So Fox News had been jabbing away at the Obama administration, and now the Obama administration has decided to hit back. White House communications director Anita Dunn has denounced Fox as more of a political operation than a real news organization, and vowed to push back hard when one of the network’s commentators says something particularly nasty or untrue.
All of this has the blogosphere abuzz with questions: Should the White House single out a particular news organization this way? Are there any parallels here, as some have suggested, with Watergate, when the Nixon administration attacked the Washington Post? And is Fox News really a news organization?
To which I answer, no, no and yes - but…
Should the White House Single Out a News Organization?
Is it smart politics for the White House to go after Fox? No. As plenty of pundits have already pointed out, doing so plays into the network’s hands and just gives their talking heads more to talk about. And there’s something a little unseemly about the White House mixing it up with the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; clearly, Obama and his team have more important things to do.
Beyond that, is there anything particularly draconian going on here? Not really. The Fox pundits may cry foul, but no one’s proposing big-government censorship of Glenn Beck, and in any case the network is playing up the spat for ratings gold.
What's really happening is, the administration has a message to get out, Fox News has its own message, and in today’s rough-and-tumble marketplace of ideas, the person who shouts loudest is usually the one who gets heard. The White House has simply decided to employ the same techniques the right-wing talking heads have been using for years.
Are There Parallels With Watergate?
No, the White House criticizing Fox News is not the same as Richard Nixon ripping Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post and other news outlets that exposed the Watergate scandal. The difference? Woodward and Bernstein were hard-news reporters investigating real crimes committed by the White House. Watergate was a battle royal of heavyweight combatants: Nixon used the power of the presidency to try to harass and intimidate reporters, but the reporters armed themselves with the most devastating of weapons: Cold, hard facts.
The current kerfuffle, by comparison, is a flyweight shoving match. O’Reilly and Hannity aren’t investigative reporters; they’re commentators, the TV equivalent of op-ed writers. They talk tough, but in the end that’s all it is: Talk. Fox doesn’t land many real punches because, at least in prime time, it traffics in opinions, not facts. Schoolyard taunts may sting, but they don't draw blood.
(One recent investigative scoop that did get big play on Fox - an undercover video showing actors posing as a prostitute and a pimp at the offices of Acorn, a community organizing group that has been the target of conservative ire - was actually obtained by activists, not Fox News reporters. And even K. Daniel Glover of the conservative group Accuracy in Media has decried the dearth of right-leaning investigative journalism. "Precious little (conservative investigative journalism) exists right now or is being produced on a consistent basis," he writes.)
Is Fox News a News Organization?
Well, sure. By day Fox does what cable news networks do, covering press conferences, car chases, fires and mudslides, and at night the pundits take over. Fox News exec Michael Clemente compared the network’s mix of news and opinion to a newspaper when he told CNN: “The average news consumer can certainly distinguish between the “A” section of the newspaper and the editorial page, which is what our programming represents.”
And every once in awhile a Fox Newser challenges the network’s conservative orthodoxy; Shepard Smith’s tough, passionate reporting on Hurricane Katrina was a shining example of this.
But what’s disturbing is the way Fox blurs the line between news and opinion. Its blatant cheerleading for the tea party protests was an egregious example of this. (Big ratings aside, Glenn Beck’s histrionics, including his accusation that President Obama is a racist, aren't burnishing the network's journalistic credibility either.)
So the better question might be, is Fox News “fair and balanced,” as its slogan suggests? Clearly the answer is, not always. Does that make Fox more of a political operation than a news organization? In the interests of being fair and balanced, I’ll ask you to act on their other slogan: “We report – you decide.”
