OK people. We need to discuss the following:
A liberal’s defense of Fox News
By Susan Estrich
LOS ANGELES –
I work for Fox News as a commentator. I say whatever I want. I’m the blonde on the left, figuratively and literally - the one who’s usually smiling because it’s TV, not the Supreme Court or Congress, and I find civility more effective in any event.
Besides, why shouldn’t I be smiling? Prior to working for Fox, I worked for ABC and NBC, spent a lot of time at CNN, and almost ended up at CBS. I worked for a bunch of local stations in Los Angeles and had a talk-radio show at KABC for six years. In other words, I’m fortunate enough to have been around, and Fox News is the best place I’ve ever worked.
I’ve come to expect the jabs at Fox News - because being a liberal, I get more than most. I work there in part because, six or seven years ago, they offered me a better deal than NBC at the time; and because, as a feminist and a Democrat, I think it’s particularly important to have a dialogue with people who aren’t already members of the same choir - that’s the way we will ultimately have to win elections.
I also work there because of my respect for Roger Ailes, the man who created it, and hired me, and to whom I am extremely loyal for reasons having nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with integrity. The jabs have gotten stronger with success. No surprise there. When you get to No. 1 as fast and as impressively as Fox News has, it’s a bull’s-eye, and Mr. Ailes would be the last person in the world to expect his competitors to go gently.
But things have taken a personal turn in the last week or so, as the targets have shifted from the institution as a whole to the individuals within it. The criticisms have gotten personal, the tone has changed, the volume is up, and the value is down. Neil Cavuto? Brian Wilson? Under attack by a Washington press corps for not probing enough on Iraq (Cavuto) and being too tough on Howard Dean (Wilson)? Give me a break.
Mr. Cavuto, a Fox News anchor, sat down to do an interview with George Bush last week on his business show. He didn’t discuss Iraq. Cavuto doesn’t cover Iraq. As far as I know, he had nothing new to ask him, nothing new to add, and no important new question to pose. In fact, the president had nothing new to say on the topic. There was no news to be made on Iraq. So Cavuto didn’t use the opportunity either to beat up on the president or to let him say something we’d heard a hundred times. Instead, he asked him questions he didn’t know the answer to, where he might get an answer he hadn’t already heard.
For this, he’s been summarily beaten up by the press corps - the same one that still can’t figure out why it got it all wrong about those weapons of mass destruction that justified the war.
Then there’s Brian Wilson’s great sin. In his case, the problem wasn’t not asking a question, but trying too hard to ask tough ones of the Senate minority leader and the party chairman who’d joined together to make it look as if there was no problem when there very obviously was.
The Dean charge is, of course, the more serious one, particularly since the party chairman has taken to attacking Fox News. There certainly is disagreement among Democrats as to whether party leaders such as Joe Biden and John Edwards should have gone public with the obvious criticism that Dean had gone too far in calling Republicans a party of white Christians who don’t work.
But I’m hard-pressed to think of anybody who’ll tell you privately that in the midst of debates about such issues as Social Security and the deficits, it’s a good idea for the party leader to be turning himself into the issue by engaging in class and religious warfare.
This is precisely what congressional leaders and Dean agreed Dean wouldn’t do when he became party chair. He was supposed to leave the message to them. Because Dean hadn’t done so and had been criticized for it by two possible presidential candidates - neither of whom is even a conservative - Sen. Harry Reid was trying to put a perennial good face on a bad situation, while Brian Wilson was trying to puncture it.
And that’s what the press is supposed to do.
Asked to respond to Vice President Cheney’s comments about him to Fox’s Sean Hannity, Dean said: "My view is that Fox News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party, and I don’t comment on Fox News."
Three times as many people watch Fox every day as watch CNN. There were certainly times during the last campaign where I disagreed with decisions made by young Fox producers. But without exception, every time I raised an issue, I won. The joke was that I would tell them to set their stopwatches and transfer me to Ailes, so they could time how long it would take me to get their decisions reversed.
It never came to that, but everyone understood the commitment not to make decisions that would even give the appearance that Dean so cavalierly bandies about.
Is Fox News different from the other places I’ve worked? Sure. But all of the rest were pretty much alike, which is the larger point that Dean ignores.
Dear Susan Estrich:
You and I have never met, but I suspect you know who I am. I’m the OTHER blonde on the left - literally, not figuratively. I’m the woman in OUTFOXED who used you as an example of a Fox staple, the faux liberal. Ring a bell?
So I read your defense of Fox, and I have a few comments.
How much did Roger Ailes pay for your soul? How much does a conscience go for on the open market these days? I realize that your lifestyle is expensive - those Hollywood plastic surgeons don’t do charity facelifts, after all - but wouldn’t you have been better off calling a madame that specializes in middle-aged call girls (uh, women) and peddling your ass for money? I think that becoming a literal whore would have allowed you to stay truer to your feminist principles than being Fox’s "liberal" Uncle Tom.
So you’re buddies with Roger Ailes. Excuse me, but isn’t he the same Roger Ailes who played a part in sinking the campaign of your candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988, by resorting to crude race-baiting and demagoguery? This is what you say about your buddy Roger:
I also work there because of my respect for Roger Ailes, the man who created it, and hired me, and to whom I am extremely loyal for reasons having nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with integrity. The jabs have gotten stronger with success. No surprise there. When you get to No. 1 as fast and as impressively as Fox News has, it’s a bull’s-eye, and Mr. Ailes would be the last person in the world to expect his competitors to go gently.
