CE Week #8: “Fox News snub is Nixonian” Oct. 25th
by Charles Krauthammer
The Spokesman-Review
Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster.
Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’ bed.
Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.
The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”
Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration – from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony Sept. 11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation – the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.
The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry – finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.
At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House “pool” news organizations – except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.
This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.
Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other – and an otherwise imperious government.
Factions (political parties, interest groups etc. . . ) should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.
But didn’t Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical – and that doesn’t even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.
Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN – which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a “Saturday Night Live” skit mildly critical of President Barack Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?
Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation.
But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?
The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?
Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.
A. I knew previously that the White House had sent out vicious messages towards Fox. When watching Fox a few days back, Glenn Beck described how the White House doesn’t have a single thing against Fox—but rather they are firing the threat in order to turn people’s heads (especially those who tend to watch Fox; the conservatives) so that the healthcare reform will draw less attention. That’s just one man’s opinion, and one that makes some sort of sense. Would the White House do that? Maybe, maybe not. Could it be a part of some political game? Certainly.
B. I learned that political groups are meant to criticize and challenge one another, but not tear each other to pieces. The Democratic White House might be going too far in an effort to “criticize” Fox News. I also never thought about the fact that most news organizations are liberal media, except Fox. I also had never thought about all of the other pieces of our culture that are so solidly liberal—universities, papers, Hollywood, etc.
C. I didn’t understand many of the segments and occurrences that were cited in this article. For instance, who is Mao? What are the “Little Red Books”?
Connection- Calling the snub “Nixonian” is an insult because of Watergate! However, I don’t think Obama has stooped quite so low…
A. I have seen the way Fox news has ruined its reputation lately, following new stories and tuning into that channel once in a while just to see what madness is up. Therefore, I am not surprised at all that the White House is finally defending itself against these fanatics.
B. However, I thought it was a little odd how this guy seemed to be defending Fox, when he begins to rant about Anita Dunn’s mess ups when Fox itself has too many mistakes to count. I also thought it was strange when the author, from the Washington Post Writers Group, says that networks should think twice about advertising on Fox news, and yet the Washington Post displayed an advertisement for Fox news just a month before (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091801102.html). The author attempts to say that the White House’s reaction is extreme and that it is trying to destroy Fox, and even attempts to say that we need Fox news to our Democracy to exist. However, our democracy needs unbiased legitimate news sources that provide information for our citizens, not information that misleads them into believing something that Fox news believes.
C. I’d like to know how out of control Fox news can get before either the courts step in to settle a dispute or before the legitimacy of the network is compromised all together.
D. Connection to: an article that was posted here a few weeks ago, and to a segment on Fox News where blood was sprayed all over the screen whenever Obama’s health care plan was mentioned.
A. Media is heavily liberal. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, and MSNBC as well as Hollywood and most elite newspapers have a liberal undercurrent. Fox is the major conservative network and it’s doing well. Its number of viewers totals MSNBC’s and CNN’s combined. The media realizes how important the Madisonian norm that “requires the contest between factions or interests” is. This is why when Ken Feinberg was made available for interviews and everyone but Fox was invited the other networks declined.
B. In Colbert’s book, I am America (and so can you), Colbert claims “reality has a liberal bias”. Well, basically everything has a bias. Any media will have a bias. Dunn claims Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news”. Yes, Fox news does have a conservative bias and I think that it well known. Fox covered her graduation speech and she didn’t like it. I think Dunn is just lashing out. I also think that although the Treasury Department responded with a bad move, giving all other networks besides Fox an interview, the networks took it in stride and proved just how admirable they are. It’s odd that it was the competing networks who upheld Madisonian norms and it was the government who did something low and Nixonian.
C. I watched the Fox segment that covered Dunn. In her graduation speech Dunn said Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa were two of her favorite political philosophers. She quoted Mao saying “you fight your war and I’ll fight mine” stressing her point of “finding your own path”. She later said it was an ironic joke that fell flat. From that clip I also learned Mao is responsible for seventy million deaths, more deaths than any other twentieth century leader. Glenn Beck also mentioned gulags. Gulags or GULAG was the government agency that administered the labor camps of the Soviet Union. The word gulag is infamous for its association with remote places where prisoners were kept and sometimes disappeared. Mao has millions of his people imprisoned in these gulags.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiBDpL2dExY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
What I learned: I had no idea that the White House was attacking FOX network for what they’ve been saying about the White House. I did know that FOX was deemed an unreliable source a few weeks ago because of some other scandal that had occurred. I’m glad that they are taking a stand against the station though because this kind of rubbish needs to be put to an end. If they are going to proceed with their false reports then why not punish them in some way, shape, or form?
What I thought: I thought this article was interesting because it actually gave examples of what is going on between the White House and FOX. I really hope that people start watching the other news stations more often because they are more reliable. I watch NBC almost every night and their stories are seemingly always accurate and recent. They don’t seem biased in any way at all either. If people are looking for actual accuracy on certain topics then they should watch C-SPAN because that is live feed that is not tampered with. I agree with the title that this isn’t the Madisonian way it is the Nixonian way because FOX lies and cheats to the public and so did Nixon.
What I would like to know: Who is Roger Ailes? Also, who is this Mao person that is referred to in the article? I’ve never heard of them before…
Connection/Extension: In one of the paragraphs it talks about the Madisonian way. I connected this to the Madisonian Model for our constitution. Madison was called the father of the constitution and used ideas from philosophers such as Locke and Montesquieu to help shape our ideally valiant constitution. As Americans we should be valiant and prove ourselves to uphold what is right rather than what is wrong