Fair and Balanced White House Press Policy

As a teenager, I was a bit of a rebellious sort. I spent most of my idle time pushing the boundaries of what a kid might get away with without actually breaking any laws or at least without getting caught. At some point I learned that when you live your life dangerously close to those boundaries, a lot of people are watching you just waiting for you to slip over that line, no matter how innocently or accidentally. When you do, they pounce and make an example of you.

It’s not necessarily fair… ok, maybe it is fair. After all, while the slip may have been innocent and accidental, toeing the line was very much on purpose! Either way, the reaction is certainly to be expected. One might even say I was asking for it. No adult wants to be made a fool by some smart assed high school kid! And you can bet that if you practice like I did, there’s someone practicing just as hard to nail your ass at the first opportunity. Tough lesson, maybe, but one we tend to have to learn for ourselves.

That’s what happened with Fox News’s access to the White House. And since Fox News, ostensibly, is comprised of grown-ups who should have learned this lesson at least back when I did, I’m a little surprised at their whining about it.

Sure, there are fans of Fox out there who will argue that this is a form of censorship, or ask, “who are they to determine what a ‘news agency’ is or who produces ‘real news?!’” But there’s an easy answer to that one… THEY are the White House Press Secretary, and determining who is and isn’t a legitimate news agency and thus who gets access to the White House – whether they are right or wrong about it – is exactly “their” job.

But there’s also another, simple answer even if a number of folks won’t to hear it: Fox really is no more a news agency than The Daily Show or The National Enquirer. Do they have White House access?

IMHO, this particular press secretary isn’t guilty of any of the things of which Fox fans accuse him. He simply said out loud what a lot of folks, including Fox, per their own propaganda, have known but been afraid to say for a long time. They enjoyed quite a run, but it’s finally ended. They can now choose to drop their single-minded agenda and operate as a real news agency, or they can assume their rightful place among the other less-than actual news agencies.

Don’t buy that? Here’s the argument:

Fox was created, by their own account, to counter what they perceived as a liberal bias among mainstream media. This bias however, only existed if Fox twisted what was actually meant by the word “liberal” as it applies to the media. Here’s what I mean by that: as applied to the press, “liberal” is actually a fundamental requirement of journalists… or should be. It means that a reporter extends all the rights of citizenship to the subject of his or her story. It means assuming a suspect’s innocence until that suspect is proven guilty. It means reporting the facts of a story and accounting for as many possible perspectives on it as may exist. It means NOT creating a story where there is none, making oneself the story, or pushing an agenda onto the story or shaping the story to fit an agenda.

This kind of fundamental journalism is sometimes perceived as having undue sympathy toward a suspect or subject of a big story, but it’s actually rather patriotic to assume a fellow citizen should be given the rights and protections promised in our Constitution. You’d think Fox would be all over that, but no, they weren’t. Instead they played upon this notion that a well-trained reporter is overly sympathetic to the evils that plague society (simply because that reporter didn’t act as judge, jury and executioner). This play on the real meaning of liberal was then mixed in with how the word also tends to be associated with a particular political party and wham, bam, Fox’s self-professed reason for existing translates into them being a tool of the Republican Party.

First they twist the definition of liberal (as it applied to journalism) into a political meaning, then they falsely assert that when folks describe journalists as liberals, folks mean “Democratic-leaning” (a premise neither proved nor accepted) and they then use this overly simplified and invalid argument to justify their Republican propaganda. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. They’ve done it for years. Most of the time they brag about doing it. I was initially impressed by the balls it took to try to get away with it.

In fact, I’d be completely sympathetic to there being just another opinion out there or another perspective on a particular news story, but that’s not what Fox says they do. They say, “we’re bringing our bias… to counter someone else’s bias, but still, we’re biased… we admit it, hell, we brag about it. It’s been our business model for years. We’ve succeeded on it as a form of entertainment to the point where our market share allowed to us into the real news arena and before anyone realized what was going on, our news people were right beside the network news people at all the big events! And then, because we’d portrayed this false “left-leaning bias” myth for so long, folks were afraid to point out that we weren’t ever really a “news” organization except in the sense that we reported bad news about Dems and good news about Repubs and there we were. Deal with us.”

But the Obama White House, bringing the change they promised, dealt with it.

Sorry boys, your charade is over. You can argue that the White House can’t tell the difference between opinion pieces and regular news all you want. Just like you can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding - if Glenn and Rush and Bill and folks like them dominate your airtime, then they are what your network represents just as stories about fallen celebrities and alien probes ARE what the Enquirer represents.

It’s not a matter of the White House getting to decide what is or isn’t real news (although that IS the job of the White House Press Secretary) it’s about Fox getting away with being so close to the line for so long that they forgot there was a line until they got caught standing way on the other side of it. You sowed, you reaped. Congrats. Now quit yer whinin’

Luth

Out