I’m a big fan of On the Media — I listen to its podcast every Saturday morning while “running.” But I had to wait for the transcript to come out to verify that I really heard what I heard this week. Brooke Gladstone interviewed TVNewser Brian Stelter (who did damned well) about FoxNews going local and said this:
Any broadcast station has a license that is regarded as a public trust, and in it there’s some assumption that it will offer a broad range of views. And I wonder, if the Fox broadcast stations were to become “Foxified” to the point where they sounded like the Fox news channels, do you think that that would pose a risk to their licenses?
That stopped me in my tracks for a number of reasons: First, do you really think that FoxNews, if broadcast, should lose its license? Why? And in what universe is it the FCC’s and government’s job to judge what is news… to license journalism?
