Obama refuses to participate in Fox Debate
Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has promised to boycott any debate hosted by Fox News."CNN seems to be a more appropriate host," an Obama campaign aide tells ABC News.
Obama's relationship with the Fox News Channel has been strained ever since Fox News falsely reported that he had attended an extremist Islamist madrassa as a child living in Indonesia. This report was typical of the way that Fox News seek to destroy Democratic candidates and makes it easy to understand the Democratic reluctance to lend this station credence as a serious news organisation rather than as the media wing of the Republican Party.
Senator John Edwards has already announced that he too will be boycotting any debate hosted by Fox News.Edwards deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince said last week that "there's just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending they're objective."
Fox News are, of course, outraged by this and Roger Ailes, Fox News Chairman and CEO, has already criticised Edwards, although he avoided doing so by name.
Any candidate for high office from either party who believes he can blacklist any news organization is making a terrible mistake about journalists," Ailes said at a Radio and Television News Directors Foundation dinner in Washington last month.
"Pressure groups are forcing candidates to conclude that the best strategy for journalists is divide and conquer, to only appear on those networks and venues that give them favorable coverage," Ailes said, adding that any candidate "who cannot answer direct, simple, even tough questions from any journalist runs a real risk of losing the voters."
This is a ridiculous claim. First, Dick Cheney has shown a willingness to be interviewed by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh that he doesn't appear to have for any other journalists, which certainly implies that he feels he will get a much more sympathetic line of questioning from those journalistic enterprises than he would get elsewhere.
And the question is not as Ailes frames it, that politicians "who cannot answer direct, simple, even tough questions from any journalist runs a real risk of losing the voters."
The real question, as Bill Clinton pointed out during his first - and probably last - ever interview with that news organisation, is that the questions are framed from a totally Republican perspective. In Clinton's case he was asked why he didn't go more aggressively after bin Laden, a question that Clinton pointed out that Fox News had never asked of the Bush administration, even though confirmation of bin Laden's role in the bombing of the USS Cole had actually happened whilst Bush was in office rather than Clinton.
Fox then sold this interview for days in trailers as "Clinton loses it", despite the fact that when the interview was aired, Clinton was so easily the winner of the dispute that Tony Snow refused to enter into any discussion of the interview.
So Obama and Edwards are right. There really is no point in lending to credence to a news organisation that is so biased that Walter Cronkite, possibly the most revered journalist in America once noted, "it was intended to be a conservative organization - beyond that; a far-right wing organization."
Why should Democratic candidates agree to appear in front of what even Kronkite calls, "a far-right wing organisation"?
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10 comments:
From everything you've said you've never watched Fox News. How do you feel qualified to comment on it?
By what I have seen and from the film Outfoxed and the stories that ex-reporters from that Channel told those film makers about the way that the news is manipulated at Fox.
The Reagan birthday sequence is particularly hilarious, as is the section, "Some people say"...
You can watch Outfoxed online here.
Kudos for Edwards and Obama. Courage is the only option in this rotten political climate in the US. Fox news is the channel who elected Bush. This day of 2000 was the day Fox News and the Bushes overtook the US through an information coup d'état which became later a legal coup d'état having the seal of approval of the supreme court.
Sophia, I agree. Good for them for standing up to this.
And I bet you believe everything you see in Michael Moore movies. It's too bad that you lack the experience to form your own opinions on this subject (or most of the subjects you spout off about here actually) and have to have them spoon fed to you a bunch of extremist nutjobs.
What I would like to see now is the Republicans refuse to hold a debate on any network other than Fox as long as Democrats are playing their games. Of course the Dems are notoriously bad at debating so maybe that's their plan.
Of course, I would gather that neither of you will actually be watching our Presidential debates.
Jason,
I love the fact that a man who watches Fox News accuses others of having their information "spoon fed to you by a bunch of extremist nutjobs."
You obviously have no sense of irony.
Do you have any serious comment on Outfoxed or did you simply hate the message which means you must dismiss it as propaganda without actually coming up with any serious defence? The facts speak for themselves. As I have previously proven to you, if you watch Fox News you are more likely to believe things that are untrue than if you watch ANY other network. That's not simply a mistake, that's a network operating a disinformation campaign.
And I do watch the Presidential debates. Bush lost the last two so I don't know where you get this nonsense about the Dems not being good at them.
But then you are beginning to sound like a fantasist to me. The truth, in your world, is what you imagine it to be rather than what it is.
Let's see... Based on a movie by a left-wing extremist affiliated with MoveOn.org, and a few choice clips on YouTube, you decide to rail against something you've never actually seen. Never mind not having seen it, you have not been able to compate it objectively to CNN or MSNBC (the other cable news networks), never mind ABC, CBS, and NBC, because like Fox, you have seen none of them. Now if upon watching Fox and the others you were able to form your own objective opinion on the subject, at least that would be saying something. Of course, you also probably think the BBC is objective.
The moonbats think Fox is biased, and I agree that I do see some bias on Fox. What the moonbats don't like to tell people is that the alternatives are at least equally as biased. Of course if you'd ever watched them, maybe you would be able to make that determination for yourself.
Firstly, you assume the contributors are "left wing extremists" without offering any evidence to back your case. Is Walter Cronkite a "left wing extremist"? Can you give me any examples of the extremism of the other contributors? Or is that the way you get to dispose of arguments that you don't like? Give them a nasty label and move on?
You also admit that even you detect bias on this channel which sort of renders your point moot, however you counter this by saying that other channels are at least as biased whilst, again, offering absolutely no evidence to back your point and ignoring the fact that it has been proven in a poll that I have already referenced you to, that Fox News are by far the worst offender when it comes to giving their audience information that is simply not true.
However, as Fox seek to blur the line between opinion and fact, so you - as an almost perfect representation of their likely viewer - tend to do the same. You constantly express your opinion as if it was fact and then leave a discussion when facts are presented to you.
If Fox viewers are more misinformed than viewers of other channels then your point is obviously wrong that they are "at least as biased as Fox".
Fox is obviously worse than they are as all these channels are supposed to be telling the news and Fox viewers appear not to be getting the news.
I was about to respond but since you've started moderating your comments I guess you may not be interested in dissenting opinions. It's been fun.
Jason,
The comment moderation button was put on by mistake. It has since been switched back off. I have no interest in moderating comments on here as you should know more than anyone.
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