A friend emailed Sunday to remark on the irony of having Howell Raines lecture FOX News boss Roger Ailes on journalistic standards. Raines, you see, resigned as editor of The New York Times after a plagiarism scandal.
Raines' screed against Ailes and FOX News ran in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post. The greatest irony, however, wasn't that Raines dared scold Ailes, which is what most of the Internet chatter has been about. Raines, after all, was not the plagiarist himself. More salient ironies lay elsewhere.
Raines excoriated the FOX commentariat for expounding a static view of the world, rather than bearing "witness to a world of dynamic change." In Raines's view, this is apparently job 1 for journalists. FOX commentators instead exude a "preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality."
The first of two ironies has to do with the view that reporters should simply root for constant change. How is that any less doctrinaire than asserting that journalists simply should remind us of timeless principles and values? Were we really all better off in the pre-Fox days, when only Raines' view prevailed?
But the prize for ironies was how Raines fails to bear witness to the dynamic change within the industry in which he once played a leading part. If he seeks evidence of a preconceived universe that is rigid in its thinking, he need look no further than his own column -- provided he could cast a critical (and non-ideological) eye upon it.
Technology has commoditized the news business. Anyone with a cell phone can now capture events in video and audio and send his witnessing round the world faster than Raines can read an article in The Nation. The gruesome killing of Neda Soltan, the young woman shot dead in an anti-government march in Tehran last year, was reported to the world not by the Reuters bureau chief by one such citizen journalist.
What does provide differentiation, what can turn a commodity into a product with competitive distinction, is opinion. For it to work, this opinion must be honest about itself, so people can go to it knowing what they are getting. This is Fox's not-so secret formula. Every educated consumer of news knows what Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck offer.
The formula has worked so well that is being copied, on the other side of the spectrum, by MSNBC. All discerning consumers know what Rachel Maddow, Dylan Radigan and Keith Olbermann are about.
I, like many Americans, have watched all six of them. They provide a valuable service in distilling the news and putting it in the context of their explicit world view.
Much worse was when we were all subjected to a monopoly on the creation and the distribution of news by a handful of men such as Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Raines himself, liberals all. We had to trust that they parked their biases aside when making editorial decisions.
And did they park them? In a revealing passage in his Post piece, Raines openly admits that he preferred journalists to mix their opinions into their reporting. He laments that FOX has intimidated other journalists "into suppressing conclusions--whether on health care reforms or other issues--they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting."
But, no, Howell, we don't want reporters to do that, unless it is clearly marked as opinion. Yes, opinion should be backed by reporting, and I think this is what we're getting now more or less. But we weren't better off when opinion was peddled as straight up reporting, and that's all we had.
Both Rather and Raines fell in part because of their liberal biases. Rather falsely reported that George W. Bush had misbehaved in the Texas National Guard, even after being warned that the sole document supporting the claim was likely fraudulent.
And Raines himself admitted that his own bias colored his handling of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. In a May 15, 2003, New York Times article, he was asked if he had personally favored Blair because he was black:
"Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?" he added, a moment later. "Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes."
It is the "not consciously" part that seals it for me. When a guilty liberal admits that even unconsciously he will be biased, I am glad that opinion is now clearly stated, as the Fox and MSNBC commentators do.
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It's still unclear if the House will have the needed votes to pass health care reform -- if the votes aren't there, it could seriously undermine the chances for any element of the progressive agenda from passing.
Actually, the information in the memo was generally regarded as accurate and consistent with witness accounts, but Rather must have had blinders on or something when it came to that memo. In any evetn, he was fired.
Just out of curiosity, who got fired when Fox was caught falsifying crowd scenes at TWO right wing rallies last year?
And Rather was not fired.
At the same time, newspapers and other media outlets have grown more professional, and now generally try to present both sides of an issue. Though many working the news might have liberal leanings--and some are avowedly conservative--we try at all times to avoid injecting our views into our work. To do so violates our ethics, decreases the value of the story, and eventually hurts our ability to do our jobs--people won't talk to you if you just want to parrot your own views.
Fox,on the other hand, deliberately touts the Republican and conservative lines so blatantly that no objective viewer could see the network as anything but a mouthpiece for the Republican elite. It does so with a mixture of outright lies and half truths, giving legitimacy to outrageous claims and dark conspiracies. Michelle Bachmann's hysterical call for her constituents to be "armed and dangerous" received wide play on Fox.
