No Bull Mom

FOX

Over the weekend my husband and I ended up in a political pow wow with a friend of ours who was passing through town. He and his wife vote Democrat (but we don't hold that against them -- ha).

At any rate, the subject of FOX came up, as it inevitably does when conservatives and liberals get together. Our friend took the predictable position: FOX is totally biased. Glenn Beck is the devil reincarnate, as is Greta and all the rest.

Here's the scoop about FOX news: FOX absolutely has conservative journalists on board. It may even have more conservatives than liberals; I don' t know b/c I don't follow it closely enough. FOX is not the only place I get my information. It's not even my main source. My main sources, as anyone who follows me knows, are The Wall Street Journal and the Drudge Report. I also get loads of information from sources many people wouldn't know about b/c they're just not as interested as I am in pursuing these other avenues.

But back to FOX. As I told my friend, FOX news has become the success it has b/c it speaks to the majority of Americans -- 40% of whom are conservative and 35% of whom are independent. The point isn't that FOX is conservative; the point is that it offers information from a right-of-center view as well as a left-of-center view. That some of the folks who provide commentary happen to be conservative is beside the point. You can be personally liberal or personally conservative and still provide programming from both sides of the fence. That's what FOX does that no one else does. CNN, in the past year, has tried to save face by following suit -- and is doing a pretty good job I think. But I don't watch enough of CNN to make a fair judgment.

The truth is that most of the people who hate FOX don't watch it. They catch one show in particular and base their entire view of FOX on that one program, or that one person -- which is ridiculous when you consider the fact that FOX is on all day long, with many different programs. Some are straight news; some are commentary. Personally, I would like a little less commentary and more straight news myself. I don't really care what O'Reilly or the rest of them think, but I love that I can get information that I would otherwise never know about.

And that's what makes FOX FOX.