Misinformation

Don't believe everything you hear on TV, especially if it's on Fox News, known to many as "Faux news," "faux" being the French word for "fake." (Those who believe that all things French should be expunged are obviously not in agreement with the U.S. military, which flies "sorties," derived from the French verb "sortir,"  which means "to go out.")

This morning a Fox News anchor smugly declared that the British Broadcasting Corporation did not broadcast the fall of the Saddam statue live. That is absolutely untrue: I know because I was watching the BBC's live stream online, and monitoring not only the BBC via WLIW, channel 21 in New York, but ABC (owned by Disney), NBC (owned by General Electric), CBS (owned by Viacom), Fox, Univision, and Telemundo, among others on TV. I listened to the BBC's hard-working Rageh Omaar, who has been reporting from Baghdad for weeks now, describing the events as they unfolded. WLIW had been showing us long stretches of BBC news in the early days of the war, but by the time the U.S. forces reached Baghdad, they had gone back to their regular programming, giving us only 23 minutes of BBC a couple of times a day. Yesterday, however, WLIW gave us at least 4 hours of BBC, with a running crawl across the screen advising children hoping to see Teletubbies or Big Bird that they should turn to channel 13 (WNET) instead.

Children who hadn't been watching enough educational TV to learn to read yet were out of luck.

I can't stand to watch Fox more than a few minutes at a time for health reasons: if I have it on any longer than that, I start yelling at the TV and my normally normal blood pressure skyrockets. Still, I try to check in on Fox every now and then, just to see how America's most popular news channel is spinning the story.

Although Fox brandishes the Stars and Stripes as if the U.S. flag were its logo, it is not an American network. Fox is owned by Australian mogul Rupert Murdoch, who conquered even more media real estate yesterday by buying DirecTV. The Guardian in London reports that Murdoch is now the most powerful man in television, owning Fox (the network and the stations), BSkyB, SKY PerfecTV, Star, National Geographic, the Speed channel, and now DirecTV. My fellow Oak Ridge, Tennessee, native Charlie Ergen fought long and hard to keep Murdoch from further consolidating his empire, but eventually Murdoch's money won out. 

Those are just Murdoch's TV holdings: he also owns the magazines TV Guide, InsideOut, and the Weekly Standard. He owns the New York Post in the U.S., 22 newspapers in Australia, and nine British newspapers. Murdoch also owns the book publisher HarperCollins and other holdings including the Los Angeles Dodgers and Australia's National Rugby League. And when he bought Fox, he also got 20th Century Fox, the movie studio.

DirecTV is part of Hughes Electronics, Hughes as in Howard Hughes, who was a mogul long before Murdoch owned anything. Most recently, Hughes Electronics was owned by General Motors.

Disclosure: I once did business with Murdoch, when he owned a company called News America Syndicate. News America distributed some of my work, and paid me for some of it, usually late and after several threatening letters. I say "some of it" because News America's records of which newspapers in which parts of the world used my work were incomplete, as I discovered when I heard from people who had read my work in their local newspapers, newspapers that weren't mentioned on the statements I got.

To keep this rant balanced and fair, I will also jump on the case of The New York Times, which found it necessary to point out yesterday that the father of former POW Pfc. Jessica Lynch "spoke in the country cadences of his home state, West Virginia." Hey! New York Times! D'youse t'ink da way people toik in N' Yoik is da only propah way to toik? What about those people in Bahstan trying to figure out wheah to pahk theah cahs?

I'm not just one voice in the wilderness in criticizing Fox News: one of the most-linked-to blogs features fictitious interpretations of how Fox might have covered other important events in history. For example, there's a photo of Neil Armstrong about to take his historic small step onto the moon, with the caption, "Geraldo expelled from moon." Then there's the faux Fox report on the crucifixion of Jesus, which claims he died in a "carpentry accident."

The Columbia Journalism Review maintains a list of who owns which media organizations; the "who" part of the list has been getting shorter and shorter as ownership is consolidated into fewer and fewer hands.