Conservative Pundit Celebrates Creation of Alternate Reality
Yesterday, Charles Krauthammer accepted the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, an annual award given by News Corporation. In his acceptance speech, Krauthammer lauded Fox News channel, which he said has “done a great service to the American polity” and for “single-handedly breaking up the intellectual and ideological monopoly that for decades exerted hegemony (to use a favorite lefty cliché) over the broadcast media.” But his praise took a strange turn when he extolled the “genius” of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes for creating an “alternate reality” for its viewers:
KRAUTHAMMER: What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.
A few years ago, I was on a radio show with a well-known political reporter who lamented the loss of a pristine past in which the whole country could agree on what the facts were, even if they disagreed on how to interpret and act upon them. All that was gone now. The country had become so fractured we couldn’t even agree on what reality was. What she meant was that the day in which the front page of The New York Times was given scriptural authority everywhere was gone, shattered by the rise of Fox News.
Elsewhere in his speech, Krauthammer tried to explain why his award was more valuable to him than the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is “awarded to those, from Yasir Arafat to Jimmy Carter, who give the most succor to the forces of terror and tyranny,” Krauthammer said. (HT: TPM)
