COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Snubbing Fox News is just wrong
I watch Fox News. Sometimes. No, not Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity or the dreaded Glenn Beck, but I’ve been known, every now and then, to spend 10 or so transient minutes watching Fox—even a whole half hour on occasion.
As yet, I haven’t grown hair on my palms or come down with swine flu. Nor has my blood pressure soared to the moons of Jupiter.
I wish my equanimity and composure on the subject of Fox News had been shared by the Obama administration, which, as you may now know, unsuccessfully tried to exclude it last week from pool news feeds until everyone else in the media got wind of it and decided that it wasn’t right for a White House—ANY White House—to vote a news organization, however obnoxious, off the island. The Mainstream News Media response to the Obama administration’s moves could loosely be translated thus: “Sure, they have a lot of bloviating idiots over there, but they’re OUR bloviating idiots. The First Amendment pretty much says so.”
The Obamanites’ chief beef with the Foxers is that they act like the information wing of the Republican Party and that their issues either are Republican issues or become them in short order.
Which, even if unquestionably true, still wouldn’t justify sudden disinvitation. You fight bad information with good information and you do it wherever you need to. Period.
The best thing I’ve heard about all this is that the Obamanites wanted to serve notice on every other cable network that anyone taking up any issue or cause previously espoused by the lepers of the cable dial would be considered just as unclean. Which, I suppose, is politically astute playground bullying, but not exactly in the spirit of the hands-across- America so many people voted for (nor the one that won him a Nobel Peace Prize, which, frankly, I interpreted as a prize to America for voting for him).
The big trouble with Fox, of course, is that it’s kind of—oh, you know—popular, as cable news goes, along with being so often absurd, slanted and disgraceful.
My relative ease with Fox—despite utter rejection of the overt ideology of its commentary and slant—is caused, in part, by my dear and lifelong friendship with someone who worked there non-ideologically for many years. But even if you don’t know anyone who ever labored in Rupert Murdoch’s salt mines, you’d still have to admit that, like all news organizations run by His Satanic Majesty Roger Ailes, Fox tends to be lively, at the very least.
In fact, my occasional affection for Fox stemmed from one show—“Fox News Watch,” a journalism review that, in best form, was moderated by commentator and historian Eric Burns and featured the most daring and incisive liberal commentator on TV, Neal Gabler, author of the great extant biographies of Walt Disney and Walter Winchell.
After a while, the big shot Foxers realized that their conservative news channel harbored the most trenchant and unpredictable free-thinking liberal critic on TV and they put a stop to it. Burns and Gabler were sent to the showers and “Fox News Watch” became much tamer and more predictable.
But it was typical of an Ailes network that, in his search for liveliness, he’d tolerate for the longest time a liberal of truly unusual intelligence and charisma. (It happened before when Ailes ran CNBC and Jane Wallace was the liberal in the window.)
It seems to me, though, that the Obama administration could have kept mum and just trusted MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow to ratchet up the mockery of Fox’s zooier excesses, when needed. It would have been so much cleaner and better that way.
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