by Barbara Fischkin
I once wrote a political column for Fox News. My point of view was liberal and at times decidedly leftist.
This is true-true and not fake news.
The notorious Fox was then a media baby, albeit an enormous one. At its American launch in 1997, it already had 17 million cable subscribers. Millions of Americans looking for a conservative alternative to CNN and company.
Two years later I was hired, as a freelancer, to write an opinion column for a nascent website: Fox News Online. Back then, the television screen ruled. The website was an experiment, to see if the Internet was real. I was told I could opine as I wished, as long as the facts backed me up and I was not libelous or incoherent. A cartoonist was assigned to illustrate my words.
When I was first approached about writing this, I thought it was a practical joke. A dear friend and former newspaper colleague showed up one morning in our family backyard and told me to stop calling her every morning with my take on national and world events. “Write it,” she said. “I will pay you. Two hundred bucks a column once a week. Eight hundred a month.” Not a lot for Fox News, even then. But I needed the money. Needing money is one of my hobbies.
“You’re kidding,” I told my friend. “I can’t write for Fox. They are conservative assholes.”
Already I knew.
“This,” I told her, still certain she was kidding. “Would be prostitution.”
“Nope,” she replied. “You can write anything you want.”
“Says who?”
“Me. I run that site. And I will edit you.”
“Uh, oh.”
“I won’t change your view. I will merely keep you from embarrassing yourself.”
I considered my behavior in the bars we had frequented as young reporters.
“Where were you when I needed you?” I asked.
She guffawed and we shook on it.
And so I became an oddball liberal voice on the opinion page of Fox News Online. I did this for two years, without a scolding. My checks from The News Corporation were approved by Roger Ailes. At the end of this stint, I did not get fired. I quit. I was busy with a contract for two books, a university teaching position and two adolescent sons. There are times when I wonder if I dreamed I worked for Fox. Maybe I got stuck in a Broadway musical. Brigadoon? Maybe my two years were just one day, one day in a hundred years.
I began to write this column before Hamas and Israel exploded into the war we now hear about in terrifying news delivered with terrifying regularity. Now I am writing it as a miniscule attempt to remedy the other casualty of a terrorizing war: The Truth. I hope that what I write will serve as a tiny reminder about civic responsibility and media literacy—and be considered by those who gobble up random social media reports. I also hope this will be read by would-be journalists and journalism and media students. For them I have one core message: Every reporter needs an editor. In these times, even an unofficial one will do. But it must be someone who will not greenlight all you send out there.
Among all but the most strident, the news from this war also terrifies by sowing confusion. Just when you think you are sure you can identify the villain, the counter-villain appears along with more atrocities. As I write this, there remains no confirmation whether or not Hamas paraded babies’ heads on stakes, pogrom-style. When this report first came out—and when President Biden incorrectly led us to believe it was absolutely true— I was as terrified as any decent human being would be. My terror was ancestral. In 1919 my family escaped an Eastern European pogrom when this exact atrocity happened, according to eyewitnesses whose reports I trust.
Not long after Biden mentioned the heads of those babies, the White House backtracked on whether or not it was real. Another example of confusion: Hours ago, on NPR, I heard interviews with Gaza physicians treating patients in the hospitals they refused to evacuate. One described a hundred patients descending on an emergency room at once.
This was followed by the Biden administration reminding us that Hamas embeds itself amongst civilians. What did that mean? Which civilians?
There is a way to make the first draft of history—journalism—matter so that it provides a decent foundation for historians. The major news organizations and outlets are doing their best, while risking the lives of reporters, at least twelve of whom have been killed. But even the best media now have to deal with the need to race against too many “independent,” untrained and unedited “reporters.” When the major outlets have to stop to report on the plethora of these bulletins, as the New York Times did on the front page of its Sunday print edition, you know the world’s information pipeline is in deep trouble. The headline: “Online Deceits Make The Truth A War Casualty.”
As for Fox, my columns have been cleansed from the Internet. The hard copies I saved floated away in 2012 when our house was hit by Hurricane Sandy. My hard drive went with the paper. For the curious, or for those who need to read about something other than the war:
The column was called “Not Calm,” a play on words that has been used many times since.
The piece I remember best is the one I wrote railing against a spate of murders of doctors who were performing abortions. That elicited at least two letters to the editor, one threatening to murder me as well, the other vowing to insist that Rupert Murdoch fire me. During the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, I wrote that if the then-president had to take a long commute to work instead of moseying over to the Oval Office, he would be too tired to fool around with an intern. I think I was more angry at the Long Island Rail Road than at Bill Clinton.
In regard to this current war, I am not writing about it. Friends keep contacting me, to ask me to explain to them what is really going on. They are doing this because the news has been so confusing and I was once a foreign correspondent. So they think I know the truth. I don’t. I never reported from the Middle East. I tell those friends what I think I can discern about the situation from analyzing the same reports they question.
Then I confess the reality: “Damn if I know what is going on there.”
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