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<H1>The End of the Fox News Era?</H1>
<H6><A
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_end_of_the_fox_news_era_20100725/">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_end_of_the_fox_news_era_20100725/</A></H6>
<H4 class=date>Posted on Jul 25, 2010</H4>
<DIV class=printlinks><FONT face="georgia, times new roman, times, serif">
<P>By E.J. Dionne, Jr.</P>
<P>The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American
politics. This is not, as the now trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable
moment.” It is a time for action.</P>
<P>The mainstream media and the Obama administration alike must stop cowering
before a right wing that has persistently forced its own propaganda to be
accepted as news by persuading traditional journalists that “fairness” requires
treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.” </P>
<P>And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash
politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President
Obama, and against progressives in this year’s election.</P>
<P>The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit
man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president
turned out to be the least protective approach of all.</P>
<P>The first reaction of the Obama team was not to question, let alone
challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might
create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a
human being outside the president’s inner circle. She could be sacrificed
without a thought.</P>
<P>Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary
Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture
where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s
his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god. </P>
<P>Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream
journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that
“balance” demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into
the political waters.</P>
<P>This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he “invented the Internet,”
but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept
reporting he had. </P>
<P>There were no “death panels” in the Democratic health care bills. But this
false charge got so much coverage that last August, an NBC News/Wall Street
Journal poll found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals
would likely allow “the government to make decisions about when to stop
providing medical care to the elderly.” That was the summer when support for
reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of
one of our most important debates. </P>
<P>The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they
are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment
editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping
fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their
attack lines.</P>
<P>Thus did Andrew Alexander, The Washington Post’s ombudsman, ask why the paper
had been slow to report on, as he put it, “the Justice Department’s decision to
scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther
Party.”</P>
<P>Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped
no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart
posted set out to do: persuade Americans that the Obama administration favors
blacks over whites. </P>
<P>And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative
George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, dismissed the case
and those pushing it. “This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers,” she
told Politico’s Ben Smith. “This has to do with their fantasies about how they
could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration.” </P>
<P>Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian
Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He’s a Republican activist
going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush
poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a
controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.</P>
<P>Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being “motivated by a
lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.”</P>
<P>This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense—and it’s
nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a
day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an
on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win. </P>
<P>The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current
media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media
should stop being afraid of insisting upon the difference between news and
propaganda.</P>
<P><I>E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is
ejdionne(at)washpost.com.</I><BR></P></FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV><FONT size=2>
<DIV><BR>Wayne A. Fox<BR>1009 Karen Lane<BR>PO Box 9421<BR>Moscow, ID
83843</DIV>
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