Persvrijheid Fox (was: Begin ondergang Obama)

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Henk,

Hierbij nog wat meer achtergrond informatie ;)

Groet / Cees

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joe_conason/2009/10/22/fox_versus_obama/print.html
Criticizing Fox News isn't "Nixonian." But Fox News is
Pundits are making false comparisons between Obama and Nixon. They have
no idea what they're talking about

By Joe Conason

Oct. 23, 2009 |

With outraged Washington journalists and Republican politicians crying
"Nixonian!" over the public scuffle between the Obama White House and
the Fox News Channel, what began as a mundane spat is turning into a
cosmic jest. Somewhere, Nixon himself is enjoying a mordant laugh to
hear this shrill defense of his old servant Roger Ailes, the television
wizard whose deceptive campaigning ushered him into the presidency more
than 40 years ago -- and who then became the living symbol of everything
negative and nasty in American politics during the two decades that
followed.

To understand what is going on today, it is essential to remember that
where Ailes came from, "Nixonian" was not an insult but a badge of honor
-- and seething hatred and even persecution of the press, rather than
mere criticism, was a way of life.

Whatever the merits or defects of the strategy pursued by Obama's
communications office in pushing back against Fox News, the furious
backlash inside the Beltway is badly overwrought. Mainstream defenders
of the conservative cable channel suddenly seem to be afflicted with a
strange amnesia, causing them to forget not just the numerous episodes
of partisan distortion that have permanently pocked its reputation, but
the dirty war against the press and the First Amendment that was waged
by the Nixon gang in the late '60s and early '70s. That lost memory does
a disservice to journalism and history.

In a sense, Fox News Channel has never been able to overcome its nature
as the offspring of Ailes, notoriously one of the angriest, toughest
Republican consultants in politics, and Rupert Murdoch, the ruthless
mogul whose political abuse of his news outlets became legendary long
before he entered the cable news business. The objective for Ailes, as
for Murdoch, is not fairness or balance; the objective is always to win
by whatever means necessary. That includes marketing himself and his
employees as high-minded truth-seekers and innocent victims of snotty
liberalism -- much in the mode of old Nixon.

Yet neither Ailes nor his employees can always control themselves enough
to hide their bias, as the world discovered last year when the Fox News
boss uttered a revealing quip about the man who would become president.
"[I]t is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's
true that President Bush called [Pakistan President Pervez] Musharraf
and said: 'Why can't we catch this guy?' " Ailes chortled at the annual
dinner of the Radio and Television News Directors Association as he
accepted their "First Amendment" award. His joke followed a lengthy
series of "reports" on Fox News promoting the idea that the young Obama
had attended a Muslim madrassa -- presumably to be trained for jihad --
in Indonesia.

The list of similar offenses is almost endless and, as it grows every
day, selecting the most egregious examples can be challenging. Back in
2004, the wife of Carl Cameron, the channel's top campaign reporter,
worked in the Bush reelection campaign, and Cameron himself posted
material mocking Democratic nominee John Kerry. Over the years, the
channel's news director John Moody has sent dozens of memos to the
reporting staff, often tinged with GOP talking points, meant to ensure
that whatever they produce has a pro-Republican slant.

With the advent of Glenn Beck as the prophet of protest, however, the
drumbeat of partisan paranoia on Fox News is growing much louder. The
cable channel heavily promoted the Beck-inspired Sept. 12 Tea Party
protests against the Obama administration, with highly favorable live
reports from Fox News correspondents, anchored by ... Beck himself.

In short, the Obama White House has ample reason to question whether Fox
News Channel is a news organization that can be expected to treat a
Democratic administration with fairness and balance. All they have
accomplished so far is to inflame the right-wing base and renew the
alliance of the Clinton era between right-wing media and mainstream
outlets. Pundits and producers who claim to see no difference between
their own outlets and Fox News are certainly entitled to express their
opinions (and to insult themselves and their colleagues) as they see
fit. But when they join the Fox chorus lumping Obama with Nixon, they
need to be corrected.

