There are no facts in newscasting. One would think the local weather newscast would be just facts. But if you live in Chicago and just a dusting of snow forecast tomorrow the “Action News Storm Center” labels it “BLIZZARD ALERT!! (Danger Will Robinson)”
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fox makes the majority of its money from cable subscription fees. ad revenue is nice for them, but basically irrelevant. ( and it’s why they’ve been immune to advertiser boycotts )
they’re currently trying to raise those fees to cover the dominion settlement
These fees are the majority of revenue for Fox, more even than advertising, and they are significantly higher than those charged by the network’s competitors. Fox has been able to raise prices and charge disproportionately high rates due to its history of deceptive and aggressive negotiating tactics during contract renewal talks with providers.
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“… there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere” 
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Because it isn’t possible. There are billions of hours of facts created every day. The very act of selecting facts creates a narrative. You could create an incredibly boring news network by following my life all day. Once commercials are taken into account, you couldn’t provide complete coverage. The choice of which moments you keep could make me a hero or villain. Pretending to aim for a voice from nowhere without an opinion is just lying about which opinions you are embedding.
Let’s apply that same idea to some common news stories. The Syrian civil war has killed a lot of people and spilled a lot of ink. If you dedicate a minute of screen time to discussing the role of climate change induced drought in sparking the war, that is one less minute spent on the exodous of migrants. Following either of those stories is fewer minutes to discussing the role of women in the Rojavan project. All three of those stories have been the primary coverage angle for different news outlets and they tell very different stories.
Which left, which right? Do you balance around the center of the most recent presidential election, the center of public opinion polling, or the center of all possible views?
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“Which left, which right? Do you balance around the center of the most recent presidential election, the center of public opinion polling, or the center of all possible views?”
Exactly. This is why “unbiased” journalism doesn’t exist. Everyone has limited space/time to present “the News” and that means everyone has to decide what stories even deserve coverage to begin with. If a candidate accuses a governor of sexual assault, then that is a fact, even if there is no evidence the assault happened and even if an assault was known to be actually impossible to have happened. As a journalist you can go with “Governor says assault charge is baseless” or “Candidate accuses Governor of sexual assault” or “Candidate makes up impossible charge against Governor” or you can choose not to cover the accusation as news. But you have to decide. Your decision reflects your own bias as to what is fair.
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It isn’t that simple. All news reporting involves editorial choices about which facts to present and when. It’s unavoidable, even when making best effort to be objective. This is the first thing they teach you in journalism school.
What do you do when one side of that “reasonable discussion” is not reasonable? It is reasonable right now to simply call the Right in America fascists, because that’s what they are. You cannot reason with fascists. While you’re debating the nuance of geopolitical influences of monetary policy, they are screaming to murder all the Jews and the queers.
How would you propose to format that reasonable debate so we can all make up our minds as rational adults?
“Am I in favour of raising interest rates to help control inflation, or should we ban all libraries because a religious maniac has deemed them peddlers child pornography? I’m so glad Crossfire is here to present these cases so I can make an informed choice”.
This is your proposed scenario.
You have to remember that presenting both sides as equal no matter what they say is what the extremists want. It’s how they move the Overton window. They’ve done that so well in America now that the “centre” is totally unreasonable and unrecognizable.
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Conservatives never really wanted “fair and balanced”, so trying to make CNN “more objective” is what’s obviously stupid about the idea.
Look how Fox News started losing viewers and getting hate mail after reporting the fact that Arizona went to Biden. They only want their weird fantasy side of the issues, and even a hint of anything else is treason.
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You’re making great points well, but I’m sitting here giggling out loud at “prepper chow”. Hehehe
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I aim to entertain and provoke thought. 
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I remember Rhett and Link tasting that. Funny episode 
ETA: Good goggly moggly, that was 5 years ago. Jim Bakker Bucket Taste Test - YouTube
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So much of what you said, but also: speaking as an engineer, who makes a living off facts, I can say two things about cold, hard, irrefutable facts:
- They’re rarer on the ground than you think.
- Nobody lives there. My view of my world and my place in it is based on a story I’ve made up that fits the facts. My values and ambitions are not facts - they’re stories. Everybody else does this too.
This matters when you’re trying to explain the significance of facts: when a news outlet chose which facts to present in the limited time they have, why was this particular fact chosen over the others? And in a world swimming with information, there’s no way to avoid this picking and choosing when you want to tell the news.
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What you are describing is a dance in which facts are beautifully choreographed by highly skilled artists to make you feel confident in your judgement without challenging you emotionally. But that may take you really far from the truth.
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And, he’s gone:
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Hopefully Zaslav next.
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You can argue if light is a particle or a wave. You can argue if comets, meteors, volcanoes killed the dinosaurs. You can argue also that light is secretly a muslim, and that Hillary killed the dinosaurs, but if you do so, CNN shouldn’t give you a town hall filled with your supporters to advertise this.
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