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As Scarecrow writes, ABC’s This Week took Fox under its wing yesterday, giving Laura Ingraham an additional forum to spread misinformation. Most members of the panel (which also included Al Hunt, George Will, John Podesta and George Stephanopoulos) wrung their hands over the Obama administration’s monstrous mistreatment of Fox. Al Hunt questioned the wisdom of “picking an alley fight with Roger Ailes” and George Stephanopoulos suggested Obama might have to “make peace” with Fox at some point.
As Scarecrow notes, even as the group was defending Fox against that ogreish Obama bunch, Laura Ingraham was reminding us why Fox is a partisan front. She preposterously suggested that the Obama administration sees Fox as more of a threat than terrorist groups, as it criticizes Fox more than real enemies of the nation. That was too much even for George, and he tried to give her a chance to “walk back” her claim, but Ingraham stuck to her guns, saying that she hadn’t seen the Obama administration use a coordinated strategy to criticize Al Qaeda, though it had done so when it came to Fox.
This is too idiotic to take seriously, but Ingraham was making a clear point, as Scarecrow also observed: She and her colleagues at Fox see themselves as being at war with the Obama administration.
Ingraham played the victim, suggesting, as others have, that the Obama administration is making Fox into a Nixonian enemy. Al Hunt noted that he could remember what it was like when Nixon really identified political enemies: it meant criminal wiretapping and auditing tax returns of political opponents. Ingraham wouldn’t give an inch, insisting that Obama might do this to his political opponents too. (Based on her logic, President Obama might also order a break-in at Republican National Committee headquarters–that’s the fun thing about presenting baseless hypotheticals, there’s no way to be proven wrong.)
This is full-fledged, foaming delusion. Laura Ingraham and others at Fox and on the right can pretend that the Obama administration is coming to get them, as Nixon once did with to those on his enemies list, but it’s simply not so, as Media Matters has explained. Nobody’s saying Laura Ingraham and the other anti-Obama partisans on Fox don’t have the right to smear Obama to their heart’s delight, but it would be nice if ABC and others pointed out how the anti-Obama attacks are disconnected from reality.
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The thing is, they’re very much afraid that Obama will succeed. He’s making an example of the worst offender as a way to shove the other news orgs away from emulating FOX.
I’m sure you’re right. Fox has gotten used to smearing and lying with impunity–they must be a bit surprised to get called on it.
Totally right. This has got the village scared.
I thought George Will came out as close as he could to insulting Faux. He referred to the Obama administrations focus on slapping Faux news upside the head asking “why silence people who are not in the business of journalism”
Will’s response was basically why waste your time on responding to non news outlets. I thought he slapped Faux down.
What I wanted to ask all of them was what the hell is the Obama administration supposed to do when demons like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh stir the hate mongrels up? What do you do when Obama is receiving 400 more death threats than any other President and Beck and Limbaugh are stirring up the hate.
Will also smacked Cheney down by saying that he appreciated that the OBama administration was “dithering” trying to decide whether to send in more troops to Afghanistan. I thought George Will verbally kicked the Bush administration in the guts for knowingly feeding the public the false pre war intelligence and sending American soldiers off to a war based on a “pack of lies” Then Will basically said that marijuana should be legalized and taxed.
Were we watching the same program?
Ingram was a horse’s ass and everyone knew it.
I hope viewers saw Ingraham’s points as completely baseless, but I didn’t think the panel made that clear. as I noted, Stephanopoulos encouraged the idea that Fox is embattled by suggesting Obama needs to “make peace” with Fox, and Al Hunt suggested the Obama admin was making a mistake in calling out Fox. Al Hunt did counter Ingraham on her Nixon comparison, as I noted, but I’d like to see something stronger–when Ingraham responded that we don’t know that Obama won’t start breaking criminal laws to spy on and retaliate against his opponents, it would be nice for someone to call that out for the nonsense it is.
In terms of George Will, I think the “silencing” point is misleading. No one is silencing Fox, the Obama administration isn’t trying to put them off the air. But I’m glad that Will recognizes Fox is not in the business of journalism. I did appreciate Will’s comment re: “dithering”.
I completely agree with your question: what is the Obama admin supposed to do when right wing media and elected Republicans make outrageous statements about Obama being like Hitler, a fascist, Nazi, etc. I think one reasonable first step is for the Obama admin to observe the obvious: Fox is a partisan organization, not a news group.
Never hear people bring up these threats
you’re quite right–I think they don’t feel comfortable talking about the crazy Nazi/fascist comparisons because it’s so over the top. But by ignoring or downplaying this, they’re giving the right wing and Republicans a pass.
All I am hearing is Journalist/talking heads all suggesting that the OBama administration’s attempts to slap down Fox are a waste of time. Have been really surprised that I have not heard one person bring up the astronomical increases of threats on Obama’s life and how Rush, Beck etc fuel the whack shits and their often race based hatred.
How would George Will, others who suggest that attacking or dismissing these strategies that fuel this hatred is a waste of time. Do they think by ignoring these inflammatory statements they will just go away and not fuel the hatred out there?
They need to slap this kind of incitement down
Steve Benen at Washington Monthly has the video showing Laura Ingraham making the preposterous suggestion that the Obama admin sees Fox News as a more of an enemy than terrorists: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_10/020614.php
One of the standard strategies for “cult” organizations is to make your following believe that its them against the world–so they make sure there are enemies to attack them in order to keep the faithful believing in them. You really can’t fight this, in terms of the already converted, because they’ve already drunk the kool-aid. But what about trying to prevent others from being sucked into the cult? Particularly when they get defenders outside of the cult who somehow view a kinship with it?
Fox gets cut a lot of slack by the other news organizations for being one of them–the old “we’re all in this together” mentality. There are still people on Fox who came with their own credibility and that cred was transferred to the organization, and it does cover non-political news with a fair amount of objectivity. But anything that smacks of politics gets so skewed it isn’t even on the planet anymore. Journalists have got to come to the conclusion that it is not in their interest to support this behavior in terms of camaraderie and journalistic freedom because it just isn’t journalism anymore. But you can’t do that by direct attacks–as exasperating as that is for us on the other side.
The only way to accomplish this is by painstakingly taking down every lie by showing its lack of basis in reality in the hope that you can destroy the messenger by proving that its messages are always false. Frustrating and tiresome, but since we see that direct attacks “gather all the wagons in a circle”, it’s probably best to wait for Fox to straggle from the group and shoot it down every time it does so that the “group” is not endangered.