Tel-Chai Nation

Wouldn't you know it. The FOXophobes in the weekly newspaper publishing are at it again, and this one practically made the cover story of the issue! The Willamette Week of Portland, Oregon, published an article attacking their local FOX station 12. And here's something at the start of the buffoonery they publish that gives away their less then sincere intentions:

"Forget London bombers, Caribbean hurricanes or Baghdad insurgents. Portland, in its own right, is one scary town."

Portland may be a scary town alright, but no less so than the bombers in London, or even what the author of this article calls "insurgents" in Baghdad. And that starting sentence there pretty much gives away what this tommyrot was really meant for: sensationalism. Exactly what they accuse FOX News of doing.

"Fox 12 is a breed apart, though, from its three local competitors. Even though Portland's crime rates in most categories are down, many nights the newscast hosted by Wayne Garcia and Shauna Parsons seems like one crime story after another. Among the station's calling cards are the near-nightly METH WATCH feature and "Cyber Stings," in which the station lures idiots into humiliating exposure with online promises of sex with teens."

No kidding. I remember in the early 90s some other stations like CBS used to do things like that. Whether or not FOX 12 is doing that, are they any different? That's selective arguing for you, everybody.

"But guess what? It seems to work. Last month, for the first time ever, Fox 12's 10 o'clock had a larger audience than any other local news show at any time during the day, according to the Nielsen ratings (see sidebar, page 23)."

And why? Because they're giving people a lot of the things that BBC and CNN won't report about, like the oil-for-food scandal at the UN. But they don't mention that here, now do they? No way, 'cause that would be praising them for doing something good, which they'd rather not do.

The rest here is mostly attempts to smear the station as flat-out tabloid, doing its darndest to make them look as repugnant as possible in their propaganda lens, while ignoring whatever stupidity in a similar vein various other TV stations have committed. And of course, the article leaves out all the positive parts, not mentioning any of them, if at all.

I once knew an obnoxious Oregonian who worked for a very sugarcoated reporter from the mid-south, who also specialized in promoting sensationalistic material, exactly what this article above supposedly condemns. I'm betting he'd enjoy reading article like what the Willamette Week publishes here, ditto his former boss.

Labels: communications, msm foulness, United States