Fox News “embedding” with ICE agents in Boston was an affront to our nation’s core democratic values
A couple of months ago, I wrote an editorial as part of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism’s big annual fundraiser that I framed around the obvious fact that the Trump administration is not going to make it easy for journalists over the next four years.
The title of my piece, “Trump Will Make Independent Journalism Even Harder to Produce,” made it clear that I was not talking about just any journalists being under threat, but specifically independent journalists like my BINJ colleagues and me. Independent as in not for sale. Independent as in free from external influence. Independent as in not carrying water for the rich and powerful.
If that’s not clear, perhaps I can explain what independent journalism is by showing its opposite: A very current example of what I view as propaganda in the guise of journalism—naturally coming from our good friends at Fox News—taking place right here in the Boston area.
Murdoch’s minions rolled into town just a couple of days after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration ready and willing to embed themselves with a gaggle of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in what they called “an exclusive ride-along with ICE” as that agency targets the “worst of the worst criminal alien offenders first” for arrest and deportation to their home countries.
But nothing that the Fox hosts, a field reporter, and his video crew did in the seven-minute segment could be called journalism in my estimation. They gleefully cheerled multiple raids on immigrants that ICE told them (and viewers) were “bad guys”—dealers, rapists, and murderers—while offering no proof of any kind for those assertions. They breezily shrugged off the arrest of another immigrant who merely happened to be present in one of the apartments ICE entered, even though he wasn’t an alleged perp. They attacked political leaders of Boston and other sanctuary cities as well as the judicial and criminal justice systems in such locales without seeking a single quote in opposition to the several straw men they set up and knocked down over the course of the segment.
It was great clickbait. It was an impressive spectacle. But I definitely don’t think it was journalism. Unless reporting is now merely transcribing whatever a government agency—or a giant corporation or preacher or potentate—tells you and repeating it to a slice of the American public all too ready to believe whatever you say.
BINJ is a gnat to Fox’s 900-pound gorilla. We cover just a tiny fraction of the stories that one of the network’s affiliates covers every year. But we are journalists. We report the news we cover as fairly and accurately as we possibly can. And we won’t say Fox News never does proper journalism. But this morning it did something else entirely … a disservice to our entire profession. An act of craven supplicance to authority that we see as an affront to our nation’s core democratic values. And that’s what journalism is not.
