News hired ready-made right-wingers--I never thought the management actually manufactured them.
If this is the state of First-Amendment-Protected news organizations, doesn't this make Wikileaks that much more important?
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