Will no one rid us of this troublesome network?
byMark Tapscott
, Mark Tapscott Editorial Page Editor
posted10 hours ago at10:05pm
with3 Comments
(Courtesy mediamatters.org)
Here's something from David Brock's new book that you may not have known: America is a politically divided nation today because the Fox News Channel denied President Obama the traditional presidential honeymoon in 2009.
That appears on page 103 of "The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes turned a network into a propaganda machine," which Brock co-authored with his vice president at Media Matters for America, Ari Rabin-Havt.
Now that you know that Fox is the cause of all of Obama's problems — and the nation's — it might be worth flipping also to Chapter Nine, for a riveting account of how Fox held Massachusetts voters at gunpoint and forced them to elect a Republican senator.
And by the way, did you know that Fox News frequently interviews Republican candidates for president? No, really, it's right there on page 277.
Fox also makes "donation[s] of airtime to Republican candidates," otherwise known as "presidential debates." This publication co-sponsored one such debate with Fox — we all wore hair shirts for a month afterward and promised never to do it again.
"The Fox Effect" is every bit as insightful and scintillating a read as the Media Matters website. And if you flip to the endnotes, you will realize that it actually is the Media Matters website.
Both the book and the tax-exempt, George Soros-funded website serve as reminders of how silly liberals can become when they abandon their historic role as the destroyers of established orthodoxies.
The apparent motivation behind both is a deep fear that someone on some television set somewhere might be failing to embrace their orthodoxies with sufficient enthusiasm — or worse, giving aid and encouragement to heresy.
On page 56, Brock distills the definitive insular liberal elite's narrative of how the insurgent conservative news network rose to dominance — by exploiting the death of thousands of Americans, of course:
"Just as the attacks of September 11 gave the Republican Party a wedge issue to pound Democrats with, [Fox News president Roger] Ailes would use the event to pound CNN. As we moved further away from the September 11 tragedy, this 'pro-American' position simply morphed into a pro-Bush position and a pro-Republican position. This is exactly what the network's conservative audience desired."
On page 84, we find Brock shedding crocodile tears over the departure of Brit Hume as Fox's managing editor. Here is what Brock writes now in the book about the man that his organization has previously accused of "falsely claiming," "falsely asserting," "smearing" and otherwise misinforming viewers:
"Though he would make controversial remarks from time of time, Hume was at heart a journalist who had made his way up the ladder in the mainstream news industry."
The aim of this disingenuous praise is, of course, to disparage Hume's successor, Bill Sammon (a former White House correspondent for The Washington Examiner). It is also to prove that Fox News is getting worse and worse all the time, because that justifies the publication of this book — or something.
The Fox Effect's sweeping characterizations provide early warnings of its quality. For example, the assertion on page 36 that President George W. Bush "was the singular leader of both the Republican Party and the conservative movement" would come as a surprise to most conservatives.
Many of them still remember No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Harriet Miers, a federal spending explosion unmatched since the days of LBJ's Great Society, and the refusal to veto bills containing thousands of Republican and Democrat earmarks for things like the infamous Bridge to Nowhere.
The authors display a similar shallowness in their many defenses of Obama. For example, "The Fox Effect" devotes an entire chapter to Fox coverage of ACORN, the left-wing group to which Obama supposedly had only "loose ties."
Set aside the fact that most of the examples used are drawn from "Fox & Friends" morning program fare and Glenn Beck's opinion show that was taken off the air last year.
The book goes much further, portraying ACORN as merely an "antipoverty group" that conducts voter registration drives in poor, mostly black, neighborhoods that are "demographically linked to the Democratic Party."
Ergo, all criticisms of ACORN are, in the authors' words, "political racism, plain and simple." The fact that 70 ACORN officials have been convicted of voter registration fraud in a dozen states in recent years — or that a 2009 House committee report suggests as many as one-third of the registrations the group generated were fraudulent — should not concern anyone.
As for Obama's ties to ACORN, Brock minimizes them. He notes that in 1992 Obama "organized an ACORN-affiliated get-out-the-vote campaign in Chicago," he "later worked as part of a team of lawyers" on a case for ACORN, and "he spoke at two ACORN training sessions in the 1990s."
In fact, Obama was executive director of the ACORN-affiliated Project Vote in 1992. His 2008 presidential campaign paid $800,000 to an ACORN-linked contractor.
And Obama himself put it this way at an ACORN gathering in 2007: "I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work."
Perhaps Media Matters should scold Brock for falsely asserting that Obama lied.
Toward the end of the beatification of ACORN, Brock quotes then-California Attorney General Jerry Brown saying this of James O'Keefe's infamous pimp-and-prostitute scam:
"The evidence illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor."
Among the facts Brock left on the cutting room floor in his recounting of the affair was an audio clip of Dan Lagstein, ACORN's lead San Diego organizer, speaking to a Democratic Club meeting in El Cajon and saying: "The attorney general is a political animal as well. Every bit of communication we've had with [Brown] has suggested that fault will be found with the people that did the video and not with ACORN."
So, Brock's book is based on a flawed premise, confuses news and opinion programming, and misrepresents major players. There may yet be a book of legitimate criticism of Fox News, but "The Fox Effect" isn't it.
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