In her June 17 syndicated column, Fox News contributor and NewsMax “pundit” Susan Estrich offered a defense of Fox News Channel from the point of view of “the blonde on the left, figuratively and literally.” Estrich proclaimed her affection for Fox News chief Roger Ailes, “to whom I am extremely loyal for reasons having nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with integrity," and discussed an interview Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto conducted with President Bush.

From Estrich's column:

Mr. Cavuto, a Fox News anchor, sat down to do an interview with George Bush last week on his business show. He didn't discuss Iraq. Cavuto doesn't cover Iraq. As far as I know, he had nothing new to ask him, nothing new to add, and no important new question to pose. In fact, the president had nothing new to say on the topic. There was no news to be made on Iraq. So Cavuto didn't use the opportunity either to beat up on the president or to let him say something we'd heard a hundred times. Instead, he asked him questions he didn't know the answer to, where he might get an answer he hadn't already heard.

Cavuto may host a “business show,” but he felt qualified to ask Bush questions on such non-business topics as Al Qaeda, the detention center on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the Michael Jackson trial. He would seem perfectly capable of asking questions about Iraq if he so chose, so the idea that he didn't ask Bush about Iraq simply because that isn't his beat is plainly ridiculous. At this point in history, how many journalists, given the opportunity to interview President Bush, wouldn't ask a question about Iraq?

As Media Matters for America has documented, Cavuto's interview was comically deferential, serving up such “tough” questions as:

• “Mr. President, this morning, we got word of an Al Qaeda-linked cell potentially broken up in California. One of the participants in that cell supposedly was taking target practice off a picture of you. What did you think when you heard it?”
• “Let me ask you about the economy, sir. Almost any objective read tells you that we're still doing very, very well. ... Do you think you get a bum rap in the media on the economy?”
• “You know, a lot of economists agree with [progressive indexing of Social Security benefits], Mr. President. Do you think, though, that the public in this country has been distracted by other events?”
• “Your vice president was saying that Laura Bush would be an excellent presidential candidate. ... Do you think she would?”

“For this,” Estrich wrote, Cavuto has “been summarily beaten up by the press corps -- the same one that still can't figure out why it got it all wrong about those weapons of mass destruction that justified the war.” The failure of the news media to adequately question the president on his justification for war is undeniable; why this is some sort of an excuse for Cavuto conducting a softball interview with him is unfathomable. If anything, it would seem to be a reason for Cavuto to be tougher on the president.

In addition, six months into the war, a study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found that Fox News viewers were more likely than consumers of any other major media source to have mistaken beliefs about Iraq, including the belief that U.S.-led forces had already found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there. This belief was held by one out of every three Fox viewers at the time, compared to one out of ten respondents who cited PBS or NPR as their main source of news. Although PIPA has not repeated this study, it did find just before the 2004 presidential election that 72 percent of Bush voters believed that Saddam had either WMD (47 percent) or a major program to develop them (25 percent) before the war. In other words, while there are many offenders in the news media when it comes to overly credulous acceptance of Bush administration claims on Iraq, it would be hard to find a more culpable outlet than Fox News.

Estrich then defended Fox News correspondent Brian Wilson, whose performance at a recent press conference with Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) raised some eyebrows: “Then there's Brian Wilson's great sin. In his case, the problem wasn't not asking a question, but trying too hard to ask tough ones of the Senate minority leader and the party chairman who'd joined together to make it look as if there was no problem when there very obviously was.” Here is a description, from the Columbia Journalism Review's CJR Daily, of Wilson's behavior at that June 9 press conference:

Cutting through the “cacophony of competing screams” from the press was Fox News correspondent Brian Wilson, who asked Dean, in light of his recent comments, if he hated white Christians. Dean didn't dignify that with a response, and Reid tried to talk about a “positive agenda,” but Wilson continued his line of questioning, prompting Democratic Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin [D-IL] to ask sardonically if Wilson was the one running the press conference.

All of that information comes from [Washington Post reporter Mark] Leibovich's report; thanks to the magic of blogs, we also get a bit of the backstory to share. Wonkette, The Huffington Post and AMERICAblog report that, when Leibovich asked Wilson who he was, Wilson screamed back, “Who the fuck are YOU?” According to AMERICAblog and Wonkette, Leibovich asked the question because “Wilson was apparently wearing no credential of any kind ... and behaving 'bizarrely angry.'” Those blogs also claim Leibovich said later that he asked Wilson who he was “because of his incredibly pointed questions”; Leibovich, say the blogs, “wondered whether or not [Wilson] was a rogue Republican staffer.” All three blogs wrote that Wilson later stormed down Senate halls, screaming obscenities.

Skeptical of such accounts, we cornered Leibovich today. “Yeah, I can confirm it,” he said. “It involved Brian Wilson of Fox News -- not of the Beach Boys. And he was not giving out good vibrations.” He said Wilson wasn't holding a notebook, and, “for all I knew he was Jeff Gannon, based on the tone and insistence of his questions.”

On the Dean question, Estrich wrote: “But I'm hard-pressed to think of anybody who'll tell you privately that in the midst of debates about such issues as Social Security and the deficits, it's a good idea for the party leader to be turning himself into the issue by engaging in class and religious warfare.” We'd be hard-pressed to find anyone not a Republican who believes that that Dean's observation that Republicans are “pretty much a white Christian party” constitutes “religious warfare” -- that sounds an awful lot like a Republican talking point. Estrich has been particularly critical of Dean, saying on the June 8 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume: “He makes Democrats look like they're way out left. And in those battleground states where people are worried that, you know, Democrats are all a bunch of crazy liberals who don't understand real people, you just reinforced that view.” Hardly a die-hard Democrat, Estrich served on Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's transition team.

That Estrich would rise up to defend her employer is not particularly surprising. But many of Estrich's performances on Fox News suggest that her role there is less to advocate for a liberal viewpoint than to be a “liberal” who can be relied upon to attack Democrats (and tout her “friendship” with people like Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter).

To take one example, Estrich was an active participant in Fox News' plugging of an unsubstantiated rumor that John Kerry received a manicure before one of the presidential debates. “My guess is most men don't stop on their way to an important event with a manicure,” she said. “But my hope is for John Kerry's sake, is that tonight people will forget about the manicure.” In addition to discussing it on several of its shows, Fox News put on its web site a fabricated story by chief White House correspondent Carl Cameron about the manicure, complete with invented quotes. Though Fox News later admitted that the web piece was phony, there was no on-air retraction.

In Estrich's defense, we can assume she was simply unaware that Fox News had taken a rumor, invented a story to go along with it, and presented it as news. But perhaps the incident -- and Fox's unwillingness to air an apology and retraction -- might tell Estrich something about the “integrity” of the network and its president.