As HuffPo reported this morning, Alan Colmes will be leaving Fox News' top-rated "news show" Hannity and Colmes after 12 years on air. I put that in quotes for a reason - the premise of the show has been that Hannity is conservative while Colmes is liberal, further emphasizing Fox's "fair and balanced" mantra. While the sparring of pundits is no doubt commonplace, what worries me is how interchangeable it has become with the world of television news journalism.
More than that, over the course of the past 12 years, Fox News has become increasingly more conservative and increasingly less fair and balanced. There is no denying its right wing bias. So what now? Will they find another (insert gasp) liberal to exchange barbs with Sean Hannity? And frankly, what's the point? Did Colmes ever really convince Fox's audience of anything or was he merely a liberal punching bag?
My previous post on Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly's most recent meeting touched on the same idea - the value of opposite ends of the spectrum meeting to try and understand eachother's points of view, their motives, their fears. What I appreciated about Stewart was that it seemed like, even if albeit momentarily, he had a vested interest in understanding WHY O'Reilly has the viewpoints he does. He wanted to understand the fear. But O'Reilly was on the show for the sake of argument. He doesn't have any interest in understanding the other side, even if just for the sake of understanding.
I've never been all that fond of Colmes (there's always been some indiscernible off-kilterness I've been unable to pinpoint), but without him, Fox will reduce the show to an even lower level of drivel masqueraded as news. They will find some argumentative "liberal" that they can paint with that red-handed placard, and they will continue to "debate," to bicker really, without ever taking the leap to understanding why it is Sean Hannity sits at one end of the table, and his partner at the other.
Not only is it not news, but it is a testament to the low level of political discourse we have reached. It is always the what, and never the why.
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2 comments:
Glad I tivo the show and make you watch it or else Alan Colmes would not have crossed your Radar Miss Gonzo.
PS. I know Hannity secretly has a special place in your heart.
Yes, the adversarial nature of "journalism" (especially on TV) is a big issue, mostly because it so polarizes the arguement that no real sense can be made of the issue. For that majority of Americans that lies somewhere in the middle of the liberal-conservative spectrum, somewhere at the table between Colmes and Hannity, there seems to be no representation in these news shows - no guidance on how to clearly articulate an arguement that strikes somewhere between the extremes.
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