Ruth Marcus responds -- sort of
October 22, 2009 11:22 am ET by Jamison Foser
The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus responds to some criticism of her complaints about the Obama administration's "'dumb' war with Fox News":
My observations about the Obama administration's "dumb" war with Fox News seem to have touched a nerve -- 868 nerves, going by the latest tally of comments. They ran the gamut from "another idiotic column" to "Amen, Ruth." I confess, I didn't read them all, but I got the drift. Meanwhile, the 869th nerve belonged to my lefty friend Chuck, who emailed, complete with links to angry liberal bloggers, to bemoan my "false equivalency" between Fox News and MSNBC.
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One of my sentences provoked particular derision from the left. "Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC," I wrote. I confess to having forgotten about the Bush administration's public tangle last year with MSNBC.
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For the record, Chuck, I don't think that Fox and MSNBC are equivalent. Fox is more over the line, more often.
While Marcus brought up the criticism she received for drawing a "false equivalency" between Fox News and MSNBC, she didn't actually respond to it. She did acknowledge at the end that MSNBC isn't as bad as Fox News, but she still suggests MSNBC is a liberal cable channel. That follows her original post, in which Marcus wrote:
Certainly Fox tends to report its news with a conservative slant -- but has anyone at the White House clicked over to MSNBC recently? Or is the only problem opinion journalism that doesn't match its opinion?
Marcus didn't address that line in her second post, but it's as silly as her false suggestion that the Bush administration never pulled a "hissy fit with MSNBC."
MSNBC is the home of Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan and Chris Matthews. Their hosts and reporters regularly traffic in conservative misinformation and -- wittingly or not -- adopt conservative frames for their reports. The fact that they also employ a handful of journalists who lean to the left does not mean it is a liberal channel, any more than CNN's embrace of Lou Dobbs means it is a right-wing channel.
The fact-free insistence by journalists like Marcus that MSNBC is a left-wing news organization does as much to skew public discourse to the right as does Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
Media Matters: On health care reform, the Fox News noise machine is cranked to 11
The media myth of Obama's "falling poll numbers"
How to annoy Glenn Beck in five minutes or less
Colmes isn't even on the station anymore.
Juan is usually a pawn for O'Reilly (many examples of Juan's "liberalness" are right here on this website if you'd like to check them out).
Shep Smith is what I would call, actually, a journalist at Fox, he seems to be about the only one telling the truth on a daily basis.
Can you imagine what the WH is mad about with Fox?
Shep Smith is a journalist . . . he understands what his job is, to report news without bias.
Try watching MSNBC, CNN and HLN for a change. Just because they aren't Obama bashing 24/7 doesn't mean that they are left leaning, just means that they have more important news items to address.
If one cannot acknowledge MSNBC's Pat Buchanan and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, they just post messages like the above.
Actually, when you receive nearly 1000 notes about your story, that probably means it was crap not that it "touched a nerve". That's just giving herself a little too much credit ...
*Sigh!* Back when I was in the Navy, I learned that if a ship ran aground or ran into another ship, the Captain went to Admiral's Mast (Ordinary sailors engaged in ordinary misbehavior went to Captain's Mast). If someone else was on the Quarterdeck at the time of the crash (Giving instructions to the people who were steering the ship), then that officer and the Captain would stand before the Admiral side-by-side. Why? Very simple. The officer who was commanding the ship before the crash was chosen and kept on the job by the Captain. The Captain had expressed confidence in the officer who crashed the ship.
When reporters like Marcus mess up, we also ought to hear from the editors who apparently spend their days playing video games and making popcorn in the microwave rather than doing their job!!! Why was Marcus not reminded that MSNBC had been criticized by the Bush Administration!?!?! Where were the editors!?!?!
And sorry to bring up the obvious, why was there no outcry when the Bush administration did EXACTLY what you are condemning the Obama administration for doing?
To the brainless slogs in the media, this constitutes proof that they're playing it fair. Never mind which criticism is valid and which is not.
This is why the media will never fix itself. It can only be destroyed.