Pseudo-journalists betray the public trust

"An interesting study published in October explored public misconceptions about the war in Iraq. One of those misconceptions was that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction had been found. Another was that links had been proved between Iraq and al-Qaida. A third was that world opinion favored the idea of the United States invading Iraq.
The study did not examine what had actually aired on specific media outlets, but the results spoke for themselves. Among people who primarily watched Fox News, 80 percent believed one or more of those myths. That's 25 percentage points higher than the figure for viewers of CNN -- and 57 percentage points higher than that for people who got their news from public broadcasting.
How could Fox have left its audience so deeply in the dark?
What we're seeing is a difference between journalism and pseudo-journalism, between journalism and propaganda. The former seeks earnestly to serve the public. The latter seeks to manipulate it.
It is the netherworld of attack politics that gave us Roger Ailes, the architect of Fox News. Having spent much of his career smearing politicians, he now refers to himself as a journalist, but his bag of tricks remains the same. Over time, I believe, the public will become increasingly aware of the discrepancy between what it's told by pseudo-journalists and what turns out to be the truth. They may even grow weary of the talk-show persona -- the schoolyard bully we all know so well."