The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

Howell Raines is the disgraced former editor of the New York Times who was forced resigned due to his involvement in the Jayson Blair scandal. He was responsible for the “diversity above all” atmosphere that inhabited the newsroom at the Times that allowed Jayson Blair to be continually promoted despite his shoddy reporting. Raines also quite clearly failed to do his job as an editor and failed to pick up on the fact that Blair was embellishing most of his stories.

But despite his obviously failings as an editor and his role in creating one of the biggest journalistic scandals in recent history, Raines still thinks that he comment with authority on the state of media in America today. In a column in the Washington Post, Raines goes after Fox News for its coverage of the healthcare issue. Here is the opening paragrah:

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

I think a better question would be who hasn’t tried to blow the whistle on Fox News? The only point to MSNBC’s existence (which ironically evolved from a network Roger Ailes founded) seems to be to bash Fox News. Not to mention the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and just about every other major newspaper in the country runs a hit piece on Fox or one of its anchors on a pretty much a weekly basis. Oh and if you want to talk about propaganda campaigns, why not talk about the slobbering love affair that was the mainstream media’s relationship with the Obama campaign in 2008?

The American people and most of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change. Yet congressional Republicans have managed effective campaigns against health-care changes favored variously by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. Now Fox News has given the party of Lincoln a free ride with its repetition of the unexamined claim that today’s Republican leadership really does want to overhaul health care — if only the effort could conform to Mitch McConnell’s ideas on portability and tort reform.

Healthcare was not the dominant issue in all those elections and those presidents weren’t elected simply to reform healthcare. Anybody with any sense of American political history in the 20th Century would know that. Nice try changing history Raines.

My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox’s financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes’s proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him. (Remember his ridiculing of one early anchor, Paula Zahn, as being inferior to a “dead raccoon” in ratings potential when she dared defect to CNN?) It’s as if we have surrendered the sword of verifiable reportage and bought the idea that only “elites” are interested in information free of partisan poppycock.

Having watched Paula Zahn’s show on both CNN and Fox, I can say that is definitely a proven fact that a dead racoon is more interesting and could garner better ratings.

As for Fox’s campaign against the Obama administration, perhaps the only traditional network star to put Ailes on the spot, at least a little, has been his friend, the venerable Barbara Walters, who was hosting ABC’s Sunday morning talk show. More accurately, she allowed another guest, Arianna Huffington, to belabor Ailes recently about his biased coverage of Obama. Ailes countered that he should be judged as a producer of ratings rather than a journalist — audience is his only yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news department whose raison d’etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation’s political discourse.

Raines conveniently fails to mention that Huffington is an unabashed liberal who runs a left-wing news website whose “raison d’etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation’s political discourse”. Naturally she is going to attack someone who she views as competition. Not to mention that Walters is also a frequent guest on Fox, especially on O’Reilly’s show.

I also have no doubt that Ailes is in the ratings business before the political business. If left-wingers like Olbermann and Maddow could pull the ratings they would be on Fox. But instead they are stuck getting their asses beat by their competitors on Fox because their shows suck.

The conclusion:

As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.

So what would the fuck would you call journalism Mr. Raines? Continually promoting a reporter who obviously was fabricating many of his stories simply because he was black? Compromising sensitive national security programs while you keep quiet about your own reporters being kidnapped in Afghanistan? Displaying an incredible amount of bias towards conservative and Republican political figures? If thats your version of journalism, than I guess the New York Times is the most pure journalistic institution in the country.

The fact that the Washington Post would print trash like this written by a hack like Raines says a lot about the state of “America’s old-school news organizations”. They are in their death-throes, but they refuse to admit it.

Category: Liberals suck, Media