The Silencing (20 page)

FOX NEWS DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

It is astonishing to me as a liberal not only how illiberal so many self-proclaimed liberals can be, but also how willingly they adopt tactics they claim to discern and detest in conservatives. In 2009, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, was happy to amplify the Obama administration’s anti-Fox message in
Newsweek
. In his column titled, “The O’Garbage Factor,”
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Weisberg channeled Joseph McCarthy, calling Fox “un-American.” He warned: “Respectable journalists—I’m talking to you, [NPR correspondent] Mara Liasson—should stop appearing on [Fox News] programs.”
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Weisberg’s broadside against Fox sprinkled in a little of that infamous leftist sexism for good measure, dismissing the female
anchors, guests, and journalists who appear on Fox News as that “familiar roster of platinum pundettes and anchor androids reciting . . . soundbites.” Where are the “War on Women” warriors when you need them?

Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the
New York Times
, wrote a March 2010 op-ed for the
Washington Post
titled, “Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?” Raines criticized Ailes, the president of Fox News, for his “clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators [to overturn] standards of fairness and objectivity” in journalism. He complained that members of the journalism establishment were failing to speak out against Fox News, a sentiment the
Washington Post
promoted in the headline. “This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue,” Raines promised. “It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: ‘The American people do not want health-care reform.’”
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I vigorously supported Obamacare, but Raines’s rant was jaw-dropping in its blinkered political arrogance—as if popular opposition to Obamacare, well testified to in all the polling data, was entirely the result of opinion-leaders at Fox News.
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Moreover, isn’t the job of the press to critically examine government programs, policies, and proposals? Or should the “objective” press simply cheer on Obamacare because it is “objectively” good for the country, as least if you hold liberal beliefs. The real “uber-lie” about Obamacare was nothing that came from the mouth of a Fox anchor, but President Obama’s “If you like your health care plan you can keep it” mantra. PolitiFact named this its 2013 “Lie of the year.”
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But the illiberal left, acting as chorus, couldn’t stop singing from the anti-Fox hymnal. In March 2010, the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief, Dan Froomkin, wrote a column headlined, “Why Journalists Shouldn’t Be Defending Fox News” and argued—you guessed it—that “Fox News is not a legitimate news organization.”
⁶⁰
Salon.com
ran a column proclaiming that Fox News is populated with, “charlatans, conspiracy theorists and . . . religious fanatics endangering democracy.”
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Rolling Stone
contributing editor Tim Dickinson argued in a 2011 article
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that Fox News
was the “most profitable propaganda machine in history.” The former
Mother Jones
editor complained that the existence of Fox News “enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion.” There again is that illiberal left hubris. If Fox has commentators who buck the leftist line, they are waging a “partisan assault on
public opinion
”—or at least the opinions of former editors of
Mother Jones
and the
New York Times
. Moreover, Dickinson’s fantasy world where Republicans “bypass” the mainstream media doesn’t exist. If Dickinson is so worried about public officials bypassing skeptical reporters, President Obama would be a better target for concern, as we will see in the next chapter.

Sometimes the anti-Fox derangement syndrome among leftists is almost beyond belief.
Salon.com
editor Joan Walsh tweeted in September 2014, “Imagine Fox covering slavery. It’s not even hard: Promoting the ‘job creators’ and hyping any rumor of violence.”
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The illiberal left has to demonize its opponents; it won’t engage them. And it can’t even see its own double standards. Of course no one who works for Fox has ever defended slavery, but MSNBC, where Walsh is a political analyst, has more than once indulged its inner racist, including making fun of a Romney family-photo Christmas card with its inclusion of a black baby (an adopted Mitt Romney grandchild) and an MSNBC segment about Cinco de Mayo when an MSNBC personality danced around in a sombrero on air as he shook maracas and pretended to down a bottle of tequila. The president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists called it “abominable.”
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It was meant as a joke, but not the sort of joke the illiberal left would ever tolerate in a conservative. Imagine if O’Reilly or Hannity had done that.

If you want to rail against cable news, or the state of media in general, by all means, be my guest. There is plenty to gripe about. But that’s not what the illiberal left does. They troll for evidence to delegitimize Fox News and then weave a narrative to “prove” that Fox is terrible, when in fact it stands up pretty well against its rivals in terms of news reporting and credibility.

Even though a recent Pew study showed that CNN and the Fox News Channel provide a roughly 50/50 distribution between news and opinion compared to MSNBC’s “full 85 percent opinion,” MSNBC is the news network that former Obama flacks Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod joined as political analysts after leaving the Obama administration. What happened to all their fretting about “real news”? MSNBC’s premier host, Rachel Maddow, asserted in January 2012, “There may be liberals on TV at MSNBC, but the network is not operating with a political objective.” Contrast this with a November 2012 Pew Research study that reported that MSNBC’s coverage of Mitt Romney during the final week of the 2012 campaign was 68 percent negative with no positive stories in the sample. Did you get that? MSNBC offered not a single positive story about Mitt Romney at the conclusion of the presidential campaign. Pew noted their coverage “was far more negative than the overall press, and even more negative than it had been during October 1 to 28 when 5 percent was positive and 57 percent was negative.”

