Abstract
The collision of news and entertainment cultures in the United States was neatly encapsulated by a 2015 dust-up between rival pundits on Fox News and its allegedly progressive rival MSNBC over the relationship between truth-telling and ratings-grubbing. The exchange revolved around the revelation that high-profile Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly had apparently stretched the truth about his experiences in conflict zones — a discovery that followed on the heels of a similar revelation about NBC celebrity news anchor Brian Williams. Whereas Williams promptly apologized and stepped down so that the circumstances could be investigated, O’Reilly, backed up by his network, stood his ground, conceding only that some of the violent and tragic events that he claimed to have witnessed firsthand in Northern Ireland and El Salvador he had actually seen only in photographs (Dearden, 2015). Picking up on the apparent hypocrisy of O’Reilly, who had publicly criticized Williams with the observation that, ‘If you can’t trust a news anchor or commentator, then you’re not going to watch that person,’ MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow enumerated O’Reilly’s exaggerations and falsehoods (Corn & Schulman, 2015).
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© 2016 Mark Andrejevic
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Andrejevic, M. (2016). Commercial Nationalism and the Affective News Network. In: Volcic, Z., Andrejevic, M. (eds) Commercial Nationalism. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137500991_10
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