Charles Krauthammer: "Fox News Has Done a Great Service to American Polity"

Dr. Charles Krauthammer, one of the must-read conservative pundits, received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism yesterday, and in his remarks commented on how Fox News has done the job that the mainstream media just won't do: Present both sides. Here are some of his remarks at the awards luncheon:

AT a time when awards in the humanities are a near-monopoly of the left -- Nobel peace prizes awarded to those, from Yasir Arafat to Jimmy Carter, who give the most succor to the forces of terror and tyranny; Pulitzers given to whichever newspaper can expose the more damaging national-security secrets -- it is important for there to be an award to recognize and encourage journalism and, more generally, political thinking of a different kind.

In that respect, there should be a special award for Fox News. Fox has done a great service to the American polity -- single-handedly breaking up the intellectual and ideological monopoly that for decades exerted hegemony (to use a favorite lefty cliché) over the broadcast media.

I said some years ago that the genius of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was to have discovered a niche market in American broadcasting -- half the American people. The reason Fox News has thrived and grown is because it offers a vibrant and honest alternative to those who could not abide yet another day of the news delivered to them beneath layer after layer of often undisguised liberalism.

What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.

A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn't even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by the rise of Fox News.

What left me slack-jawed was the fact that she, like the cohort of mainstream journalists she represented so perfectly, was so ideologically blinkered that she could not fathom the plain fact that the liberal media were presenting the news and the world through a particular lens. The idea that it was particular, and that there might be competing ones, perhaps even superior ones, was beyond her ken.

That's why Fox News is so resented. It altered the intellectual and ideological landscape of America. It gave not only voice but also legitimacy to a worldview that had been utterly excluded from the mainstream media.

I'm proud to be part of this televised apostasy. And particularly proud to be part of the single best news program on American television, the six-o'clock news -- first with Brit Hume, now with Bret Baier. How good is "Special Report"? So good that even if I weren't on it, my mother would watch it -- and she spent 50 years as a Democrat.

Don Surber adds his own thoughts on the media before Fox News:

This is not news to those of us who are frustrated with the media which praised Mikhail Gorbachev as a reformer but ridiculed Ronald Reagan as a blithering war-monger — which drove Bob Packwood from office over an unwanted French kiss but shielded Bill Clinton’s decades of serial sexual harassment — which blew up a mild economic downturn in 1991 into the worst crisis since the Great Depression — which plucked defeat from the hands of victory in the Gulf War with one-sided coverage of the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait — which in 1988 accepted at face value that there is a computer model that shows the world would burn up in 20 years thanks to cow farts — which cared more for the black men in prison for life than the black men they murdered — which labeled the ending 40 years of Democratic Party control of the House of Representatives as voting by “angry white males” — and which had distorted the facts and accepted every koo-koo plan to expand government control of our lives for as far back as I can remember.

All this happened before Fox News.

After Fox News, Dan Rather tried to bring down President Bush with a counterfeit memo.

He failed.

No wonder the left gets so apoplectic about Fox.

Charles is a regular panel member on Special Report with Bret Baier, one of only two news shows that I TiVo and watch regularly (the other being Fox News Sunday). His dry and very pointed wit is alway entertaining and informative, and both shows provide a balance to the major stories of the day.

If there's one guy in media who I would love to sit down and talk to for an hour it would be Charles.