Fox News has been full of complaints over ABC's plan to air a news special entitled "Questions for the President: Prescription for America," during which President Barack Obama will field questions on his plans for health care reform. Various Fox personalities have complained that the access ABC is getting is "unprecedented" and that "journalism is dead." But yesterday, objectively demonstrating the fatuousness and hypocrisy of Fox's claims was done so effortlessly and completely, that they'd have been well-advised to reconsider whining about it.
But no! Last night, on On The Record with Greta Van Susteren, no less a figure than Karl Rove was giving the old piss and moan about this ABC special. Here's video, courtesy of ThinkProgress:
[WATCH]
ROVE: If it's not crossing a line, it's getting comfortably too close to a line of where a news network becomes a cooperating partner of and an adjacency to the White House communications shop. And I think the presence of a former ABC reporter as the communicator-in-chief inside the White House on this issue also raises questions about how it ended up in the hands of ABC.
Am I missing something here? Wasn't Tony Snow, former Fox reporter, a presence at the White House as President George W. Bush's press secretary? I can't imagine that concerns over potential "cooperating partnerships" where Snow was concerned would have been met by Rove with anything other than pooh-poohing. And you know why I imagine that? Because Rove, himself, was never too upfront about disclosing his own "cooperating partnerships," like, for example, the fact that as he set off on his own pundit career, he was an adviser to the McCain campaign -- a fact he furtively avoided disclosing. In fact, one of my favorite Fox moments from the campaign was when Chris Wallace asked Rove a question with the setup, "If you were advising McCain..." If? He was advising McCain!
Back then, the New York Times thought Rove's role was merely "another step in the evolution of mainstream journalism, where opinion, 'straight news' reporting and unmistakable spin increasingly mingle." Now, Rove thinks the same situation is a worrisome "cooperating partnership." I guess some things are only okay when the people Kark Rove likes are doing them!
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