I believe we could be heading for very dangerous times for this country, and the violence would largely come from the enraged right. Fox has done more to foment that violence than any other organization.
News would indicate verifiable facts and some reasonable amount of objectivity. Fox is a propaganda machine for corporations .They prey on the minds of the weak and illiterate like a payday lender preys on the poor. Fox pushed that 3 trillion dollar Iraq War ,what a waste of lives and money; now they are blaming Obama for the deficit.
I used to be disgusted , but now I*m just amused .
You're comparing apples and oranges here Mike. So, someone who "helped shape and explain financial and foreign policy from inside the second Bush administration" is trying to convince us the Bush apologist network is unbiased during it's hard news programs? Didn't you work for the Wall Street Journal which is owned by Newscorp, the parent company of FOX? I think you should of have put that information up there, so we can understand exactly where you are coming from and who has paid you.
Oh, and great work on that "Letter of Eight" piece. You achieved great results on that one. We should so totally, believe everything you say.
Second, Joe Wilson's "You Lie" was a comment on how liberals pay lip service to certain laws (such as those against illegal immigration) but do something else entirely, like setting up sanctuary cities.
Unless Obama's bill specifically excluded illegal immigrants and provided the mechanism and protocols for determining a person's legal status, it would certainly have been a " lie."
Unless you can cite actual comments from Wilson after the fact which support the meaning and context of the "you lie" outburst, it seems to me that all you're doing is ascribing a talking point -- or, better yet, an opinion which you actually formed -- to Wilson's shameless grandstanding.
Despite what Fox News features in the on-screen graphics to their promos, hypocrisy is not the exclusive province of Liberals.
On the matter of 'sanctuary cities' for illegals, I'm living in a rural location 90 miles from NYC which functions as same, although the policies which allow this to happen are crafted in Albany, not Washington. I have to wonder if you're as passionate and principled when it comes to the policies not hatched or implemented by Liberals which encourage the flood of illegal immigration (and all in the service of the "free market") into the US.
Both parties are guilty. They passed laws, swore to uphold them, and then immediately turned their backs on their duty for a variety of reasons. They have been craven in many ways to the great detriment to this country.
It seems that nearly all Democrat officials (and meny Dems in general) support amnesty. A good portion of Republicans are against amnesty, so I see Dems as the main problem. Their liberal political correctness sees immigration control as right wing and mean spirited.
As far as my interpretation of Wilson's comment, you are right, it is my interpretation. But I am sure that is exactly what he was talking about on this issue. The Dems will say that, of course, something is illegal, but they will do the opposite in practice if it fits their agenda.
I am not presenting myself as a scholar, just a private citizen with an opinion. It is my firm belief that the Dems want to continue to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants in hopes of turning them into Democrats so that they can simply overwhelm the GOP.
By the way, I can make a much better case that liberalism has ruined this country and its culture. Much.
The complaint really is that the media just presents two opposing viewpoints as equal and doesn't uncover the objective facts. The complaint really is that the media is more interested in controversy than substance.
Case in point: The "you lie!" moment. There were two forks in the road that the media took a wrong turn at (and by media, I of course mean the mainstream, conservative media)--first, they chose to focus on that particular incident rather than on the substance of Obama's speech and proposals. Second, they never actually investigated who was right! Look, either illegals were covered by the plan, or they weren't (they weren't). Where is that statement? It should have read "Joe Wilson incorrectly accuses the president of lying during speech." That's objective, no opinion inserted.
The problem is that conservatives are much less dependent on fact, reason, and much more on fear, emotion, and faith (by which I mean the nonrational holding of beliefs, not necessarily religion, through logically fallacious processes such as susceptibility to appeals to authority). They make a point to campaign against the media as too liberal, which was never true and isn't today.
Bush met the standards which required x number of days served over the years. During his early years, while training to be a pilot, he obviously put in hours and days far in excess of the required minimum. In his last couple of years, he served far less , but still met the minimum, His total time was in excess of the standards required. Rather, blinded by partisanship, tried to show that Bush did not meet his obligations, instead receiving preferential treatment. He was wrong, and ended his career on a very sour note.
Dan R. may have made some mistakes in the handling of that National Guard piece, that's pretty obvious. But again, you're resorting to hyperbole when you remark that fellow Texan (native, not transplanted) Rather was "blinded by partisanship" in the Dubya Nat'l. Guard story.
Guess Rather must have been wearing those partisan blinders when he got roughed up by Daley's goons circa DNC '68, huh? That's real "Chicago-style politics" fer ya!