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What's Wrong with This Picture?

By Alice Pfeifer
Opinion | February 10, 2010

HAYS, Kan. - I must be slow because I never noticed this before.

This past weekend I watched Saturday Night Live for the first time in a long time. I had stopped watching it after tiring of the show's rapid descent into third-grade bathroom humor when its stars didn't have vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin to spoof anymore. However, this weekend I was in for a pleasant surprise when the show returned to its former glory with a brilliant parody of "fair and balanced" Fox News. (Or Faux News, as some of us prefer to call it.)

The show's opening skit featured Greta Van Susteren bemoaning the present state of the nation's security. Then she interviewed Karl Rove, Oliver North, Fox News correspondent Attractive Blonde Lady, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs -- whom she kept cutting off. Well, the more I watched Greta and friends carrying on, the more one particular point caught my attention. I double-checked the Fox News website to make sure I was right, and, sure enough, I was. Tell me, what do you notice about this list of star attractions on Fox News -- Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Chris Wallace, John Stossel, and of course Greta Van Susteren?

That's right -- there is not a person of color anywhere in sight. From Fox, we get only the lily-white version of American life, which even the US Census Bureau admits is one increasingly small part of our nation's story. And if I didn't have the census bureau to get me in touch with this basic reality, all I'd have to do is recall my experiences in the past thirty years of living and working in the Milwaukee, Chicago, and New York City metro areas. Heck, even the small Kansas town where I currently live isn't lily-white. And the town is the richer for it.

But what does it say about our country if Fox News has such a large national following? We all have seen Fox set the news agenda for other networks in recent years. If Fox makes a major scandal out of ACORN, the story is soon covered by everyone else whether it's real or not, newsworthy or not. But if the undercover reporter who "exposed" ACORN is later arrested for wiretapping a US senator's office -- and if by omission Fox News declares it a non-story -- then pretty much everyone else downplays the incident, too.

But I'm still sticking with ABC, NBC, and CBS for much of my news (along with PBS of course). At least those networks feature reporting by the likes of John Quinones, Byron Pitts, Russ Mitchell, Ray Suarez, Gwen Ifil, Hoda Kotb, and John Yang. And that's the America I know and love.

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Published February 10, 2010 by Alice Pfeifer | |

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