Transplanted Lawyer has the first – and thus far, only – truly sane take I’ve seen on the matter. I was thinking about writing a post on this subject, but T.L.’s post says all that really should or can be said. Say what you will about Fox News, but it is simply not the position, right, or responsibility of the Obama Administration to decide which news organizations are and are not “legitimate.” Please do read the whole thing.
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63 thoughts on “The President’s War on Fox”
I’m not convinced. Even granting everything Kaus says about Fox News as true, the problem is that it is not the role of government to make decisions about what media is and is not sufficiently independent to warrant talking to. If this were the middle of a campaign, there’d be nothing wrong with playing favorites among the media. And I’m not so naive as to be unaware that elected officials have been using access as a way of influencing coverage for years (this was, after all, at the root of why coverage of the Bush Administration on torture and other issues was often so timid). For that matter, I don’t even have much of a problem with a Congresslizard acting as the Obama Administration is doing – their actions and statements do not represent official government policy or action. But when you’re outright using the office of the Presidency to differentiate between what is and is not a legitimate news organization, and especially what is and is not an independent news organization, we’ve gone a bridge too far.
This is an ignorant post.
“It’s really not news — it’s pushing a point of view. And the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way. We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate but understanding that they represent a point of view.” — David Axelrod
It might be fair to say that the White House isn’t the best positioned to make this case, but it really enrages me when we judge an argument by whether “someone is in a position to make it” or by whether it is felicitously phrased. Fox News is not, by the most generous accounting, a news organization. When’s the last time it broke a story? It treats Republican Party press releases as unbiased sources, even down to the typos. It parrots wild claims by Republican officials like Betsy McCaughey and Sarah Palin about death panels and the like. And it organized and promoted the Tea Parties, which makes it not a disinterested reporting outfit but a political actor.
And all that is fine. Free speech, free media. It’s the price of the game. But once you stop being a disinterested observer of the proceedings and become a political actor, you can be criticized just like anyone else in the political arena. And I can’t speak for anyone else, but my problem with Fox News isn’t that it’s delivered from a conservative point of view. The Economist is a conservative publication, and it’s usually on the level. My problem is that Fox News follows no conventionally accepted journalistic standards and yet it asks for the same prestige as, say, CBS News, that usually tries to (however imperfectly).
I think most bloggers and readers of this site would reject the notion that criticizing Israeli policy is antisemitic. That’s essentially censorship, which always empowers the status quo. But making a political criticism of a political actor deserves only to be judged on its merits, not on who’s making it.
Mickey Kaus has a better article on the subject.
FOX News doesn’t merely have an “anti-Administration editorial slant that really does creep into [their] reporting from time to time.” FOX News has actively organized anti-government protests. Protests that certainly had the approval of FOX News boss and former Republican strategist Roger Ailes.
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