I face something of a double bind in my teaching career, because generally English instructors at the college level are expected to focus on one particular area of English, such as composition, or business writing, or creative writing, or some field of literature.  There’s no question that I get the most enjoyment out of teaching creative writing, because it’s basically an excuse to hang out with all of the coolest students on campus in an atmosphere where we meet as fellow artists.  At the same time, I think teaching composition is more fulfilling for me because, through teaching my students critical thinking skills and applying those skills to the worlds around them, I help them see the BS around them and show them how writing can work to help reduce the amount of BS in the world that we all have to deal with.  Critical thinking plays a heavy part in my creative writing classes, but really, the main thing I’m teaching my students to do is write really good, convincing, effective lies.

The thing is, when you read a piece of fiction, whether it be a short story online or a novel you pick up at the bookstore, you go in knowing that what you are experiencing is something that is made up.  I’ve been reading a lot of historical fiction lately, and even though a lot of historical fiction uses real names and places and events, there is an underlying knowledge you go in with that what you are reading is a fabrication, something that may have some connections with real events, possibly even strong connections, but ultimately is not a wholly accurate depiction of reality.  The lines between fiction and non-fiction can sometimes be blurry and hard to determine, but when a work is represented as being non-fiction, there had better be no doubt about that claim.  The claim to non-fiction is an implicit promise from the creator of the work and his or her audience, and when that promise is broken — most famously in recent times with James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces — not only are readers left feeling lied to and abused, but it damages the ability of those who do lay claim to “non-fiction” in an honest way to be seen as honest by the general public, because they’ve been burned before and they’re afraid that they’ll be burnt again.

Of course, none of this is a problem if your audience is willing, ideally even eager, to accept whatever you present to them, no matter how little connection it has to reality (if it has any at all), as indisputable, gospel fact.  Enter Fox News and its conservative media conscripts.

The recent firestorm over Shirley Sherrod is just the latest example of the conservative media machine creating a controversy out of thin air, with just the tiniest wisps of reality woven in, and using it to effect the changes they want to see in the real world.  Given that this whole controversy traces back to Andrew Breitbart, that should have been more than enough for any sane person to take the whole thing with a pound of salt and wait until actual journalists researched what really went on.  Because of the power and influence of institutions like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, though, and the sheer volume of right-wingers and their manufactured outrage, Sherrod was ousted from her job, drawing condemnation and scorn from all corners of the political spectrum. When a modicum of actual research was done into the story, though — watching Sherrod’s speech unedited instead of the hacked-up version Breitbart posted — it became more than clear that Sherrod wasn’t saying any of the things Breitbart, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the right-wing media machine was accusing her of saying.

If nothing else, the presence of clear jump cuts in the Breitbart video should have tipped most people off that something was fishy.  It’s gotten to the point now where I have to be suspicious of any jump cut in any news clip, whether online or on television, and I doubt I’m the only one who feels that way.  Just taking a look at my last blog, any right-winger with two brain cells to rub together (which, I know, excludes a lot of them) could look at it, then go to Andrew Breitbart or Matt Drudge and have them concoct the headline, “LIBERAL BLOGGER SAYS ‘LET’S BULLDOZE EVERY CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN AMERICA’.”  Yes, those seven words do appear in that blog in that order, but if you read the whole blog then you know that the “suggestion,” if you could even call it that, is a humourous suggestion meant to point out the inherent lack of logic of people protesting the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” on the grounds that the mosque would be offencive to New Yorkers traumatized by the 09.11 attacks.  If you just take that part of one sentence, though, it’s easy to ascribe all sorts of sinister notions not just to my writing, and not just to me, but to the liberal blogosphere (Goddess I hate that word) in general, notions the audiences of the right-wing media machine are all too ready to accept because of all the other similar hack jobs that have been done to things other liberals, and even moderates, have said.

(By the way, if anyone wants to try to see if Drudge or Fox News will run with that headline, I’d appreciate it.  I need to hire a consultant for one of my screenplays, and I could use the extra cash from hits on my Website.)

David Letterman has made this kind of manipulation of public figures’ words into one of his longest-running comedy bits, using these kinds of jump cuts to make presidents and celebrities and all sorts of people say the most absurd and idiotic things.  It’s funny because what is being said is so clearly divorced from reality, both in terms of what is said and the blatancy of the jump cuts, that the contrast is funny.  When Andrew Breitbart does something like this and it gets aired nearly non-stop on Fox News, though, the audience doesn’t get that contrast, doesn’t understand that what they’re seeing is ultimately so divorced from reality that no impartial observer would dare to call it non-fiction or, for that matter, journalism.  Given the effect these things have had on America, they’re the furthest thing from funny.

Let us not forget that the Sherrod controversy is pretty much a condensed version of what happened last year with ACORN.  When Fox News started playing the James O’Keefe videos all the time, they drummed up pretty much the same response and got enough Democrats to vote with Republicans to get ACORN’s federal funding cut, leading to ACORN’s relatively quick death.  When California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, subpoenaed O’Keefe’s unedited tapes, though, what he saw was so far removed from what aired on Fox News that most people soon realized that ACORN shouldn’t have lost its funding, let alone be subjected to the media storm initiated by the right-wing media machine.  Let’s not forget that the end of ACORN meant scores upon scores of people losing their jobs, and that one of ACORN’s services was helping people build local businesses to create even more jobs, a necessity if we’re to stop the advance to a future where the three branches of government are Wal*Mart, Big Oil, and Pat Robertson.

Say what you will about MSNBC and its hosts — I’ve certainly been critical of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow when I’ve felt it right to be — but even if you have problems with their interpretations of the facts, at the very least they put a good faith effort in to present all the facts along with their interpretations.  Fox News does no such thing, using the same kind of tactics Rush Limbaugh pioneered in his radio show over twenty years ago (and still makes a mint from today).  The Obama Administration, the NAACP, and everyone else who ran with this story before checking Sherrod’s unedited speech deserve scorn for leaping to conclusions, but at the very root of this story was Fox News not engaging in the most basic of journalistic practice, whether through gross negligence or in a deliberate attempt to present its audience with right-wing fiction as if it were fact.  This isn’t the first time this has happened, and I sincerely doubt it will be the last.

This is why, effective immediately, the Obama Administration, not to mention state and local governments across the country, should revoke the press credentials of Fox News and its employees.  This means no more access to press conferences, no interviews with government officials, and hopefully forcing Fox News to relabel itself as something other than the “news organization” it claims to be.  You can argue whether things like the ACORN and Sherrod controversies came about from mistakes or a deliberate attempt to convey fiction as fact, but the end result is the same.  Sherrod and the employees of ACORN are all out of jobs, and even if they all get hired at new, better-paying, more fulfilling jobs, Fox News viewers are still left with the mistaken impression that all these people engaged in acts that were, if not illegal, then highly immoral.  You can call what Fox News does a lot of things, but one thing you cannot call it is journalism.

I realize this has been a common cry from the left-wing almost since Fox News first took to the air, but between the open advocacy and organizing of Tea Party movements and the ACORN and Sherrod controversies, the evidence that Fox News should lose its journalistic and press licenses has never been more readily apparent.  The time to act is now, before Fox News becomes any more brazen in their activities.