LA Times: Fox News isn't legit, but WH was wrong to say so
October 26, 2009 9:01 am ET by Eric Boehlert
As the MSM commentary of the Fox News/WH 'debate' continues to deaden the senses, with its now almost comical uniformity of how horribly wrong the administration is for fact-checking Fox News, the Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten's belated, yet predictable, entry to the genre caught our attention if only for this passage:
Even though the White House is right on the merits when it describes Fox News as operating mainly as a surrogate for the Republican Party, making an issue of that fact is a tactical mistake.
Are you following? Rutten comes right out and concedes that the White House is right on the facts; that Fox News is not a legitimate source of journalism. In fact, according to the newspaper's columnist, Fox News consists of "long stretches of editorial comment, conservative and pro-Republican, interspersed with snippets of normative reporting."
Wow. That's exactly the point the White House has been making. But Rutten isn't interested in holding the news media outlet accountable for his unprofessional brand of partisan reporting. Rutten, like virtually every pundits on the planet, is sure it's the White House that's out of line with its critique.
Incredibly, Rutten agrees with the critique. Rutten agrees that Fox News is essentially a propaganda outlet for the RNC. Rutten just doesn't think it made sense tactically for the White House to highlight that fact publicly.
UPDATED: Talk about ironic. At the bottom of his piece, Rutten sets aside a paragraph to say nice things about the recently deceased Jack Nelson, who served as the LA Times' Washington, D.C. bureau chief and, as Rutten properly points out, "was the paper's public face." Rutten praised the esteemed Nelson as "one of the journalists who set the standards we all aspired to match."
It's true. Nelson was an old school pro who scored scoops for the newspaper during Beltway journalism's glory days of the 1970's, and then helped steer the daily for decades after that. Rutten especially admired Nelson's "passion for truth and decency."
Passion for truth and decency? This, of course, after Rutten finishes up a column in which he condemns the WH for highlighting Fox News' lack of truth and decency. I have no idea what Nelson thought of Fox News, and especially its unmanageably partisan incarnation of 2009. But the notion that legendary newsroom vets like Nelson would latch onto today's CW and needlessly cover for Murdoch's cable cabal seems unlikely to me.
The White-House should have just said that "Fox" is not actually "News" & left it at that.
To exclude someone from the White-House Pool is Discrimination.
Fox News though an "Axis of Evil" they do be does not deserve that Proclamation.
Speak truth to power.
Mr. News
How much time, do ya think, it takes to criticize the GOP's media wing VS. putting a war strategy in place?
Where does the U.S. press go for their Cracker Jack journalism degree's these days?
I don't think it really matters if Obama takes 4 weeks or 4 months to make the decision - the troops won't get there for months after that. If he put off the decision until next spring, then that would have an effect - the logistics take a while to arrange, so that could delay the arrival of new forces in Afghanistan.
I don't know why the White House isn't making this point every time this subject comes up. Maybe they're afraid of admitting to the enemy that they can't produce tens of thousands of more troops, and that there's a significant limit on how high they can go even then, but it doesn't change the fact that the decision doesn't have to be made right away since it's months from having a detrimental effect on troop reassignment.
Why did we spend any time talking about nonexistent death panels? We should have been talking about how valuable it would be to older citizens and their families to have patients better informed about their end of live choices.
Why have we spent any time talking about how much this bill will cost us when it's proven to be deficit neutral and will actually cost us less than what doing nothing will cost us? How does that benefit anyone in the USA?
And that's the pivot point that everyone seems to miss, that we need to marginalize FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh, etc, in order to make the progress towards a working and fair minded two party system we need to accomplish. It's not that we need to or want to marginalize the opposition - it's that we need to exclude the false stories coming from this version of the opposition. It's not that we don't think that a vibrant 2 party system is valuable - we think it's SO VALUABLE that we want this phony stuff from them to STOP! And the only way to get it to stop is to call them out.