Fox Suggests A Reason Its Pseudo-Scandals Haven't Caught On: Media Bias

Written by Mike Burns

Published

During a segment today on Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade and guest Larry Sabato discussed a recently released report that suggests President Obama may soon face a major scandal. Sabato, a political analyst and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, stated that the report, written by University of Michigan's Brendan Nyhan, found that “presidents since Watergate regularly have scandals, and that President Obama statistically is overdue” for one. Doocy responded by suggesting the reason there have been no scandals surrounding Obama is that “the mainstream media has been so supportive of this president.”

Put another way, Doocy suggested that Obama has avoided being hit by a scandal not by keeping from doing anything scandalous, but because the media are biased in his favor. But perhaps a better explanation is that Fox News has been working incessantly to try to uncover an Obama administration scandal, yet the only ones they have been able to dig up have been completely baseless.

Watch the segment:

For instance, Fox News claimed that 38 health-care reform “waivers” granted to businesses in Northern California are evidence of Rep. Nancy Pelosi and President Obama's “corruption.” Fox's Sarah Palin and Jeanine Pirro even called for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Oversight Committee, to investigate the waivers. But this proved to be entirely without merit -- the business owner who actually requested the waivers said that they were in no way connected to Pelosi and were part of an annual request for businesses throughout the country, not just in Pelosi's congressional district.

Then there was the dubious suggestion by Fox and others in the right-wing media that the Obama administration's decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unlawful and “a form of dictatorship.” This, too, was an entirely bogus controversy, as evidenced by the fact that presidents from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush have opted against defending statutes they viewed as unconstitutional. Not to mention that it is entirely within the authority of the president and Justice Department to choose not to enforce unconstitutional statutes.

Fox also called for congressional investigations into numerous “scandals” that Fox itself spent the first two years of Obama's administration pushing. But these purported controversies, involving the New Black Panther Party (Megyn Kelly's favorite “scandal”), “Climategate,” ACORN, and the stimulus package, have long been debunked.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Doocy may think media bias partly explains why the Obama administration has not been subjected to a major scandal, but the inability of his own network to uncover any legitimate controversies despite non-stop attempts to gin up such a scandal suggests otherwise.