Networks support of Fox News harbinger of change?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Americans with a stake in the future of a free press as the counterweight to tyrannical government can be cheered by a major White House vs. free press fiasco last week.
We refer to the networks defying the White House and rallying behind Fox News to overturn President Obama’s try at excluding Fox from pool coverage of Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg’s news conference.
ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN all refused to attend their own pool interviews, if Fox News was ostracized.
The White House caved and Fox got its interview. In the process, however, Obama’s heretofore media smiley face took on a five o’clock shadow.
Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, called Fox’s output “opinion journalism masquerading as news.”
Fox is “not a news organization,” said Senior White House advisor David Axelrod to George Stephanopoulos on ABC. The other networks ought not treat them as one, he said, adding: “We’re not going to treat them that way.”
Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, offered similar advice, saying Obama did not want CNN and the others following up on any Fox leads.
Translation: We don’t care what Fox’s investigative reporters learn about anything detrimental to our image.
Not about some of the outrageously unqualified, if not dangerous, czars appointed by Obama.
Not about the true costs of Obamacare, when estimates from creditable sources differ by multi-billions of dollars from the White House’s.
Not about the multiple scams carried out on the taxpayers’ dimes by the group Obama once gushed over, represented, and taught, ACORN, in areas of voter registration fraud, housing corruption, and prostitution counseling, unmasked by journalists, on how to run an underage ring and cheat the IRS in the process.
The president has a talent for evading responsibility. On this one, however, he cannot vote “absent.” He can tell Americans, as we predict he soon will, “It wasn’t me. It was others in my administration.” But it was, and is, him. And we think more in the media are coming to understand.
A number of commentators, not just Fox’s, said the White House’s interference with the pool violated decades of tradition and possibly the law.
The U.S. Supreme Court decades ago sanctioned the legitimacy of pool coverage. The reasoning was that modern media of that day was adding reporters and commentators so fast it would be impossible for all to gather for major events. Thus the pool was born.
The networks’ support of Fox News is only a peg to support our guess that a sea change might be taking place in newsroom attitudes.
To have that happen will be akin to turning around an aircraft carrier, so deep runs the welfare state liberalism ingrained in journalism schools and the teaching ranks.
A creed from the days when the media was not so universally taken with one political position urged editors and reporters to, “Walk down the middle of the street and shoot the lights out on both sides.”
Young reporters being what they are — and Obama’s lock-step Washington being so rife with street lights begging to be shot out — it could happen again.
It has to stir young investigative juices that two young journalists – a woman reporter and a cameraman – could so easily engage ACORN’s advice on setting up a house of prostitution and shielding the profits of white slaving young women from Mexico.
What reporter pretending to be a prostitute wouldn’t leap over her tape recorder to hear paid staff of an organization funded with millions of federal dollars advise her how to set up a whorehouse and then get around the IRS by burying the profits in a tin can in her backyard?
Beyond his charisma, Barack Obama’s biggest advantage has been the evolution of an uncritical, fawning press.
It is odd that he has decided now to replace the smiley face with one more sinister. It is odder that so many of his followers seem not to grasp the fragile line a free press draws against tyranny.
October 30, 2009