The sad fact is the illiberal left expect members of the media to support their ideological and partisan goals—or else. As reporter Sharyl Attkisson said in an interview after leaving CBS, “The troubling part is that some in the news media routinely allow themselves to be used as a tool in this propaganda effort. Instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority. By way of example, my news reporting has an impeccable record for accuracy while the Obama administration’s record for providing accurate facts is decidedly mixed. Yet some in the media question me with a skepticism and zeal that they would never think of applying to the wildly false and unfounded claims raised by ‘the other side.’”
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Charles Krauthammer once noted that Fox News’ success is due to its appeal to a niche market:
half the country
. And unlike much of the rest of the media, Fox distinguishes between opinion and straight news shows. The problem with the illiberal left is that it believes a “progressive” take on issues is an objective take, and cannot conceive that there are other
legitimate points of view. As William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped, a liberal is someone who claims to be open to all points of view—and then is surprised and offended to find there are other points of view. I think liberals should be better than that and at least acknowledge their own biases. Veteran reporter and Fox News Senior Political Analyst Brit Hume likes to point out that everyone has a bias. He has told me many times, “The people who are dangerous are those who don’t know it and fail to correct for it.” Because so many in the media believe their liberal worldview is merely a reflection of settled truth, we end up with a leftist echo chamber, which helps nobody, including liberals.

THE PYRRHIC VICTORY

In late 2014, Media Matters Executive Vice President Angelo Carusone declared the war against Fox News over. He said, “And it’s not just that it’s over, but it was very successful. To a large extent, we won.”
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This was a strange claim considering that the Media Matters website continued to hyperventilate over all things Fox News. On January 5, 2015, as an example, the front page of the Media Matters website featured seventeen posts about Fox News including banner stories demonizing Fox News host Mike Huckabee, who had just announced he was leaving Fox News to explore a presidential run.

It is unclear exactly what Media Matters won. Despite its concerted attack, Fox News continued to dominate the ratings to the point of humiliating its competitors. A December 30, 2014,
Variety
headline declared, “Fox News Dominates Cable News Ratings in 2014; MSNBC Tumbles.”
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The article explained, “Fox News finished on top in both total viewers and the adults 25-54 news demo for a 13th straight year. . . .” The cable network, “had the top five programs in cable news” and “in primetime for the year, Fox News ranked second in total viewers among all ad-supported basic cable networks,” ahead of AMC and TNT and behind only ESPN. As for its competitors, “CNN posted its all-time low primetime average in total
viewers as well as its lowest-ever total-day tune-in among adults 25-54. MSNBC hit a nine-year low in total viewers.”
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Following the 2014 midterm elections,
Baltimore Sun
media critic David Zurawik wrote, “Any day now, I am expecting to turn on the tube and see an ad that says, ‘More Americans get their TV news from Fox than anywhere else.’” He pointed out that, “Much of the media establishment seems bent on ignoring the incredible ratings success of Fox News . . . [that] show Fox News rising to a new and remarkable level of dominance. . . .”

He proffered the evidence: “Fox News beat not just CNN and MSNBC, but also ABC, NBC and CBS on Nov. 4, the night of the mid-term elections. It did so in both total viewers and the key news demographic: viewers 25 to 54 years of age. Fox more than tripled the audiences of MSNBC and CNN in total viewers, while beating ABC, NBC and CBS by more than 3 million, 2 million and 1 million viewers respectively. On a watershed political night, more Americans tuned to Fox for information about the vote than anywhere else. I have been covering media long enough to remember when CBS, NBC or ABC was the big story on election night in the 1970s and ’80s.”
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Zurawik seemed to be on to something. A June 2014 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey done in partnership with the Brookings Institution found that Fox News was America’s most trusted television news source.
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MSNBC was dead last. In response to the question, “Which of the following television news sources do you trust the most to provide accurate information about politics and current events?” 25 percent of survey respondents answered Fox News. Broadcast news came in second at 23 percent, followed by CNN (17 percent), PBS (12 percent), and Jon Stewart’s the
Daily Show
(8 percent). MSNBC trailed the fake news show with just 5 percent of respondents describing it as their most trusted news source.

In his
Baltimore Sun
piece, Zurawik urged the media establishment to stop ignoring Fox News’ success and, “start seriously trying to figure out how and why it has come to pass that Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly matter
more to Americans on election night than Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer—way more than the latter two.”

When the Obama administration dismissed administration scandals as Fox News stories, the mainstream networks were inclined to stay away, while Fox led the charge to investigate what happened at Benghazi (where the administration initially trotted out a ludicrous story, blaming the death of the American ambassador to Libya as a violent reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube video) and in the IRS targeting scandals and much else besides. A White House aide told me, while I was working on a column about Benghazi and citing a Fox story, “you know that can’t be trusted because it’s Fox News.” That’s the line the White House peddles to reporters all the time.

“I think one of the reasons for this latest evolution of ratings dominance might be that Fox was a far better watchdog on the Obama White House than any other TV news organization,” theorized Zurawik in his
Baltimore Sun
column. “It took the heat and the blowback from an administration that showed an enmity for the press not seen on Pennsylvania Avenue since the dark days of Richard Nixon, but it stayed the course. And now with viewers seeing the contempt this administration had for them and the truth, they respect what Fox did the last six years.” As for Fox critics who insist the only people who watch Fox are stupid partisans, he warned, “we shouldn’t let our biases blind us to the serious media criticism [of other media outlets] that demands to be done.”

Fox News has shown the virtues of resisting the intimidation and demonization by government officials, media elites, and even a self-described media watchdog group that can’t tolerate dissent. It should be disconcerting for every true liberal that so many of their own media outlets have been content to be led and used by the Obama administration, and to use their power to try to silence others.

SEVEN

MUDDY MEDIA WATERS

              
[T]he only security of all, is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.
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