I was once a fan of Fox News. Every young conservative is, I think. With thirty minutes of Fox each morning, you’re prepared, ready to fight the good fight, equipped with all the truth you need to crusade for conservatism!But, needless to say, my sentiments have changed. Fox News has not. It is still the same old cable network, with a snazzy and credibility-simulating news ticker at the bottom of the screen, the dashing and sharp anchors who have their inside jokes and crooked smiles, and all the rest. But these things do not make Fox unique in the least: CNN and MSNBC possess these same distinctive marks of cable news.

No, what makes Fox unique is its profound determination to remain abjectly partisan even in the face of the innumerable political failures on the establishment-Republican side of the aisle in the past eight years. I can only faintly remember what Fox was like pre-empire (that is, pre-2001), but I doubt it was half as bold in declaring its “reportage” “fair and balanced.” Now Fox blares its cheerful and non-objective Iraq message louder and clearer and more journalistically distastefully than ever before.

Today, sitting in a McDonald’s in downtown Auburn, Ala., I caught a glimpse–or, rather, about 30 minutes–of a Fox News broadcast, mostly about the “pregnancy pact” nonsense up in our glorious Socialist Republic of Massachusetts. But in the last minutes of my meal, the news turned quickly to the less-than-rousing speech Senator “Alex Hamilton” McCain was giving in Fresno at the moment. My stomach churned with uneasiness, as much a product of the mealworm burger I’d just ingested–only out of the greatest and bravest necessity, let me assure you–as of the uncomely spectacle I was watching on the TV, narrated by the two anchors with the gumdrop gaiety that only Fox can furnish. As McCain left the stage of his “townhall meeting,” the Fox camera trained in on his podium and the “Reform.Prosperity.Peace.” sign pasted to the front (the bewildering paradoxes of which seemed to have been lost even on McCain).

Then they quickly turned to something they called “The Deeper Insight,” or some bogus “news analysis” term they employ to signal that their normal propagandizing will be ratcheted up for a while. And with the help of yes-men guests who robotically nodded to every leading question thrown to them by the Fox anchors, they explored the “amazing boost” in foreign investment in Iraq recently. Could this be, dare they extrapolate, confirmation that the war was going well, that the surge had been successful? “Why, certainly! Why else would we bring it up, dumbo!” they seemed to answer my silent question in their five-minute segment. Their quick conclusion–characteristically stretched–was far from sound. Theirs was a question that required serious scholarly treatment for a true answer, not just some unfounded commentary from a couple of razzle-dazzle news anchors and some “Fox contributing retired adjunct quasi-intellectual analyst” from the hallowed halls of Who-Knows-Where Institute.

I am not one of those people who believes that the press ought to be completely objective. First, I think that’s an impossible end. Second, I don’t believe it’s useful to pursue impossible ends. And third, never in history has the press been dedicated to such an end, the wiser scribes of the past knowing that their purpose was to both present and persuade, since if “brute facts” were the only aim then there would be need of only one press and one newspaper, and that can only last so long before itself devolving into a certain subjectivity.

Thus I am not at all condemning Fox on account of its lack of objectivity. It doesn’t bother me any more than CNN’s similar problem, or The New York Times’, or any blog’s, for that matter. What does irk me–what gets my goat on a persistent and chronic basis–is that Fox News stays in business. What bothers me is that there are Americans, and masses of them, who will watch Fox–or any news program–and swallow it down without even the slightest reflex of scrutiny. I know these masses because not so many years ago I proudly counted myself among them: in watching Fox alone, I liked to think of myself as purified, refined, purged of the blasphemies and lies told elsewhere, as if I were “beating the system,” “dodging the CNN bullets,” keeping myself above the mere propaganda, and indulging in the real, down-to-earth truth. I know better now. I think it was John Adams who said that he didn’t read any newspapers and felt all the better for it. I feel the same way about TV news, and it’s my policy to avoid watching it at all costs–and, in fact, I do feel a lot better, and my blood pressure’s been on a healthy decline since I first implemented it.

It is the duty of the fortunate educated to combat, and not to encourage, such media as Fox News, CNN,  et al. We have been given a sense of reason and rationality, of balance and sensibility, and I believe it’s a very sad waste of that fortune to support, or even swallow ourselves, this kind of one-sided, unintelligent nonsense (pardon the redundancy). For those of you out there who want “change” and “hope” and “reform” and “prosperity” and “peace” in this country, you should be prepared to divorce yourselves and your respective campaigns from the clutches of the entrenched, militant rhetoric machines that thrive on our misfortunes and wars and corruptions.