COLUMN: Fox News confuses fact and fiction

To be honest, I was worried that after the midterm elections there wouldn’t be a lot going on in the world of politics. Fortunately for me, even if there isn’t much to really report on, Fox News is always up to the task of seeking out and reporting on important “groundbreaking” news.

    Not only has Fox unveiled the true “puppet-master” of the liberal conspiracy, they have also helped us to better understand how stressed and over-worked President Obama has become. Unfortunately, this may have been done in a completely unethical way.

    Yes sir, Fox propaganda has never been better.

    Fox Nation recently had an article which depicted President Obama as at the “end of his rope.” The problem with this article? The first two paragraphs were taken from The Onion.

    For those of you who are not familiar with The Onion (and shame on you if you are not) allow me to help you understand. The Onion produces satirical news. In other words, the stories they write about are fake.

    They have produced stories from “Supreme Court Rules Death Penalty is ‘Totally Bad-ass'” to “Entertainment Scientists Warn Miley Cyrus will Be Depleted by 2013” to “Taco Bell Launches New ‘Morning After’ Burrito” which is a riveting story about how ingesting a Taco Bell burrito within 36 hours will help to prevent unwanted pregnancies (again, as a warning to my readers, these are fake stories. Taco Bell will not prevent pregnancies… yet).

    More recently The Onion posted an article entitled “Frustrated Obama Sends Nation Rambling 75,000-Word E-Mail.” This satirical article developed the story of President Obama sending an e-mail to everyone in America discussing his frustration and feelings.

    Fox Nation took this story and re-posted the first two paragraphs. Here is how they read, please keep in mind that this did NOT actually happen, it is all satire:

    “Having admittedly ‘reached the end of (his) rope,’ President Barack Obama sent a rambling 75,000-word e-mail to the entire nation Wednesday, revealing deep frustrations with America’s political culture, his presidency, U.S. citizens, and himself.

    The e-mail, which was titled ‘A couple things,’ addressed countless topics in a dense, stream-of-consciousness rant that often went on for hundreds of words without any punctuation or paragraph breaks. Throughout, the president expressed his aggravation on subjects as disparate as the war in Afghanistan, the sluggish economic recovery, his live-in mother-in-law, China’s undervalued currency, Boston’s Logan Airport, and tort reform.”

    While it would be easy to debunk this article from Fox as false by simply checking your e-mail inbox to see if, in fact, you did receive an e-mail, this did not happen on too many occasions. While Fox did have a link that mentioned that readers could “find the whole story at THEONION.COM”, this was nearly the only clue of the falsity of the story. If Fox readers did not know what The Onion was (again, shame on them if they don’t), they would have no idea that this article was meant to be satire.

    Some people obviously, from the comments left on the article, clearly had no clue what The Onion was. Here are just a few of my favorite comments on this article:

    “He can write 75,000 words … but he couldn’t write any of his own books?”

    “‘Frustrated’? Call it like it is. Incompetent.”

    “If this story is correct, that he did send out this e-mail, it is very concerning about his current state of mental health. I am surprised he would be allowed to send something like this out and if he is not functioning very well why there isn’t some attention being paid to his current state.”

    While I applaud Fox for helping spread the good news of The Onion, I have to wonder if that was their actual intent. Nothing was mentioned about how this was satirical. This leads me to one of two conclusions.

    One, Fox has no idea what satire is and, because they have become so far right-wing, they are willing to post anything that makes Democrats seem bad.

    Or two, Fox is trying to make their readers think and view Democrats, and specifically the President, in a certain light in order to promote an agenda and help any number of their staff who just happen to be running for president in 2012.

    Since this is Fox we are talking about here, it could go either way. 

Ben Zaritsky is a senior majoring in journalism and communications. He can be reached at ben.zaritsky@aggiemail.usu.edu