Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?
Washington Post
By Howell Raines
March 14, 2010One 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? Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals…
Whatever its shortcomings, journalism under those standards aspired to produce an honest account of social, economic and political events. It bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality. Now, it is precisely our long-held norms that cripple our ability to confront Fox’s journalism of perpetual assault. I’m confident that many old-schoolers are too principled to appear on the network, choosing silence over being used; when Fox does trot out a house liberal as a punching bag, the result is a parody of reasoned news formats…Why can’t American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher’s political career, with the expectation that she would open the nation’s airwaves to Murdoch’s cable channels. Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post… For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party…
In defending Glenn Beck on ABC, Ailes described him as something like Fox’s political id, rather than its whole personality. It is somehow fitting, then, that Sigmund Freud’s great-grandson, Matthew Freud, might help put mainstream American journalism back in touch with its collective superego. This year, Freud, a public relations executive in London and Murdoch’s son-in-law, condemned Ailes in an interview with the New York Times, saying he was "ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard" of proper journalistic standards… 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.
Howell Raines is a former executive editor of the New York Times and the author of "The One That Got Away: A Memoir."
I say hooray for Howell Raines! Someone finally calling the Fox News’ hand. But then I read this from my favorite blogger:
Tim F made this point implicitly, but it deserves to be made explicitly. Do you really think Howell Raines, the editor who oversaw Judy Miller’s Iraq War propaganda, is really the one to exhort journalists to call out Fox for its false journalism?… I’ll admit that when I first suggested that Judy Miller was not engaging in journalism when Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby outed Valerie Plame to her, I wished that other journalists would have the courage to acknowledge that what she was doing was not journalism. It would have been nice, then, to have a column like this, calling on journalists to expose disinformation in the guise of journalism.
But really. Does Howell Raines have no sense of irony? After all, it’d be a pity if Raines missed the irony of the fact that Judy Miller now works for Fox News.
Glenn Beck isn’t Fox’s Political Id, he’s part of a Brain Cancer that’s dead set on eating up our country. Beck is fond of bringing up Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Nazi Party as being the biggest threats to America in the past. But I’m thinking that Fox News is running a close third, and it is now.
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