Dobbs, Bozell praise Beck, Fox for “having the guts” to focus on Van Jones
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the September 8th edition of United Stations Radio Networks' Lou Dobbs Show:
BRENT BOZELL (Media Research Center president): This man is a radical's radical. This guy is about as far left as you can possibly get, and the fact that the truth about him comes out and the media decides that it's just not important. And he's one of the more powerful people -- he's in charge of all the green jobs that the Obama administration is going to create through the stimulus package. This is a very powerful czar that Obama had created.
DOBBS: Right.
BOZELL: And nothing -- nothing from CBS, nothing from ABC, nothing from C -- NBC, nothing from The New York Times, nothing from The Washington Post, nothing from the LA Times. A complete blanket from the American people.
DOBBS: Yeah, it's stunning. And much -- you know, I was talking with Michael Barone. And he was talking about, well, Fox and Glenn Beck, you know, they really used a tool that wasn't available to, you know, a very important weapon here that wasn't available to a lot of people -- the weapon called Google.
BOZELL: Yeah. Yes that's absolutely right. You know the world has changed so dramatically. First of all, you can't keep -- you can't keep the toothpaste in the jar anymore. When the genie is out of the bottle, the genie's out of the bottle, and you can't put the thing back in. When the truth comes out about somebody, because of the Internet and because of you folks on talk radio, the truth is going to come out.
And the media for years and years have enjoyed -- had enjoyed a monopoly on information. They don't enjoy it anymore. Look at the fact that the man was forced to resign and yet nobody covered it. So how did America know about this? Why did it become such an issue? It became an issue because of the Internet and talk radio.
DOBBS: Yeah, and also it became an issue because Beck and Fox had the guts to stand up when Van Jones' outfit, excuse me, went after him.
BOZELL: No question about it at all. They started it. Glenn Beck started it. But, you know, here is the other interesting thing. Again, if you look at the coverage of it, CNN covered this story on Friday; it was the first time CNN covered it.
DOBBS: No, no, no. My show was covering it earlier.
BOZELL: I'm sorry, I stand corrected. I'm talking about Anderson Cooper. I'm sorry.
DOBBS: Oh yeah, but my show, which is also part of CNN, covered it.
BOZELL: Yeah, absolutely. But you all covered it -- your network covered it before he resigned. Now everyone else refused to cover it. The first time they covered was when he resigned, and guess what? It became a Republican controversy. And it's always the case if it's a controversy involving a liberal Democrat, the Republicans somehow become the controversy.
DOBBS: Sure, and the national media -- and this is the thing that's perilous here. And, by the way, I'm an independent in every sense of the word. And I'm also a proud member of the national media. But I have to tell you what I'm not proud of, and that is the fact that this is, for the first time in my career, a time in which the national media has simply dropped the veil of pretense and is absolutely on board, fully supportive of this president and this administration, which they were, you know, really in the campaign beginning in January of last year. But this is something I've never seen. And to me it is more troubling than having, you know, a -- all three branches of government being in the control of one political party. The Fourth Estate is now simply an accomplice.