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| Dan Clore... |
 Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 5:20 am |
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703574604574499671746743510.html
OCTOBER 28, 2009
Obama Is Right About Fox News
By THOMAS FRANK
Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its
practitioners' persecution. There is no higher claim to journalistic
integrity than going to jail to protect a source. And the Newseum in
Washington, D.C., establishes the profession's legitimacy with a
memorial to fallen scribes, thus drawing an implicit connection between
the murdered abolitionist editors of long ago and the struggling outfit
that gave you this morning's page-one story about cute pets in Halloween
costumes.
But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of
its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts
it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment
by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give
it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force
hissy fit.
As the Obama administration has discovered by now. A few weeks ago,
after Fox had scored a number of points against administration figures
and policies, administration spokesmen decided it was time to start
fighting back. Communications Director Anita Dunn called the network "a
wing of the Republican Party," while Obama himself reportedly dismissed
it for following "a talk radio format."
The network's moaners swung instantly into self-pitying action likening
the administration's combative attitude to Richard Nixon's famous
"enemies list."
They should remember that it wasn't just the keeping of a list that made
Nixon's hostility to the media remarkable. Nearly every president -- and
probably just about every politician -- has criticized the press at some
point or other. What made the Nixon administration stand out is that it
also sued the New York Times to keep that paper from publishing the
Pentagon Papers. It schemed to ruin the Washington Post financially by
challenging the broadcast licenses for the TV stations it owned. It
bugged the office of Joseph Kraft, a prominent newspaper columnist. One
of its most notorious henchmen was G. Gordon Liddy, who tells us in his
autobiography that under certain conditions he was "willing to obey an
order to kill [columnist] Jack Anderson."
It is interesting to note that Mr. Liddy, that friend of the First
Amendment, appeared frequently in 2006 on none other than the Fox News
network. In fact, the network sometimes seems like a grand electronic
homage to the Nixonian spirit: Its constant attacks on the "elite
media," for example, might well have been inspired by the famous
pronouncements on TV news's liberal bias made by Mr. Nixon's vice
president, Spiro Agnew.
And, of course, the network's chairman, Roger Ailes, was an adviser to
Mr. Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign; his signature innovation
back then was TV commercials in which Mr. Nixon answered questions from
hand-picked citizens in a town-hall style setting.
Although they cry persecution today, the network and its leading lights
have not really distinguished themselves on the issues surrounding
clashes between the government and the press. When Mr. Ailes was on the
other side of the politician/press divide, making ads for the
presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, the Washington Post once
found out in advance where one of the commercials was going to be
filmed. According to an article that appeared in that paper in 1988, Mr.
Ailes was moved to comment thusly on the situation: "'These leakers!' he
told an inquiring reporter the night before the planned event. 'I think
they should all be executed and tortured.'"
Mr. Ailes was joking on that occasion. But faced with one of the biggest
First Amendment cases of our own time -- the New York Times's 2005 story
on the George W. Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program --
how did Fox News react? By impugning the motives of the Times, of
course, with different Fox personalities speculating that the Times
deliberately published the story when it did in order to dissuade the U.
S. Senate from reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
To point out that this network is different, that it is intensely
politicized, that it inhabits an alternate reality defined by an
imaginary conflict between noble heartland patriots and devious
liberals—to be aware of these things is not the act of a scheming
dictatorial personality. It is the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody
with eyes and ears.
Still, one wishes that the Obama administration had taken on Fox News
with a little more skill. As cultural criticism goes, this was clumsy,
plodding stuff. What the situation required was sarcasm, irony, a little
humor. Simply feeding Fox a slice of raw denunciation was like dumping
gasoline into a fire. It did nothing but furnish the network with a
real-world validation of its long-running conspiracy theories -- and a
nice bump in its ratings.
thomas at (no spam) wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A21
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan" |
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| robert bowman... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 7:55 am |
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