In The Discarded Image, his apology for the Middle Ages, C.S. Lewis observes that in those days, "the very words story and history had not been desynonymised." It was not that the medieval world gullibly swallowed tales of Adam and Moses, or Aeneas and Arthur, he argues, but rather that they saw no point in disbelieving them.
Europeans of the era lived in a world at the center of a heavenly gallery of angels and demons, a moral cosmology. They knew and valued facts, enough to conduct daily life or to convey themselves to distant lands, but they valued more the unquestioned narratives that would channel them to salvation. Reason was the capacity to use those stories to check selfish passions, not the corrective for unexamined accounts of history or science. Lewis writes that in the 18th century, moral judgments came to be considered matters of feeling, as the Enlightenment introduced the notion of reason as the unfettered examination of fact, an ideal the Western world cherishes.
Perhaps past tense is in order. For it seems increasingly that we are loosening our grip on fact and reason and embracing a pale reflection of the medieval model. Fox News Channel might be the Gabriel heralding this dubious development.
The documentary Outfoxed, like Fahrenheit 9/11, is unapologetically polemical, and for that reason will be as easily dismissed by partisans of the right as its subject, Fox News, has been by those on the left. It's easy to see this as further evidence of our "polarized" society—they believe this, they believe that, what's to be done?
For director Robert Greenwald, "they" include the Republican Party, the Bush White House and Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron who launched Fox News in 1996. It is no secret to viewers that Fox, like its owner, is conservative, but Greenwald's point is that the cable network has become the mouthpiece of the president and his party. He evinces, for instance, a series of directives to the news staff ordering critical coverage of John Kerry or the 9/11 Commission.
These memos could reflect what any good news outlet should do—question assumptions, be skeptical. But ex-employees and media analysts confirm that a rightward slant is imposed from above. Even Walter Cronkite is enlisted to lament that he's "never heard of any other network or legitimate news organization" so deliberately skewed as Fox. Communications professor Robert McChesney observes, "It's eliminated journalism ... as we've traditionally known it."
For objectivity, Fox substitutes a heady brew of flag-waving, fear-mongering and That Old Time Religion. Anchors and hosts coyly suggest that "some say" contrary opinions are wrong, and guests with contrary opinions are ridiculed, told to "shut up" (a montage of Bill O'Reilly barking "Shut up!" follows the host's assertion he's only said it once in six years) or simply cut off.
This dovetails neatly with emergence of a plague of commentators, on Fox, on the radio and on op-ed pages, whose task is to tart up White House talking points with entertaining but hollow contempt. Read the Review-Journal opinion pages and you'll encounter the species, fellows at think-tanks where the self-evident common sense of conservative viewpoints is uncomplicated by serious research.
Or settle on Fox long enough to see Al Gore, in 1992, talk up the peril posed by Saddam Hussein, followed by Brit Hume and a couple of smug guests, one of whom crows that Gore was a hawk back then. Well, context, please ... Saddam was a danger, and had the weapons—used against his people without a peep from us—that years of UN sanctions and inspections later wrung from him. It is possible to see that Saddam was evil, even that he might have had some residue of weaponry secreted, and that invading Iraq was the wrong action at the wrong time. But in Fox World, it's either black or white, and those who see shades of gray are blind.
It might be argued that we had an advocacy-based journalism once, that newspapers used to be almost exclusively partisan. A reprise would work if we could be sure that media outlets espousing varied viewpoints develop organically. But the danger outlined by Outfoxed is twofold. Media have concentrated into a handful of large conglomerates, and those controlling Fox News' rivals have responded to its popularity not by appealing to other viewpoints, but by imitating it.
The issue here is objectivity. By rejecting the Christian model of the Middle Ages, with objective truth rooted in God, Western intellect over the years embraced a relativist viewpoint. The objectivity of journalism in some ways reflects this relativism, in others challenges it. At its best, objectivity sorts through subjective assertions to find the middle way. And facts, even in a relativist universe, remain facts.
Conservatives say they've pulled the country rightward in recent decades, but what they've done is tug it to the center. Meanwhile, though, their leaders have abandoned their long-held standard of sober analysis for the airy a priori of a God-centered, medieval mind-set, leaving liberals to comb through the wilderness of inconvenient facts. Arguably, what has developed is a polarity not of liberals and conservatives, but of analysts and acolytes, those who weigh evidence to seek answers and those who find answers in unexamined verities.
Both liberals and conservatives have something to say. An ideal news network would negotiate their frontiers. It would understand that objective fact sustains a world without an objective truth. Instead, we have shouting and ridicule, and facts can't be heard because they're just the other side's opinion.
Chuck Twardy has written for many newspapers and magazines.