undefined Had the balloon boy’s father just been Googled before the story went public, the “hoax” idea would have immediately popped up for the authorities to take a closer look. Due to this bizarre “flying saucer” hoax event last week, and for the statement finally from the White House saying that FOX News only presents an “ideology”, not real news, it’s time to review overall how the country gets its news. No, I mean “real” news.

I was raised back in the era that when a program was listed as a “news cast”, everyone could usually assume that what we were going to hear was a real and accurate news cast. In fact, back when reporters such as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Roger Mudd, and even back as far as John Cameron Swayze and Edward R. Murrow, when those reporters (and they were “real” journalist reporters) gave you the news, you could usually take it to the bank. Today, that is not the case. In fact, I’ve decided that in the future, I will no longer refer to what is today called the FOX NEWS CHANNEL as “FOX NEWS”. From this day forward, they will at best be the “FOX Opinion Network”, or I might also call them “FIXED NEWS”. I might also refer to them as the “GOP Opinion Arm of the FOX Network”. A big and unwarranted noise was made last week by the FOX Opinion Network because the White House Communications Director Anita Dunn stated publically that "As they [FOX] are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave". In additional comments, just days earlier to Time Magazine, Ms. Dunn, a veteran Democratic Party communications strategist who joined the White House in May, denounced FOX NEWS as "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Dunn had also added; "They are boosting their audience. But that doesn't mean we are going to sit back" While appearing on CNN on Sunday, Dunn said "the reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party." Dunn said the White House would not be a "passive bystander" as opponents try to "tear down the president and his presidency." What brought us to this point is that years after the 60 Minutes News Hour started making money as a prime time program, all the networks have since transferred their news organizations from their then costly “News” operations to the lucrative “Entertainment” profit centers.

Eventually, the real journalists on TV News that had worked themselves up from being staff and “Beat” reporters, started being replaced by handsome male or easy-on-the-eyes female “talking heads”. Most of these individuals had never worked for a news organization or a radio, TV or international news operation. News programs then slowly started becoming opinion entertainment, similar to the thousands of conservative radio talk shows that currently cover the AM radio dial. When the financier, Rupert Murdock first started the FOX News Network, he committed hundreds of millions of dollars for years for becoming a major force in America for supporting conservative ideology.

Unfortunately, this was regardless of whether the station’s content was real news or conservative opinion. The Fox Network lost millions of Murdock’s dollars for many years before it eventually began having the viewership necessary for drawing the larger paying advertisers for allowing Fox to finally start breaking even. The “Balloon Boy” story is a perfect example of what these changes in news programming has unfortunately brought to us today. News, politics, opinion, and entertainment have all become confused. In some surveys and polls over the past few years, it became alarmingly apparent that many Americans were stating that they were regularly watching Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and Bill Maher’s Real Time, for getting their daily inputs of what they called, “real news”. People, these are comedy, current events entertainment shows!!!! Other people also said the same things about the David Letterman Show and Jay Leno’s Show. The Fox Opinion Network is currently all upset at being singled-out by the Obama White House. What Fox is not understanding is that “what they offer is not news”. They loudly criticize on their so called “news” programs that they aren’t doing anything different from MSNBC. Yes, MSNBC is a network that offers mostly liberal political opinions. But, MSNBC does not call themselves a “News Network”. MSNBC calls themselves “The place for Politics”. But instead, Fox puts on pundits such as Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, and Knute Gingrich, who have been indicted or connected to illegal activities. Yet, on Fox, these individuals are given the “status of informed and expert individuals that are supposed to be watched, listened to and respected by the viewers”. That is NOT news. Even CNN, which is the Cable News Network, distinguishes between its news and its talking heads such as Larry King, Lou Dobbs, Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper. These shows present entertainers, politicians and special events as does MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, Rachael Maddow, Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz. This is also similar to Fox’s: Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, and Greta Van Susteran. Unfortunately, the Fox news casters and the opinion talkers are all mixed together and you are lead to believe that the whole network is “Fair and Balanced” and what they present is true and is real “news”, not opinion. Since years ago, when the line between “news” and “comment” was officially removed, this confusion between the two has migrated to all electronic communications.

Today, with regard to talk radio, the conservatives: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly , Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck are also confused by some listeners as offering news, as are the liberal talkers: Ed Schultz, Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Bill Press and Stephanie Miller. But the liberal talker, Randi Rhodes, is the only one that continually rails against the fact that all the networks are confusing news with opinion and entertainment. Ms. Rhodes is also the only one I’ve heard tell her audience; “Don’t believe anything I say or that you hear on my show. Go look it up for yourself. With today’s Internet, that’s become very easy to do. But don’t just look at one location, check-out multiple sites.” In the “old days”, the “Balloon Boy” story would not have made the air in the fashion that it did. It would have been what the news calls “Embargoed” and checked out before it was released to the public. The emergency response may have still gone on, but when it was released for general distribution, there would have been more info on the family and the father’s background. While the event was actually happening, there were even callers to national talk shows that had previously known the boy’s father.

There were multiple comments on the radio that this was probably a publicity stunt because the callers knew that he had done this kind of thing before. This was all on national talk-radio before they even found out that the boy was not on-board the balloon. The information about the family was all out there and readily available for the authorities to find and to say, “just a minute there”. However, once the ball of sensation got rolling, and after it had hit TV, there was no stopping the story until the boy made a comment on a national TV morning news show the next day that questioned the father’s motives. Mixing up news, comments and politics is very dangerous for a democratic nation.

I’m not asking for the return of the “Fairness Doctrine”. I would however like to see some regulation for a requirement of a real distinction to be made by the networks between real “news” and any kind of comment, opinion or “non-news”. Without this distinction, making decisions based on real information is becoming virtually impossible, as the problem continues to grow. It’s the right thing to do.

Copyright G.Ater 2009

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