Over the past few days, that false comparison has been made by Ken
Rudin, the political director of National Public Radio, who called the
Obama White House "Nixonesque"; by Karl Rove, who played a bit role in
the Watergate saga as a Young Republican dirty trickster; and by Ruth
Marcus, who likened Obama to both Nixon and his attack dog Vice
President Spiro Agnew in the Washington Post -- a place where ignorance
of the true history of the Nixon era is inexcusable. (Update: Ken Rudin
emailed to make sure I saw his apology for the Nixon reference, which he
called a "bone-headed mistake;" you can read about it here.)

But ignorance is epidemic on Capitol Hill and in the capital's
newsrooms, so let's say this very simply: Nothing that Obama or any of
his aides has done or said remotely resembles the war on the press waged
by the Nixon White House until Watergate ended that administration's
assaults on the Constitution. Nobody has sent Joe Biden out to question
the patriotism of reporters and columnists who criticize the president,
as Agnew did repeatedly. And nobody has tried to intimidate the media
with obscene threats and tax audits, in the Mafia style of Nixon's
aides.

On Fox News, the aggrieved correspondents, crackpots and crybabies now
claim to be on an Obama White House "enemies list." Perhaps they mean to
use the term metaphorically, but in the Nixon White House there was an
actual list, compiled by Chuck Colson at the behest of John Dean. In
August 1971, Dean wrote a memo explaining that such a list was needed
"to maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to
be more active in their opposition to our administration." This meant
using "the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."

Among those present on the original enemies list (which later morphed
into a much longer second list) was Daniel Schorr, the eminent reporter
who then worked for CBS News and now provides sage commentary on NPR.
(Perhaps he can have a word with Rudin.) So Fox should stop whining
about Nixon until a similar memo turns up bearing the name of Rahm
Emanuel or Patrick Gaspard.

The Nixon gang began to go after journalists within months after the old
reprobate took office and never stopped. In 1969, Dean ordered the
Internal Revenue Service to initiate an audit of Newsday investigative
reporter and editor Bob Greene, to avenge a series he had written
probing the business deals of Nixon crony Bebe Rebozo. Then came the
enemies list, which included Schorr and other journalists who were
scheduled for similar harassment. During the 1972 campaign, Nixon aides
hired Lucianne Goldberg (later the confidante of Lewinsky taper Linda
Tripp) to spy on reporters aboard the press plane of Democratic nominee
George McGovern. For a thousand dollars a week, she posed as a reporter
for the Women's News Service, gathering salacious gossip for Nixon,
mostly about who was sleeping with the stewardesses.

Lucianne's buffoonish spy caper only serves as a counterpoint to the far
more sinister assaults on the Washington Post, which mounted in thuggish
excess as the Watergate scandal unfolded. Marcus and her misguided
colleagues could benefit from the educational account of those year
provided by the late Katharine Graham in her memoir, "Personal History":

        The investigation of such a tangled web of crime, money, and
        mischief was made much harder given the unveiled threats and
        harassment by a president and his administration. Bearing the
        full brunt of presidential wrath is always disturbing. Sometimes
        I wondered if we could survive four more years of this kind of
        strain.


The threats most famously included Attorney General John Mitchell's
screaming warning to Bob Woodward that "Katie Graham is going to get her
tit caught in a big, fat wringer" if the Post continued to investigate
Watergate. But the campaign against the Post went much further. Nixon
tried to persuade Richard Mellon Scaife (yes, the billionaire nemesis of
Clinton) to buy the Post. On the White House tapes, he told aides that
the Post would have "damnable problems" getting FCC license renewals for
its Florida broadcasting properties -- and then two Nixon business
cronies challenged the Post licenses, costing the company millions of
dollars and precipitating a fall in its stock. Friends with
administration ties warned Graham of possible violence against her.

Through those years, Graham held up bravely under incredible pressure
until her paper triumphed. She is gone, but we all still owe her a debt
of gratitude for courage under truly Nixonian fire -- along with the
editors and reporters she supported. The bogus comparisons between those
days and now are a dishonor to her memory and to the tradition of public
service that she came to represent.

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