Plato and Fox News have more in common than you might expect. Both claim objectivity. Neither mean it.
In 1996, Roger Ailes founded Fox News with a slogan: "fair and balanced." The phrase was rhetorical cover for something quite different — a news operation openly tilted toward a particular political agenda, but insisting loudly on its own objectivity. The louder the insistence, the more convincing the illusion.
This piece argues that Ailes did not invent this move. He inherited it. The strategy of claiming to transcend bias while systematically pursuing it traces back, with remarkable precision, to Plato. The founder of Western philosophy was also, in a quieter way, a political strategist: an elitist who believed only the wisest few were fit to govern, a moralist who wanted to protect society from dangerous thought, and a writer who claimed his dialogues allowed both sides to speak while ensuring, every time, that only one side won.
The parallels run deeper than tone. Plato used the dialogue form the way Fox uses the panel debate: as a device that creates the appearance of open inquiry while controlling its outcome from offscreen. Plato spoke through Socrates, remaining invisible while pulling every string. Fox anchors invoke founding fathers and Ronald Reagan, speaking through the silent authority of the dead, whose convenient inability to object lends partisan hype the gravity of historical truth.
Both Plato and Fox also condemned media they considered corrupting, while depending on it entirely. Plato called writing a poison, then built his entire legacy through writing. Fox calls the mainstream media corrupt, then uses media as its primary instrument of influence. In each case, the condemnation of a medium is itself a rhetorical move, positioning the speaker as a purifying exception to a corrupt norm.
Plato was the shrewdest man
because he claimed to lack an agenda.
"Platonic dialogues are simply monologues in disguise. They persuade by appearing unbiased, but the author's true intentions are always simmering just beneath the surface."Fair and Balanced Philosophy, Flow, May 2013
Every public debate has a frame. The question is whether that frame is visible.
What the Plato and Fox comparison suggests is that the most effective forms of rhetorical control are the ones that present themselves as neutral. The dialogue, the panel, the "no spin zone": each is a structure that performs openness while constraining what can actually be said. Recognizing this is not the same as concluding that all perspectives are equally biased, or that objectivity is simply impossible. It is an invitation to ask, in any discourse, who designed the space, what questions were ruled out before anyone sat down, and whose silence is being spoken through.
The deeper question the piece raises is one that applies well beyond Fox News: how does rhetoric gain authority by appearing to renounce it? That is as old a question as philosophy itself. And it remains, in an era of algorithmically curated information and personalized media bubbles, more pressing than ever.