If favorable news coverage is bribery, what should we think of Fox News?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

This is an interesting interpretation, but what does it mean if applied to Fox News?

Reality needs to be called what it is. Systematically skewing coverage and providing a false picture of reality to the public constitutes a financial benefit on a huge scale. When a senior politician gets a series of flattering articles from a publisher, it’s worth a lot more to the politician than a box of cigars or a suitcase of cash to finance primary election activists. When a publisher censors an investigation of the truth about a politician, sometimes the publisher is sparing him the end of his career, and in the process is paying him a bribe worth more to him than it would be to transfer a million dollars into the politician’s son’s secret bank account in an island tax haven.

And when the politician, for his part, promises to compensate the tycoon by passing legislation or furthering the businessman’s huge financial interests, he is consummating the bribery deal. The harm to the public interest in such a case is immeasurably more severe than when a developer builds a monstrosity of a real estate project on a green hilltop in Jerusalem, or a company gets help to win a bid from the politician’s government ministry. Skewing news coverage represents a financial benefit par excellence for any politician and is also apparently the largest benefit there is in the interior world of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Post external references

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    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/media-cases-show-netanyahu-s-bid-for-tyranny-1.5827498
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