Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of you earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember?

Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 11th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

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This was originally posted on October 11, 2010 in my old blog. As you read this, bear in mind that this post was written nine years ago. Some things never change, do they?

Anything But Fair and Balanced

For those cable news viewers who cannot see the obvious or who are in denial of the facts, the cat is apparently out of the bag. As an article in a recent issue of The Week magazine noted, Fox News is “out of the closet.”

The Fox News channel (or as many liberals, myself included, call it, “Faux News”) is run by longtime Republican political adviser and media consultant Roger Ailes. Fox News is part of Rupert Murdock’s media conglomerate, News Corporation, and there is no question that Murdock has a conservative agenda and has no qualms when it comes to leveraging his ever widening media clout to advance his political views.

Perhaps to achieve that end, Murdock’s News Corporation has made several large contributions to Republican lobbies and causes. He donated $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a pro-business lobbying group that is aggressively working to defeat Democratic candidates in the upcoming mid-term elections. Separately, Murdock donated another million dollars to the Republican Governors Association.

Murdock, though his Fox News channel, seems to have crossed the line from conservative advocacy programming to overt political lobbying. Zachary Roth, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, opined that Fox News has “dropped the pretense” of being a news outlet and has evolved to being a propaganda and fundraising arm of the Republican Party.

A whole new level of blatancy

Syndicated columnist Paul Krugman said that Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. He wrote, “Every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News.” While it’s not unheard of for media moguls to promote the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests, Krugman suggests that “directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.”

Fox News has, from its beginnings, promoted itself as the “fair and balanced” cable news network, pitting itself against what it claimed to be the liberally biased media establishment. Somehow, Fox News has vaulted to the top of the cable news food chain, leaving the original cable news network, CNN, and the clearly liberal foil to Fox News, MSNBC, pretty much eating the Fox News channel’s dust.

So is Fox News really what it has always claimed to be: fair and balanced? The real question is this: has Fox News ever been fair and balanced?

All you need to do is to look at Fox News’ lineup of “personalities,” including conservative pundits Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, along with “key” (and highly compensated) contributors that include Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich, all of whom are 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls, to recognize that Fox News is anything but what it has claimed to be.

What a shocker!