Media Matters: Damage control week
It's been a bumpy week for America's premier Republican cable news channel. Internal strife on various fronts required constant attention, but so did the assorted scandals that pricked up this week involving some of Fox News' very favorite Republican candidates, requiring the network to play some strenuous defense.
And, of course, whenever Fox News is in trouble, you can pretty well guarantee that Glenn Beck will be at the center of it. Beck was the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile last week which reported that his peculiar on-air behavior and relentless hucksterism have started to rankle his slightly less disreputable colleagues. Foremost among them is Fox News president Roger Ailes, who has apparently grown weary of the fact that Beck uses Fox's airwaves to promote his own, non-Fox ventures and line his own pockets. (You can understand why Ailes would be upset -- after all, Beck has reportedly cost the network millions of dollars in ad revenue.)
Meanwhile, Fox News' "journalists" have apparently decided to make Beck the scapegoat for the network's steadily eroding credibility. The Times reported that several of them "complained that Beck's antics are embarrassing Fox, that his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to present itself as a legitimate news outlet" -- a humorous complaint, given that Fox News' "journalists" are just as capable of legitimacy-killing antics.
But everyone knows that Beck was and is a troublemaker. Less well-known was Fox News' apparently longstanding problem with gender discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against the network for penalizing reporter Catherine Herridge because she once complained about gender and age discrimination at the network. This followed the 2006 lawsuit against a Fox VP who "used obscene terms to describe women and their body parts," and Bill O'Reilly's reported games of falafel phone tag. Regarding the Herridge affair, a Fox spokesperson responded in the network's typically measured fashion by blaming the whole thing on President Obama.
Then there's Karl Rove, whose presence at Fox News has never really screamed "ethical." He's one of the raft of former Bush officials who landed at Fox News as their administration slowly crumbled and limped out of office, and the network really wanted us to believe that he -- the most infamous Republican political operative since Lee Atwater -- was an independent election analyst. But then Rove formed American Crossroads, a sort of shadow RNC that works doggedly to elect Republicans and is funded almost exclusively by a handful of Texas billionaires, and any pretense of ethics or good journalistic practice was washed away.
And -- wouldn't you know it? -- Democratic politicians and independent campaign finance groups are calling for the IRS to audit American Crossroads, suspecting that the non-profit group might be misusing their tax-exempt status. In response to this development, Fox News called on Dana Perino, Rove's one-time Bush administration colleague and current Fox News colleague, to defend her buddy Karl and his pet political project, labeling the calls for investigation "politically motivated" and "political interference that is inappropriate, possibly unlawful."
Tending to your own house is difficult enough, but cleaning up your friends' messes at the same time is a real feat, and Fox gave it their best shot in a week full of Republican candidates struggling with controversy. First up was California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who was alleged to have knowingly employed an undocumented immigrant. Fox has both an ideological and financial stake in Whitman -- remember, News Corp. gave $1 million to the Republican Governors' Association -- so they went to bat for their candidate, reporting that she is the "victim of a last-minute smear campaign" and "dirty tricks." Fox News' Megyn Kelly dismissed the controversy by saying "there is no case here," and Sean Hannity went so far as to praise Whitman for her "complete and due diligence."
No sooner had they finished attempting to rehab Whitman's image than another GOPer was embroiled in something of a brouhaha, this time New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who threatened New York Post reporter Frederic Dicker during a heated confrontation. This was a real doozy, and not just because Fox rushed to Paladino's defense. To boost Paladino, they had to lob some intramural attacks at Dicker -- the Post is a fellow Murdoch-owned media outlet. Gretchen Carlson of Fox & Friends said that "it almost seemed like" Dicker "was working for" Paladino's opponent, Andrew Cuomo. David Asman wondered aloud if "Americans are going to be cheering the politicians taking on the journalist."
Meanwhile, Paladino sat down for interviews with three separate Fox News hosts to defend himself and try to defuse the issue. Hannity, one of the lucky interviewers, said of Paladino: "I love his confrontational style. He's refreshingly honest."
All this raises some interesting questions. Is there anything a Republican candidate can do that will cause Fox News to abandon them? Is there anything that Fox News can do that will impel the network to apologize or -- at the very least -- not lash out wildly at critics? Are there any standards at all? Any lines that can't be crossed?
The answer seems more and more to be "no," and that's as depressing as it is remarkable.
Shine on you crazy D'Souza
There's no real reason anyone should be talking about Dinesh D'Souza's latest book, The Roots of Obama's Rage. All things being equal, the book shouldn't even exist; one would like to think that no publisher worth their salt would consider for a moment publishing such avirulently nativist collection of lies.
But, of course, all things aren't equal. In fact, things have become pretty absurd, and as a consequence D'Souza's book is a hot topic of conversation. The reason that this ridiculous person was able to publish such a ridiculous book is that there's an entire ridiculous publishing house committed to cranking out right-wing garbage of this stripe. The reason that ridiculous book sells is because there's an entire ridiculous right-wing infrastructure of book clubs and magazines that buy copies in bulk and resell them at drastically reduced rates. The ridiculous author of this ridiculous book is able to communicate with broad swaths of America because there's an entire ridiculous cable network that will put him on TV without so much as a hint of criticism.
It's tempting to look at this and brush it off. After all, it's just another example of the right-wing subculture telling each other what they want to hear and reveling in epistemic closure'scomforting, suffocating embrace.
But then D'Souza popped up in The Washington Post.
The Post cleared space on their op-ed page for a guy who argues, in all seriousness, that the first black president of the United States is on a quest to drain the country's economic and military power in order to fulfill the ambitions of the "anti-colonial" father he met only once as a young child. This was after Forbes had to publish corrections to the article D'Souza wrote for them and dispatch a post-publication fact-checker.
So why did they run it? Here's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt defending the move: "D'Souza's theory has sparked a great deal of commentary, from potential presidential candidates as well as from commentators on our own pages." The "potential presidential candidate" is Newt Gingrich, who loved D'Souza's theory; and the Post commentators areEugene Robinson, Richard Cohen, and Jonathan Capehart, all of whom called Gingrich a lunatic for promoting D'Souza. Hiatt's argument is essentially: "People are talking about it -- who cares if it's right?"
It's this sort of passive attitude towards factual accuracy that allows fringe hacks like D'Souza to break into the mainstream. The Post has an obligation to keep their readers informed, not to reprint the intellectually fraudulent trash Newt Gingrich finds interesting.
