Fox TV Is Violent, Profane & Obscene

In our New Oxford Note “The Filthy Speech Movement” (Sept.), we wrote: “The neocon Fox television network has violated decency standards by broadcasting the ‘s-word’ and the ‘f-word’ in family-viewing time slots. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in March that broadcasting such vulgarities was ‘indecent.’ The FCC, however, did not impose a fine on Fox. Nevertheless, Fox appealed the FCC ruling, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York decided in Fox’s favor.”

In our New Oxford Note “Smooth as Silk” (March 2006), we cited an article in Touchstone magazine by Rod Dreher. Dreher recalled: “In the early 1990s, I was a television critic for the Washington Times. One of the biggest television stories in either 1992 or 1993 was the debut of Matt, an openly gay character on the [neoconservative] Fox nighttime soap Melrose Place…. The producers made Matt into a veritable saint, and audiences got comfortable with him…. Just over a decade from the moment when Fox tentatively stepped forward with an openly gay character in prime time, homosexuality is at the white-hot center of our popular culture.”

Dreher also said: “This is…why you have seen little, if any, reference in the mainstream media to the role male homosexual culture played in the Catholic sex-abuse scandal. Mainstream journalists are making conscious decisions to ignore it. When I arrived in Dallas in the summer of 2002 to cover the historic meeting of the Catholic bishops for National Review, I was asked to brief a correspondent for [neocon] Fox News who had been put onto the story at the last minute. When I got to the part about the role of male homosexuality in Catholic clerical culture, I told her she needed to speak to Michael S. Rose, who was at the conference [meeting], and whose terrific book Goodbye, Good Men was an important exposé of the so-called lavender mafia. The reporter shook her head and said the crew had orders from New York, from the top of the company, not to talk to him [Rose], and to stay off the homosexual thing.” Fox News claims to be “fair and balanced.” Is it really?

In our New Oxford Note “It’s Good for Business” (Dec. 2006), we reported: “According to LifeSite­News.com (Sept. 8 [2006]), the neocon Fox News channel donated $10,000 to the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA).”