With such right-wing ideologues as Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly
dominating the media, Williams Cole argues in The Brooklyn
Rail that ‘objectivity’ is obsolete and that liberals must
respond with unabashedly leftist viewpoints. Drastic measures are
needed for troubled times, he writes. Fox News has risen to levels
of massive popularity and the ‘loudmouthed, aggressively
conservative O’Reilly Factor got a greater audience in the
8 PM slot than all of the other cable news channels combined.’
For years conservative pundits have successfully labelled the
mainstream media as being too liberal, a charge that has had the
effect of pushing network news shows to include more conservative
views. Unlike the very strong diversity of viewpoints featured in
the European media, there has been no consistent mainstream voice
in America countering the Fox propaganda machine.
Corporate ownership of the media makes it unlikely that the
mainstream will swing back toward the left any time soon. So, in
order to counter the imbalance, Cole argues that the best hope for
liberal media is to shelve the idea of objectivity for the time
being and ‘come out swinging.’
— Joel Stonington
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For the Dismissal of Objectivity in News
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