The Osterley Times: Obama Is Right About Fox News.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Obama Is Right About Fox News.

I didn't think I'd ever live long enough to find this in the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal; An article entitled: "Obama is Right About Fox News".

It starts describing the mindset over at Fox where, "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."

He describes how Fox have reacted to the Obama administration refusing to talk to them; and their ludicrous comparisons between this and "Nixon's 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."

The comparison between Obama refusing to talk to Fox and Nixon's infamous enemies list is simply absurd on it's face. Simply put, Fox is not behaving like a normal news organisation, therefore they don't deserve to be treated like one.

Indeed, between the Obama administration and Fox News, it is the latter that maintain the connections to the Nixon camp.

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.

But he concludes - again, in a Murdoch owned newspaper - that Obama is right in what he says about Fox News and only the most partisan Republican supporter could dare to pretend otherwise.

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.