Legitimate Beef
by digby
Matt Stoller has an excellent op-ed on The Politico site about the FOX debate issue that I think is worth reading:
We argued that Fox News is not a news channel, but a propaganda outlet that regularly distorts, spins, and falsifies information. Second, Fox News is heavily influenced or even controlled by the Republican Party itself. As such, we believe that Fox News on the whole functions as a surrogate operation for the GOP. Treating Fox as a legitimate news channel extends the Republican Party’s ability to swift-boat and discredit our candidates. In other words, Fox News is a direct pipeline of misinformation from the GOP leadership into the traditional press.
Thankfully, Fox News immediately proved our point with a press release after the debate cancellation that made the following remarkable claim: “News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic caucus which appears to be controlled by radical, fringe, out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party.”
That certainly sounds like an unbiased news network, doesn’t it?
It is incomprehensible to me that we even have to make the argument that FOX News is a white house propaganda outfit and Republican Party adjunct. It is obvious to anyone with eyes and ears. You can argue that that’s ok, that they have a right to have a “point of view” and that conservatives feel they don’t get a fair shake in the media so they need an outlet that speaks to their concerns. Fine. But please, please don’t try to sell me this nonsense that they aren’t biased or that they are a legitimate news organization. It’s ridiculous on its face.
Eric Boehlert has another good piece on this today. Here’s a little taste:
Fox News is still fighting the last war. Busy arguing that it truly is fair and balanced, Fox News execs haven’t noticed that, thanks to the Nevada showdown, the real question now on the table is not about Fox News’ fairness. It’s about whether or not Fox News is a legitimate news organization. That’s precisely where Ailes does not want this media branding debate to go. And that’s why the Fox News team has exerted so much energy in recent years trying to bully any doubters. It’s the reason a Fox News flack swung back wildly in October 2003, when a former producer there, Charlie Reina, wrote publicly about the daily internal Fox News memo that instructs staffers how to spin new stories, often in a partisan manner. Rather than address Reina’s factual points, in what must have been a corporate media first, Fox News VP-news operations Sharri Berg issued a public statement in which she quoted an anonymous Fox News employee who belittled Reina as being a nobody and worse, he “NEVER had a job in the newsroom,” which was supposed to raise doubts about Reina’s credibility. (Reina tells me Berg had to resort to using an anonymous quote because Berg herself knew the statement about Reina never working in the newsroom was false.) It’s why when Ben Smith, blogging for the New York Daily News, observed that Fox News projects an “unmissable, insistent slant,” Fox News responded with an oddly personal, schoolyard-quality taunt: “Ben has struggled to regain relevance since leaving the New York Observer, which is why you need a blood hound to find his column. We’re happy he’s making more than the $29,000 he made at the Observer … then again, you get what you pay for.”
As they say, read on, if only for an amazing rundown of nasty, puerile FOX tantrums whenever anyone criticizes them. I think Ann Coulter must be advising them on rhetoric.
Unfortunately there are some establishment political and media figures who are also up in arms about this because the crazy fringe has infiltrated their friendly little club and insisted that Democratic primary candidates not play ball with a Republican propaganda arm. Well, boo hoo. I have rarely heard the kind of derisive, contemptuous language used by the mainstream media (or certainly the Republicans) to describe the base of the GOP that I hear commonly used to describe people like me. I don’t make a huge deal out of that, if they feel they need to disparage me in order to be accepted by Americans who don’t support them then I guess there’s not much I can do about it.
And there’s probably not much we can do if the media and party establishment wants to kiss Rupert Murdoch’s butt and brownnose Drudge on an everyday basis. It makes no sense to me for either commercial or political reasons, but I guess it’s part of their social network and they are such conformists they can’t even look out for their own interests.
But I am damned if I’m going to fail to exercize legitimate grassroots political power in the nomination process of my party, which is what happened in this case. It’s called “democracy” and if certain political poohbah’s and media mavens don’t like it, that’s just tough. Candidates vying for the nomination of the Democratic Party have to respond to the voters. Contrary to Kondracke and O’Reilly’s hysterical rantings, that’s as far from Stalinsim and Nazism as you can get.
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