House of Eratosthenes

The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological. . . . What I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party. . . . They’re widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.

How did Mr. McDermott handle this?

When I approached Fox to gain access to their studios and staff for a story about the nature of their news operations, I was told that if I wanted to do a piece on Fox, I should do a profile of Shepard Smith, their main news anchorman. I should be careful, they told me, to distinguish between Smith, a newsman, and their bevy of more notorious personalities—Bill O’Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, and Greta Van Susteren*. They aren’t really news people, I was told; they are editorialists and ought to be analyzed as such. They are analogous, Fox suggested, to the editorial and op-ed opinion pages of newspapers, which ought not be confused with the straight news coverage.

The proposal to do a story on Smith was fair enough, but would not in any way address the central issue: Was Fox a political operation? I declined. A Smith profile would be a wonderful story for another time, I told Fox, but it wasn’t the story we felt relevant at the moment. That being the case, Fox “declined to participate” in my reporting, which is another way of saying I should go do something to myself and possibly the horse I rode in on, too.

Wow, that’s really unreasonable of Fox, huh. They’re accused of filtering and tailoring their news to such an extent that they’re a Republican mouthpiece, and they respond by insisting that any investigation into their news should be confined to their…news.

But that isn’t where McDermott lost me. Where he lost me was right about here:

Shepard Smith is an interesting guy. He is far and away the most charming personality on Fox. Not that this takes special effort. Generally speaking, Fox doesn’t do charm. O’Reilly, for all of his considerable talents, blew a fuse in his charm machine years ago, and it’s not clear Beck ever had one to blow. Let’s not even start on Sean Hannity and Cavuto.

So the guy starts out fastened like white-on-rice to his central question, which is whether Fox News gets its talking points shipped in straight from GOP headquarters. Fox offers him an opportunity to interview its news personality, and his response is to split hairs so finely that, hey, this doesn’t service my stated mission so no-can-do. And just a few paragraphs after that, Mister Stalwart is distracted by the bright-shiny-object of the charm question.

This brings back bad memories for me. Two-year-old memories. Then-candidate Barack Obama had a serious problem when His attempts to appear Christian-like backfired on Him; we found out His “spiritual mentor,” Jeremiah Wright, was a bigoted asshole.

Obama delivered a speech.

The speech was oh so charming.

He called for a “national dialogue on race.”

Some — many — called it the BEST! SPEECH! EVAR!!!

Today, just-about-nobody can recite from memory a single statement from the speech.

And exactly which friends Barack Obama does or doesn’t have, or did & didn’t have, is thought to be absolutely nobody’s business. In fact, since then it’s come to light that quite a few more of His friends are assholes. Were you to task me to go out and find someone with as many asshole friends as Barack Obama, I really wouldn’t know how to look. But we pay it no mind, because Mister Charming is oh-so-charming.

At least sometimes.

This seems to be what happened to Mr. McDermott. Past this point excerpted above, the job he does sticking to the subject at hand is…well, let us call it rather lukewarm in quality. And that is being charitable.

Resigning himself to checking out the question by simply watching news shows from Fox, CNN and MSNBC, he comes up with these…

Here are some more representative examples. They might seem chosen to make a point; they were not. They are admittedly impressionistic, but we think a fair sampling of what was on the air that day.

On the Senate compromise on health care reform:

MSNBC—Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon called it “a godsend.” Howard Dean said “the Senate bill really does advance the ball.”

CNN—Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, called it “the type of coverage that they [her constituents] deserve.”

Fox—Neil Cavuto posed this question to independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut: “Senator, they just didn’t put lipstick on a pig? It’s still a pig, right?” Lieberman was noncommittal on the porcine nature of the compromise, but assured he would vote against it. Hayes of The Weekly Standard said, “it is absolutely insane.” Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said, “It is the lump of coal in our Christmas stocking.”

On climate change:

MSNBC—Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, addressing Sarah Palin’s claim that climate change is not necessarily the result of human activity: “Her bigger problem, if she wants to be a candidate, is that she’s on the wrong side of history. She’s on the wrong side of science. She’s on the wrong side of politics here.”

CNN—Kitty Pilgrim, CNN correspondent: “The United States is falling behind the rest of the world in what some see as the cleanest energy option available, nuclear power.”

Fox —Amy Kellogg, Fox correspondent: “…stolen e-mails suggest the manipulation of trends, deleting and destroying of data, and attempts to prevent the publication of opposing views on climate change…”

We could go on, but the pattern would not change.

This seems to be the point where McDermott makes up his mind. It also gives him away. He does not seem to personally know of anybody who might show some reasoned skepticism toward the Obama agenda, the left-wing agenda, let alone anyone who might be rationally hostile toward these. People like this heard all about the big ol’ dust-up with Anita Dunn and Fox News. You know what they had to say? They said, Fox News gets in trouble with the White House, for presenting both sides of a given issue, including the side that might not be so convenient to the White House. And because it does this, it is worth watching; whereas, its competition is nothing more than a bunch of damnable echo chambers.

If he had heard of this, he would have realized his two universally-representative samples — “we could go on, but the pattern would not change” — prove their point, and not so much his. For within his two samples, CNN and MSNBC contributed absolute-zero discourse, and on open questions even. They did not travel. No foundation of ideas upon which the chatter could rest. They began precisely where they ended: health care “reform” is a “godsend,” and you’re “on the wrong side” if you don’t go along on climate change.

And so I have two concerns here — since Terry McDermott is not doing anything here that I don’t see lots of other people doing every single week.

One: To look upon someone presenting only one side of a story, as presenting two sides…and vice-versa. How is that done exactly? To plagiarize from Prager, it impresses me as an exercise of confusing clarity with agreement. Fox is found undesirable; just how, McDermott doesn’t really say. But clearly, he finds the ClimateGate scandal to be inconvenient and harbors a preference that it not have been mentioned.

Two: Barack Obama is charming, Bill O’Reilly is not. I recognize we live in a world in which some people are charming and other people are not, and I bow down before the reality that — right or wrong — this is, occasionally, and maybe not so occasionally, a serious advantage on some serious issues.

But you know what? That should buy you only so much.

Terry McDermott, Columbia Journalism Review

Five words, the latter three of which should have given you a clue as to the thrust and conclusion of the piece. Did you really expect something different?
- bpenni | 03/10/2010 @ 12:09
The reality of it is that CNN, ABC, NBC, NPR, CBS, and the New York Times, often operate almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Democrat Party. And it is not ideological. . . . What I think is fair to say about the mainstream drive-by media, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Democrat Party. . . . They’re widely viewed as a part of the Democrat Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like FOX is.

There, fixed it for him.
- cylarz | 03/11/2010 @ 01:14
CNN—Kitty Pilgrim, CNN correspondent: “The United States is falling behind the rest of the world in what some see as the cleanest energy option available, nuclear power.”

Now THAT is remarkable, considering that there are many over here on the Right who are just fine with nuclear power and are perplexed that environmentalists, who purport to be against energy sources that emit “greenhouse gas,” tend to be so virulently opposed to a mature, safe, stable source of electricity that can be placed nearly anywhere and has zero emissions of any kind except heat and water vapor.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Pilgrim.
- cylarz | 03/11/2010 @ 01:20

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“Dumb Like a Fox”Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

“Dumb Like a Fox”
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010