Outfoxing The Spin
Posted 10/19/2009 07:57 PM ET
The Media: Now we know why the Democrats who run Washington declared war on Fox News. The feisty network is spoiling their policy of controlling Americans' diet of information.
When Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., who earlier this year was set to be the Obama administration's secretary of commerce, warned on CNN on Sunday the U.S. was on track toward "banana republic" status, he was talking about "throwing debt on top of debt" to the tune of a trillion dollars or more a year.
But another facet of banana republics is their rulers' control of the press. As in the make-believe African "Republic of Ishmaelia" of Evelyn Waugh's novel, "Scoop," the government exploits journalists' laziness, cowardice and susceptibility to bribery and flattery. In the end, what's called "reporting" ranges from state-sanctioned disinformation to the correspondents' own entirely made-up tales.
Democrats' attempts to taint Fox News as an illegitimate journalistic entity are being spearheaded by White House Communications Director Anita Dunn. WorldNetDaily recently posted an Ishmaelia-like video of Dunn speaking at a conference last January.
In it, Dunn boasted that the president's successful election strategy focused "on making the press cover what we were saying ... so it was very much 'we controlled it' as opposed to 'the press controlled it.'" According to Dunn, "very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control."
Does such bragging embarrass the press corps? Well, think back to NBC News reporter Lee Cowan grinning like a teenage schoolgirl coming out of a Justin Timberlake concert.
In January of 2008, interviewed by NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams, Cowan gushed that "from the reporter's point of view it's almost hard to remain objective" about candidate Obama, "because it's infectious, energy like that. It sort of goes against your core to say that as a reporter, but the crowds have gotten so much bigger, his energy has gotten stronger, he feeds off that, and ... he stays at this sort of high-octane level all night long."
You can almost feel Cowan's "objective" goose bumps. Similarly, MSNBC's Chris Matthews last year described the "thrill going up my leg" the then-candidate caused.
And just who are these people playing the media like a well-tuned Stradivarius? Fox News' Glenn Beck last week showed video of Anita Dunn telling high school students in June that one of her "favorite political philosophers" was Chairman Mao, the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, whose Communist regime liquidated at least 70 million, dwarfing both Stalin and Hitler.
Presumably, Dunn and Mao don't have much in common except making silencing their critics a priority.
why use facts?
j/k