His bark is worse than his bite.
Just a year ago, Fox News Channel was considered a pariah in many Democratic circles. But it appears that the cable news network is no longer on the outs.
Fox may indeed be more unfair to Democrats than Republicans (and I believe this to be the case), but some would say that this simply makes up for the unfairness that Republicans have had to endure from CNN and MSNBC. It is unfortunate that those doing the squawking on this, do not oppose bias per se, but only bias against their views and their candidates.
At what point are we going to get past this myth that news reporting should be unbiased? At what point are we going to realize, in postmodern fashion, that neutrality is impossible? At what point are we going to insist that all news should be reported, not in an unbiased way, but in a fair way? It is indeed possible to be biased and fair at the same time.
I try hard to be “fair and balanced” when I look at these kinds of things, but I have to confess that, in this long election season, my patience is running out with the left-wing and right-wing political extremists, who in their self-righteousness, believe that their views should be taken more seriously than the views of everyone else.
Fox, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Washington Times, is a conservative counterestablishment institution designed to ape the functions of the real thing, doing double duty by firing up the troops with custom-crafted ideological spin, "analysis" and phony scholarship while confusing the rest of the world with nonsense disguised as news.
The question of Fox's malevolence is settled. What remains is a disagreement among liberals over an appropriate response. Some argue that liberals ought to refuse to participate at all because it is impossible to do so without playing by Fox's fixed rules. But by sitting it out, the counterargument goes, they are shutting themselves off from cable's largest audience, and inviting the accusation of fear and wimpiness.
As John Edwards explained when announcing his withdrawal from a Fox debate, "There's just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending to be objective." He also noted that he had appeared on the network more than 30 times. Edwards is right. The proper response to a Fox attack disguised as a question is, "Well, Brit, I appeared on this biased show of yours to set your viewers straight about the BS you and your fellow right-wingers have been handing them. Now here's the truth..."
Rupert Murdoch founded Fox News Channel in 1996, at the height of the Clinton Administration.
Fox is still the top-rated news channel, but there are signs it's plateauing. Its ratings started to lag in 2006, and in February, CNN's prime time (boosted by several presidential debates) beat Fox among 25-to-54-year-olds for the first time since 2001. Maybe even more galling, the network has lately faded in the ephemeral category of buzz.
What’s wrong with Fox News for these folks?
Not unlike their counterparts way over to starboard, these principal players in the lefty blogosphere are ideological warriors, hyperpartisans who offer little if any quarter in their political jihads. They want their chosen party, the Democratic Party, to do what they want it to do. But most professional Democrats regard the lefty blogosphere, which styles itself as the netroots, as distinguished from the traditional grassroots, as an angry constituency that doesn’t necessarily see the bigger picture.
They put a particularly post-modern spin on their crusades, focusing on the need to change “the media narrative” about events in order to influence those events. To win reality, in this view, you must redefine reality. Others in politics believe that in order to win in politics, you work in the reality that exists.
Thirty years ago, his brilliant screenplay for the movie "Network" was a satire. Today it seems almost prophetic. News as a profit center. Infotainment masquerading as news. An anchor ranting on the air. What seemed shocking and outlandish back then is now commonplace. Somehow it's not hard to envision Bill O'Reilly as the heir of fictional anchor Howard Beale, who told his audience, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
Fox's critics would like to believe that its days of dominance are numbered, pointing to an aging audience and the lagging performance of Fox News online. But that's wishful thinking, at least in the short term. Fox has a leg up in the cable TV news game because it rewrote the rules. The other channels have stolen parts of its playbook, but they lack the coherent game plan that keeps Fox in front.
Clearly, they're not afraid of CNN.
Hillary Clinton is ready to debate on Fox News. Barack Obama? We're not sure. But rank-and-file Democrats hate the idea: They think Fox is a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary of the Republican Party.
Fox New CEO Roger Ailes has a different take: "The candidates that can't face Fox," he says, "can't face Al Qaeda."
I wonder why these courageous Democrats only feel free to speak when appearing on CNN. I mean, the Congressional Black Caucus doesn't seem to feel the same fear as the candidates. They had their 2004 debates on Fox, and they survived the ordeal -- twice. Those debates included Edwards on both occasions, and he wound up on the ticket for the Democrats.
Once again, I will ask this question: how can we expect these candidates to face off against America's enemies when they can't bring themselves to face Fox? Do they expect that this demonstration of cravenness to actually impress anyone but the radical defeatists of MoveOn?
On a conference call today, Howard Wolfson of the Clinton campaign has said that Hillary Clinton will appear in a Fox News debate on February 11 in Washington, DC. After Roger Ailes made a joke comparing Barack Obama to Osama Bin Laden, Harry Reid rightfully nixed a Democratic Fox debate in Nevada.
Wolfson defended the choice to accept the Fox debate because Obama has appeared on Fox News himself recently. Which is true, he has, but it doesn't excuse how many awful lies and distortions Fox has peddled in order to damage Obama, Clinton and Democrats in general. Fox is not a news outlet, it's an openly partisan opinion factory and the Democrats should not be legitimizing them (and allowing them to recruit Democratic viewers to propagandize to) by doing this.
Still a mastermind?
Ladies and gentlemen, Karl Rove has not left the building. He's on Fox News, giving election analysis. And he looms in the minds of Democrats looking to November, as they plan a defense against the types of strategies he used to help George W.
Rove's wins can never be taken away from him, especially when in 2000 and 2004 he had so little margin for error. It's in his ambition to realign American politics that he fell short. Big government "compassionate conservatism" degraded into the indefensible excesses of the late GOP congressional majority. The vision of an "ownership society" foundered with the failure of Social Security reform. Outreach to Hispanics backfired when it was based on a nonenforcement of immigration laws offensive to law-and-order conservatives.
If a Republican wins the presidency in 2008, it will have to be Rove-style -- a masterful, but narrow victory won in parlous political circumstances.
Blessed, in Romney, with an opponent who approaches the Platonic Ideal of Inauthenticity, McCain has racked up primary-season successes more because of the personal contrasts between the two candidates than because of differences of program. But his personal merits have yet to sway those Republicans who classify themselves in the polls as very conservative.
A more direct affront to the Republican strategy devised by Karl Rove -- to build support within the party's right-wing base and then try to win over just enough moderates to carry elections -- cannot be imagined. McCain's whole campaign is anti-Rovian
GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul talks to reporters in New Hampshire.
When Republicans take the stage for their debate in Myrtle Beach tonight, there will be six -- not five -- candidates. But Ron Paul, who was excluded from the Fox News debate in New Hampshire on Sunday, could face questions about his newsletters, which have been described by the liberal New Republic as "bigoted" and filled with "fringe" conspiracy theories. Paul has taken "moral responsibility" for the newsletters, but denies writing them.
Does Ron Paul deserve to share the limelight with the other GOP contenders? Or has his time passed?
Ron Paul could also do liberty-lovers a big favor if he would come out with a very strong statement that he's made some errors in his past associations, but wants to make it clear now that he neither solicits nor welcomes support from racists, neo-Confederates, conspiracy-mongers, anti-Semites, and so forth. But I'm not completely convinced that Paul finds support from at least some of these groups entirely unwelcome.
There is a paradox at the heart of the Paul campaign: he's the candidate least likely to hedge or obfuscate, the most apt to spell out in sharp detail his underlying principles--and yet he's also something of an ideological cipher, attracting the support of everyone from hipstertarian kids on Northeast college campuses to John Birchers in Texas.
