I wrote a whole post just now criticizing Fox News for their annual War on Christmas because it’s exhausting and polarizing.
And the crux of the post was, of course, that for someone who isn’t Christian there’s nothing more obviously fictional than the notion that Christians can’t celebrate their holiday, that the “political correctness” decried by Fox isn’t designed to make the powerful feel weaker but to make minorities feel included, and that the result of Fox’s War on Christmas is to make a whole bunch of people — who are already in the majority by a wide, wide margin — celebrate Christmas more aggressively.
And immediately two geniuses decided that I don’t know what I’m talking about because
1) I clearly don’t understand the difference between Fox News’ entertainment programming and Fox News’ news programming:
This is a damn morning show, not hard news. Learn the difference.
2) The show I must like — but that actually I’ve never watched for even one second — is bad too:
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell shouting over people he disagrees with and then kicking them off of his show is what they consider journalistic integrity.
So, basically, the argument in reply is that the people who are talking about the War on Christmas on Fox News have no journalistic standards. Which is precisely what I claimed at the beginning of my post. But the real point of the post was about how the trumped up War on Christmas exists only in the minds of Fox News and its viewers … but that the result of their constant harping on something that doesn’t exist is further polarizing of people in this country. Which is then demonstrated by the two geniuses who think that Fox News doesn’t have any responsibility to journalism or even to truth-telling.
So, yeah, polarizing nonsense.
Fox News should use that as their new slogan. It’s much more obviously true than Fair and Balanced. And it captures the spirit of what they’re doing and what their viewers have come to expect.
I pretty much couldn’t get past #1: Fox News has news programming?