Fox News

The Fox organization has decided to replace WWOR’s evening newscast with a half-hour program on New Jersey politics. The canceling of its ten p.m. newscast is a gigantic loss to New Jersey and an unconscionable misuse of local service responsibility.

WWOR is New Jersey’s only licensed television broadcast facility. I know, I anchored and co-anchored that broadcast for many years back when it was an independent super station and reached an audience nationwide and it was a bonifide player in the New York Television ADI.

Other network stations in New York City and Philadelphia do cover breaking news in New Jersey, but their license does not require them to do so.  

Years ago there was a challenge to the then WOR-TV license for not covering the public service needs and news requirements in New jersey for a renewal of an FCC license.

Former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradlay extracted a promise from the previous owners of Channel Nine that if the license were to be renewed they would move their facilities to New Jersey and concentrate their news coverage on New Jersey with a noon and a ten o'clock news broadcast.

The license was renewed and New Jersey had a state wide televison news coverage until Fox, a.k.a. Rupert Murdock, bought the station several years ago and began its systematic decimation of a rival to New York’s, Fox owned, channel five.

That fact that the FOX news organization influences over 37 percent of American television homes is worrisome. Every viewer of any station must look for prejudice and slant everywhere. It does not come from just conservative viewpoints or from liberal perspectives. It comes from all and any who believe only in the efficacy of their opinions, but call it news and surreptitiously influence the viewer by the  commission and omission of information.

Unfortunately most of us do not independently verify what we are told on our news broadcasts and on what we read in our newspapers or hear on the radio.

I have always said that to be fully informed all of us must read widely, listen (radio) widely and watch widely. To embrace only one news source and form an opinion based on what you hear from that one news source is debasing your responsibility to be an informed citizen.

Having an engaged citizenry is a hard national maintenance. People must choose to participate in the fullness of democracy not just wallow in selective personal beliefs.

I don’t trust Rupert Murdoch or his upper leadership. I have many friends and former colleagues who work for the FOX organization. They are good people and dedicated journalists, but, in my opinion,  they are cemented into a narrow ownership viewpoint that calls itself NEWS.