Fox News: If you purport to be a journalist, it helps to have a grip on your subject

Glenn Beck got away with his games at the Fox News channel for more than two years

Conservative radio and television commentator Glenn Beck speaks to a rally of Tea Party members as they protest against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeting of the Tea Party and similar groups during a rally called 'Audit the IRS' outside the US C (Getty Images)

Trailing his channel’s coverage of Tuesday night’s State of the Union address by Barack Obama, the Fox News anchor Shepard Smith made a little joke. For the big night he had forsaken his usual New York studio to be with the rest of the Fox political team in Washington. “I am surprised they let me into the city, there is usually a roadblock,” he quipped.

Rehearsed or spontaneous, it was meant to feed the assumed prejudices of his viewers about Washington as the bad bastion of big government and liberal largesse against which only Fox rails. But let’s say he had met barricades at the border … who would have been manning them? Aides from the White House? Or peers from his own profession?

Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, still operates under the banner “Fair and Balanced”, which is precisely what it is not. That alone makes you wonder – that it would so misrepresent its mission. Or maybe that’s another joke and I’ve lost my sense of humour. I do tune in sometimes. Give Fox a tornado or a Trayvon Martin and it excels. It has zing and urgency. But come dusk, it turns into a grotesque liturgy of paranoia and conspiracy theories about what President Obama really intends to do to the country given a chance. Remember Glenn Beck?

Beck left Fox in late 2011, apparently after exhausting the patience even of Roger Ailes, the former media operative for Nixon and Reagan who created the channel and still runs it. Beck had taken provocation so far that big advertisers were starting to jump ship. Maybe it was the on-air assertion that financier George Soros had sent “Jews to the death camps” while a child. Or the occasion that he doused a studio guest with petrol and lit a match (only the match was real) suggesting that that was what Mr Obama planned to do to every American with his heinous policies: set them on fire.

Last week, Beck, who now runs an obscure internet TV and radio shop called Blaze, popped up on his former channel as a guest and expressed remorse about some of the stunts he pulled while at his Fox desk. Beck began: “I made an awful lot of mistakes, and I wish I could go back and be more uniting in my language.” That would have been nice.

It got better. “I think I played a role unfortunately in helping tear the country apart. And it’s not who we are. I didn’t realise how really fragile the people were. I thought we were kind of a little more in it together. And now I look back and I realise [that] if we could have talked about the uniting principles a little more, instead of just the problems, I think I would look back on it a little more fondly. But that’s only my role.”

As contrition goes, Beck’s may not persuade. He didn’t know “how really fragile” people were? So it’s the audience’s fault now. He is also admitting there that he was clueless about the country he claimed to understand, even represent. If you are going to purport to be a journalist, it helps to have some grip on your subject.

We have known that the “News” in Fox News is a misnomer since Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey published a study in 2012 showing viewers of the Murdoch channel to be less knowledgeable about current affairs than those of any television outlet. Astonishingly, they would have been more aware of actual events if they didn’t watch Fox at all. MSNBC, the liberal mirror of Fox with anchors like Al Sharpton, did barely better, by the way.

“On average, people were able to answer correctly 1.8 of four questions about international news, and 1.6 of five questions about domestic affairs,” the report said. “The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly – a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all.”

In their scramble for audience ratings, these channels and the personalities employed by them feel compelled to forsake facts and to push comment to the extremes. CNN may be the least guilty of this. But latest figures show that CNN has just suffered its third-worst ratings month in its history, losing 39 per cent of its primetime audience compared with the same period in 2013. Fox saw its monthly numbers grow.

But let’s try this. Did you hear that in time for this State of the Union, Fox had developed a secret technology that implants code words in the news crawler at the bottom of the screen that aren’t visible to the naked eye but register with viewers anyway? Five times a minute the message “Impeach Obama” was fed to the brains of millions of Americans. OK, I made that up, but I will apologise for it in a few years and my reputation will be restored.

If I wrote that in earnest, I would be fired. But Beck got away with his games at Fox for two years, never mind that he was “tearing the country apart”. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether we feel bidden now to forgive him or not. It is Fox that must fix itself – and say sorry – if it wants to be taken seriously as a news source.