Dangerous talk

You've gotta love the way that Durbin misses the point in this article from The Hill...

“The point is this, and it really needs to be made: Fox is not just another television network,” said Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), a close Obama ally. “Fox has become the official/semi-official voice for the Republican Party, in opposition to the president. And I think calling them out is the only way to delegitimize them as political propaganda.”

Asked if he would follow Obama’s lead and boycott Fox, Durbin said, “I don’t know that I’d never go on Fox, but I will tell you that when I go on, it’s with a clear understanding that this is not a news network. This is the closest thing to the Republican Party’s official voice on television.”

Okay, let's stipulate something here: Fox leans to the right. But (and you can see where this is going from a zillion miles away, unless you took a wrong turn and ended up here from a lefty blog) ABCCBSNBCCNNNYTWAPOLATETC,ETC,ETC are the voices of the Democrats. Durbin, while I'm sure he misses this point, doesn't realize that when Obama went on all the other networks' Sunday shows, actually legitimized conservative concerns about liberal bias in the MSM.

The thing is, I don't really have a problem with that bias. No, really. As Sen. Judd Gregg says, “This is the way our system works. You go back to Abraham Lincoln’s time, and the major papers in this country were basically political papers. They weren’t reporting papers. That’s our tradition, and it’s part of the freedom of the press.”
 
He's right. If you go back in history, there were papers that were for Dems and papers that appealed to GOPers. Then, somewhere along the line, the idea that news outlets had to be "objective" slipped into news. Coincidentally (or not), this happened along with the rise of Journalism Schools and an influx of baby boomers into newsrooms.

I've rambled far too long here, but the thing is that "objectivity" in news is a sham. Until we get robots reporting the news, it will always be a sham.

Also, would the White House be attacking Fox News if it was a piddly little operation that nobody cared about? Nope. There's a hunger out there for conservative-leaning news (yeah, I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know) so it's disturbing that Obama and his pals are singling out this outlet.

They're not interested in a revival of the Fairness Doctrine, especially as far as talk radio is concerned, right?

Yeah.

Posted by: Sean M. at 02:17 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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