Here’s what this paragon of integrity did to YOUR candidate, Susan:
The GOP threw everything at Dukakis. They attacked him for mental problems (John McCain, are you listening?); his veto of a Massachusetts bill requiring public but not private school teachers to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; his "lax" furlough program; his membership in the ACLU; the filthy Boston Harbor (supposed proof that the "Massachusetts miracle" was a scam); and his refusal to support the death penalty, even for CNN’s Bernard Shaw, who posed a difficult question about the issue in a presidential debate. This was carefully designed helter-skelter -- there was no pattern, but the bottom line was, this guy is not like the rest of us.
Republicans also attacked Dukakis for allowing a weekend furlough for a convicted black felon, Willie Horton, who had attacked and raped a white woman -- under a program begun by Dukakis’ Republican predecessor. "When we’re through, people are going to think that Willie Horton is Michael Dukakis’ nephew," said political consultant Floyd Brown of Americans for Bush. By making the spot, Brown’s group allowed Bush and Ailes to deny that they had hatched it. (Brown’s group would later pump up the Whitewater pseudo-scandal against the Clintons, once again sucking in the press corps.)
You know, it must have seemed like old times in 2004, watching Ailes and his minions push the Swift Boat Vets for "Truth", a group so sleazy that even Bill O’Reilly - Bill O’Reilly! - was sickened by their tactics. It takes a real man of integrity to instruct his underlings to turn a decorated war hero into a lying, flip-flopping, Frenchified faker who may have received his Purple Heart under false pretenses, all in defense of a chickenhawk who went AWOL for a significant portion of his service (I guess defending Texas from Oklahoma was just too stressful). Yes, I think it’s safe to say many of us will never forget election 2004, and Fox’s role in it. Never.
Now let’s take a look at some of your other liberal bona fides, shall we?
- Telling the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER that the Clintons need to "shut up" (I see your colleague Bill O’Reilly is rubbing off on you! But not literally...)
- Slamming Air America
- Slamming Howard Dean and Al Gore
- Sucking up to repulsive hypocrite and serial adulterer Newt "I know you have cancer, just sign the damn divorce papers" Gingrich
- Trumpeting your friendship with the fair and balanced Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter
- Defending Matt Drudge
- Defending Arnold Schwarzenegger against charges of groping and harassment
On this last point, Katie Roiphe writes in SLATE:
The week before the election she attacked the Los Angles Times for running an exposé about the charges. She complained that the paper had cited outdated accusations, which is a little odd when she herself has argued so passionately against the need for "fresh complaints," saying it often takes women a long time to conquer their fears and report a sexual crime; she also took the newspaper to task for seeking out women who hadn’t come forward, when she herself has written extensively on how hard it is to come forward in cases of sexual assault. It may or may not be relevant to all this that she was one of the Democrats later named to Schwarzenegger’s transition team.
She goes on to praise your honesty in facing your internal contradictions. Me, I just call it opportunism. Hey, tomato, tomahtoe, you know?
As to this preposterous point:
Mr. Cavuto, a Fox News anchor, sat down to do an interview with George Bush last week on his business show. He didn’t discuss Iraq. Cavuto doesn’t cover Iraq. As far as I know, he had nothing new to ask him, nothing new to add, and no important new question to pose. In fact, the president had nothing new to say on the topic. There was no news to be made on Iraq. So Cavuto didn’t use the opportunity either to beat up on the president or to let him say something we’d heard a hundred times. Instead, he asked him questions he didn’t know the answer to, where he might get an answer he hadn’t already heard.
To review: Cavuto asked Bush about MICHAEL JACKSON. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t care what Bush’s view is on MJ’s problems. He’s GEORGE Bush, not BILLY Bush after all. As to "nothing new to ask him, nothing new to add", are you out of your fucking mind? The insurgency continues apace, Americans are dying at a rapid clip, recruitment is so fucked that the military is bringing on, shall we say, undesirables to fill the rapidly emptying ranks. But I guess that when you spend all that time at Fox, guzzling the Kool Aid, you probably DON’T think there’s anything new to report. The Administration says all is well? Good enough for me! Move along, nothing to see here.
I have to say that I’m pretty amused by your use of a common Fox maneuver: When you’re accused of bias, change the subject. Howard Dean calls Fox’s content "propaganda", so your response is:
Three times as many people watch Fox every day as watch CNN.
Talk about misdirection! OK, so if you want to play the ratings card, how about this: On a typical night, a ten year old episode of LAW AND ORDER on TNT gets twice as many viewers as THE O’REILLY FACTOR. Come to think of it, that little reprobate in tight pants, SpongeBob, whips O’Reilly’s ass as well. What have we proven about Fox’s bias? Nothing, right? Ok.
Let me finish by telling you that I’m amazed you’ve come this far. Had I been in charge of hiring contributors, let’s just say you wouldn’t have topped my list, unless I needed an expert in how to blow a huge election lead and lose big. If you’re happy at Fox, good for you. But stop claiming to speak for me. You’re an embarrassment and a disgrace to liberals, feminists and people of conscience.
UPDATE: Gilliard and Wolcott join in the fun.
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Liberals to Susan Estrich: Drop Dead