Breathtaking cluelessness
Sometimes somebody in government says something so utterly and mind-bogglingly clueless that one stops and wonders how our the mail gets delivered. Never was this more the case than with an interview given by White House Communications Director Anita Dunn on CNN as part of the Administration's ongoing war with Fox News.
Savor the utter failure to grasp the essentials of the topic manifest in the following quotation: "What I think is fair to say about Fox -- and certainly it's the way we view it -- is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party. They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is."
Two things. First, whatever criticism one might be disposed to offer concerning the objectivity of Fox News, a compelling case can be made that CNN- and ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, and the mainstream media generally- are at least as much a wing of the Democratic Party, and for the same reasons. And secondly... well, let's let Fox News respond.
"It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming," Fox News Senior Vice President Matt Clemente replies. "It seems self-serving on their part."
Yeah. It kinda does- especially since every newspaper in America has an editorial page.
The problem comes in when opinion and news coverage melt into each other. The regularity with which this happens in the mainstream media has been a conservative talking point for at least a generation, and with good reason; upward of ninety percent of working reporters regularly vote Democratic in presidential elections. With all the ethical grounding and integrity in the world, the filters of opinion and worldview through which any journalist views the news inevitably color how he or she reports it. The trick is for a journalist to be aware of those filters, and to strive to minimize their impact on his or her reporting.
Those who see the often outrageous liberal bias in the mainstream media as an intentional plot of some kind are in pretty much awash in the same sea of naive and self-serving cluelessness as Dunn. While commentators like Glenn Beck are no more news reporters than MSNBC's... well, pretty much anybody on MSNBC, of course Fox News tilts to the Right in its news reporting. Its journalists, too, are only human, and Fox News does tend to serve as a kind of refuge for that endangered species, journalists whose personal politics are something other than hard Left.
The point Dunn misses is that even to the degree to which it does so, it doesn't even begin to compensate for the tilt to the Left reflected in news coverage by major outlets just about everywhere else.
HT: Drudge
Savor the utter failure to grasp the essentials of the topic manifest in the following quotation: "What I think is fair to say about Fox -- and certainly it's the way we view it -- is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party. They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is."
Two things. First, whatever criticism one might be disposed to offer concerning the objectivity of Fox News, a compelling case can be made that CNN- and ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, and the mainstream media generally- are at least as much a wing of the Democratic Party, and for the same reasons. And secondly... well, let's let Fox News respond.
"It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming," Fox News Senior Vice President Matt Clemente replies. "It seems self-serving on their part."
Yeah. It kinda does- especially since every newspaper in America has an editorial page.
The problem comes in when opinion and news coverage melt into each other. The regularity with which this happens in the mainstream media has been a conservative talking point for at least a generation, and with good reason; upward of ninety percent of working reporters regularly vote Democratic in presidential elections. With all the ethical grounding and integrity in the world, the filters of opinion and worldview through which any journalist views the news inevitably color how he or she reports it. The trick is for a journalist to be aware of those filters, and to strive to minimize their impact on his or her reporting.
Those who see the often outrageous liberal bias in the mainstream media as an intentional plot of some kind are in pretty much awash in the same sea of naive and self-serving cluelessness as Dunn. While commentators like Glenn Beck are no more news reporters than MSNBC's... well, pretty much anybody on MSNBC, of course Fox News tilts to the Right in its news reporting. Its journalists, too, are only human, and Fox News does tend to serve as a kind of refuge for that endangered species, journalists whose personal politics are something other than hard Left.
The point Dunn misses is that even to the degree to which it does so, it doesn't even begin to compensate for the tilt to the Left reflected in news coverage by major outlets just about everywhere else.
HT: Drudge
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