M
Maxirad
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Is Mr. Hunter’s overall argument sound?
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White_Tree
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Partially. Fox News is a little bit of the problem. But so is CNN, MSNBC, etc.Is Mr. Hunter’s overall argument sound?
The problem is the marketplace of ideas fails to function when people are unwilling or incapable of listening to those ideas. Marketplaces involve trade, exchange. When that exchange ceases to happen, the market no longer functions.
So when you create places that are essentially echo chambers, where people are only exposed to one point of view, it becomes impossible for them to objectively evaluate those ideas, because they never really see the other side.
Most people do not have time to watch an hour of Fox, and then switch over to watch an hour of MSNBC. They’re probably only going to be able to watch one or two news commentary shows. So providing conservative counter-programming to the rest of the liberal media isn’t really enough for the people watching your programming to get a full, unbiased picture of the world. You’re simply creating another echo chamber.
But he’s right that it’s not purely Fox’s fault. As I mentioned before, the other media companies are also contributing to the current level of polarization and confusion. The viewers themselves are also to blame. Again returning to the market analogy, markets involve both supply and demand. There is a demand for ideas as well as a supply. The people who watch the news are not mindless consumers. They listen to what they want to hear.
As Fox is noticing now, there is a currently a demand for news supporting particular statements made by the President. Fox is (mostly) not providing that type of news, so people are finding it elsewhere. The fact that people are unwilling to hear ideas that make them uncomfortable is not (entirely) Fox’s fault. That is due to lack of fortitude on the part of the viewers, not the network itself.
Granted, Fox (and the other biased media companies on the left) contributed to that lack of fortitude by running programming that failed to expose their viewers to enough uncomfortable ideas, thereby preventing them from building up the tolerance necessary to handle such ideas. But again, I don’t think the blame can be placed entirely on Fox here.
Fox News is, in a sense, a victim of their own business model. Stations whose entire business model is to provide news or commentary 24 hours/day are much more beholden to the whims of their viewers. If the news was only a small segment of your programming, you could afford to make your viewers a little uncomfortable, because you get most of your revenue elsewhere. But if news is all you do, you effectively have to tell people what they want to hear, or they will leave and your business collapses.
So I agree with his ultimate conclusion: “Fox News isn’t the problem, reality is.” But Fox has contributed to that reality, often in ways they likely did not intend.
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