Fox News is a Republican tool. The White House has now officially figured that out.
Looks as if the White House has decided that a “news” organization head by a career Republican operative and devoted to echoing Republican talking points should be treated as part of the opposition and not as a news outlet. About time.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
I appreciate that the White House is showing some teeth, attacking Fox News is pretty much a zero risk strategy at this point. I have a bit of a problem though with Dunn complimenting CNN at the same time she criticizes Fox. Granted, calling CNN a news organization isn't so much a compliment as much as it is a matter of fact statement. But the context of the statement makes it come off as a compliment. But what happens when CNN participates in some of the same type of sensationalistic and misleading so called journalism that Fox has mastered (e.g. see ACORN last fall)?
My worst prediction as a blogger here (http://www.samefacts.com/2006/05/uncategorized/rupert-stavro-murdoch/) was that Murdoch would ditch the Republicans as sure losers before the US presidential election, as he did the Tories in Britain in 1997. Instead, after overtures to both HRC and Obama, he apparently decided that it still paid to be the leading voice of the losing side. The hardball White House strategy is to go after Murdoch, not his employees. Antitrust on media concentrations, anybody? Requiring free political advertising on TV? The Murdoch empire's big worry at the moment seems to be the impact of internet news on the newspaper franchises, see son James' attack on the BBC's website. Newspapers as a class may need help, but don't make any special concessions to help News Corp and the WSJ. Remember, Murdoch doesn't really have any politics beyond maximising his influence and working off an outside Aussie cringe (= inferiority complex) by trashing every establishment value and institution in sight.
Reality-based community? Heh. Perhaps you never noticed that CNN or NBC is just as annoying to conservatives as Fox is to progressives. But that's okay, because they're telling the truth – because they're on your side. By definition.
Mike,
CNN is not terribly partisan. They've got lots of problems and blind spots, but they're not partisan.
The evening line-up on MSNBC is fiercely partisan, I'll give you that. Although their morning lineup is dominated by its eponymous host, a former Republican Congressman who's still a moderate conservative, and nominally a partisan Republican – he' just not enthused by the craziness of Bachmann, Palin, Joe Wilson (R-SC), Beck, Limbaugh, etcetera, etcetera.
More importantly, and even leaving aside the overt opinionators like Beck and O'Reilly or like Olbermann and Maddow, Fox News lies. It does so almost constantly. It's really quite breathtaking how dishonest, and how partisan, their news updates and their standard output is. MSNBC may cheerlead for the Dems (at least in the evening), but it's not divorced from reality in anything like the same way.