The Real Price of Faux News

From William Raspberry's piece appearing in the Houston Chronicle:

The in-your-face right-wing partisanship that marks Fox News Channel's news broadcasts is having two dangerous effects.

The first is that the popularity of the approach — Fox is clobbering its direct competition (CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, etc.) — leads other cable broadcasters to mimic it, which in turn debases the quality of the news available to that segment of the TV audience.

The second, far more dangerous, effect is that it threatens to destroy public confidence in all news.

That last, I admit, is more fear than prediction, but let me tell you what produces that fear. Fox News Channel — though the people who run the operation are at great pains to insist otherwise — is deliberately partisan. It is as though right-wing talk radio has metastasized into cable and assumed a new virulence.