In that respect, there should be a special award for Fox News. Fox has done a great service to the American polity -- single-handedly breaking up the intellectual and ideological monopoly that for decades exerted hegemony (to use a favorite lefty cliché) over the broadcast media.
I said some years ago that the genius of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was to have discovered a niche market in American broadcasting -- half the American people. The reason Fox News has thrived and grown is because it offers a vibrant and honest alternative to those who could not abide yet another day of the news delivered to them beneath layer after layer of often undisguised liberalism.
What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.
A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn't even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by the rise of Fox News.
Rush Limbaugh led the way, of course; he made it possible to succeed, and to succeed wildly, by going against the grain of liberal media. Agree or disagree with either Limbaugh or Fox - and I'd say there's really nothing to disagree with Fox about since, as they say, they're simply bringing you the news in a more fair and balanced way than you're used to - their accomplishments can't be considered anything other than extraordinary. A truly new thing to come upon the media landscape that hadn't been there before.
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