A PLACE ON EARTH, by Craig Gallaway, watercolor, copyright 2007. A small patch of ground in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens illustrates something of the patience and particularity of creation. The artist who draws and paints such a subject learns something about the Creator’s care for the reality of each individual thing, each moment of being as the sunlight changes and the wind blows. We need to engage similar powers of patient, critical observation as we assess the behavior of news media in our time.

The recent decision of the Democratic National Committee to bar Fox News from covering any of the DNC’s primary presidential debates exposes a problem that many people have become acutely aware of over the last couple of years. There is a big difference between news stories that try to be realistic, basing their claims on verified sources and concrete evidence, and opinion pieces masquerading as news, which really only give us the political bias of the journalist, and how his or her sources (often unnamed) want to shape our opinions. The problem for the DNC, of course, is that the “news” sources which they favor (CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and most “main stream” outlets) are just as guilty, often more so, of confusing opinion with news as anyone associated with Fox News.

Deb and I have watched this unfold in daily installments over the last two years or so, since Donald Trump became president. We have never regarded President Trump as a perfect president or person, nor even at times in his life as a very good man (the same could be said of most of us); but we have been astounded to watch the mainstream media stoop to the most obvious tactics of misinformation in order to depose him if at all possible. We used to be avid listeners to NPR, and to watch PBS Newshour every evening on TV; but then we began to see a pattern of one-sided interviews with loaded questions, and only democratic-leaning guests. Since we didn’t even have access to Fox News, we tried turning to other sources such as NBC and CBS; but we found the same kind of thing happening there. A kind of self-satisfied group of journalists who seemed to be parroting each other, and presenting themselves as news room heroes, bravely exposing the alleged sins of others, while they championed clearly partisan opinions among their guests and in their own voices.

As a result of getting Apple TV we finally gained access to Fox News. We were skeptical at first. We had seen Fox programs on my father’s TV during the Obama years, and we expected to find just a lot of trash talk from the right. Of course even that would at least have brought some balance to what we had been getting through the mainstream media. What we actually found was that Fox News seemed much more candid about which of its programs were opinion shows (Hannity, Laura Ingram, Tucker Carlson, for example) and which were in fact making a concerted effort to do something more objective and fact based (Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Chris Wallace, etc.). And we also found that on the News shows, there was a much better effort than we had witnessed in the mainstream media to include interview guests with intelligent opinions from the other side of the aisle (guests such as Juan Williams and Mara Liasson of NPR, Amy Walter of PBS, and Charles Lane of The Washington Post, etc.).

As a result of this personal journey through various offerings of the news media over the last two years, Deb and I have come to believe that it is very important to offset the offerings of the mainstream media with those of Fox News or other reputable non-mainstream sources, at least for anyone who wishes to have even a modest chance of hearing the news rather than simply reinforcing partisan opinion. Therefore, if all you have been hearing comes from the mainstream, we recommend an experiment: try tuning into a program like Bret Baier on Fox News in the evening. See if you don’t discover a few insights, a few authoritative sources, even whole areas of information, that you would never have heard about in the mainstream. And if this seems like just too much to ask, then perhaps you yourself have become a champion of partisan bias in a way that even facts and evidence could never disturb.