The Silencing

by Kirsten Powers

  Sometimes the anti-Fox derangement syndrome among leftists is almost beyond belief. Salon.com editor Joan Walsh tweeted in September 2014, “Imagine Fox covering slavery. It’s not even hard: Promoting the ‘job creators’ and hyping any rumor of violence.”63 The illiberal left has to demonize its opponents; it won’t engage them. And it can’t even see its own double standards. Of course no one who works for Fox has ever defended slavery, but MSNBC, where Walsh is a political analyst, has more than once indulged its inner racist, including making fun of a Romney family-photo Christmas card with its inclusion of a black baby (an adopted Mitt Romney grandchild) and an MSNBC segment about Cinco de Mayo when an MSNBC personality danced around in a sombrero on air as he shook maracas and pretended to down a bottle of tequila. The president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists called it “abominable.”64 It was meant as a joke, but not the sort of joke the illiberal left would ever tolerate in a conservative. Imagine if O’Reilly or Hannity had done that.

  If you want to rail against cable news, or the state of media in general, by all means, be my guest. There is plenty to gripe about. But that’s not what the illiberal left does. They troll for evidence to delegitimize Fox News and then weave a narrative to “prove” that Fox is terrible, when in fact it stands up pretty well against its rivals in terms of news reporting and credibility.

  Even though a recent Pew study showed that CNN and the Fox News Channel provide a roughly 50/50 distribution between news and opinion compared to MSNBC’s “full 85 percent opinion,” MSNBC is the news network that former Obama flacks Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod joined as political analysts after leaving the Obama administration. What happened to all their fretting about “real news”? MSNBC’s premier host, Rachel Maddow, asserted in January 2012, “There may be liberals on TV at MSNBC, but the network is not operating with a political objective.” Contrast this with a November 2012 Pew Research study that reported that MSNBC’s coverage of Mitt Romney during the final week of the 2012 campaign was 68 percent negative with no positive stories in the sample. Did you get that? MSNBC offered not a single positive story about Mitt Romney at the conclusion of the presidential campaign. Pew noted their coverage “was far more negative than the overall press, and even more negative than it had been during October 1 to 28 when 5 percent was positive and 57 percent was negative.”

  The sad fact is the illiberal left expect members of the media to support their ideological and partisan goals—or else. As reporter Sharyl Attkisson said in an interview after leaving CBS, “The troubling part is that some in the news media routinely allow themselves to be used as a tool in this propaganda effort. Instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority. By way of example, my news reporting has an impeccable record for accuracy while the Obama administration’s record for providing accurate facts is decidedly mixed. Yet some in the media question me with a skepticism and zeal that they would never think of applying to the wildly false and unfounded claims raised by ‘the other side.’”65

  Charles Krauthammer once noted that Fox News’ success is due to its appeal to a niche market: half the country. And unlike much of the rest of the media, Fox distinguishes between opinion and straight news shows. The problem with the illiberal left is that it believes a “progressive” take on issues is an objective take, and cannot conceive that there are other legitimate points of view. As William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped, a liberal is someone who claims to be open to all points of view—and then is surprised and offended to find there are other points of view. I think liberals should be better than that and at least acknowledge their own biases. Veteran reporter and Fox News Senior Political Analyst Brit Hume likes to point out that everyone has a bias. He has told me many times, “The people who are dangerous are those who don’t know it and fail to correct for it.” Because so many in the media believe their liberal worldview is merely a reflection of settled truth, we end up with a leftist echo chamber, which helps nobody, including liberals.

  THE PYRRHIC VICTORY

  In late 2014, Media Matters Executive Vice President Angelo Carusone declared the war against Fox News over. He said, “And it’s not just that it’s over, but it was very successful. To a large extent, we won.”66 This was a strange claim considering that the Media Matters website continued to hyperventilate over all things Fox News. On January 5, 2015, as an example, the front page of the Media Matters website featured seventeen posts about Fox News including banner stories demonizing Fox News host Mike Huckabee, who had just announced he was leaving Fox News to explore a presidential run.

  It is unclear exactly what Media Matters won. Despite its concerted attack, Fox News continued to dominate the ratings to the point of humiliating its competitors. A December 30, 2014, Variety headline declared, “Fox News Dominates Cable News Ratings in 2014; MSNBC Tumbles.”67 The article explained, “Fox News finished on top in both total viewers and the adults 25-54 news demo for a 13th straight year. . . .” The cable network, “had the top five programs in cable news” and “in primetime for the year, Fox News ranked second in total viewers among all ad-supported basic cable networks,” ahead of AMC and TNT and behind only ESPN. As for its competitors, “CNN posted its all-time low primetime average in total viewers as well as its lowest-ever total-day tune-in among adults 25-54. MSNBC hit a nine-year low in total viewers.”68

  Following the 2014 midterm elections, Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik wrote, “Any day now, I am expecting to turn on the tube and see an ad that says, ‘More Americans get their TV news from Fox than anywhere else.’” He pointed out that, “Much of the media establishment seems bent on ignoring the incredible ratings success of Fox News . . . [that] show Fox News rising to a new and remarkable level of dominance. . . .”

  He proffered the evidence: “Fox News beat not just CNN and MSNBC, but also ABC, NBC and CBS on Nov. 4, the night of the mid-term elections. It did so in both total viewers and the key news demographic: viewers 25 to 54 years of age. Fox more than tripled the audiences of MSNBC and CNN in total viewers, while beating ABC, NBC and CBS by more than 3 million, 2 million and 1 million viewers respectively. On a watershed political night, more Americans tuned to Fox for information about the vote than anywhere else. I have been covering media long enough to remember when CBS, NBC or ABC was the big story on election night in the 1970s and ’80s.”69

  Zurawik seemed to be on to something. A June 2014 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey done in partnership with the Brookings Institution found that Fox News was America’s most trusted television news source.70 MSNBC was dead last. In response to the question, “Which of the following television news sources do you trust the most to provide accurate information about politics and current events?” 25 percent of survey respondents answered Fox News. Broadcast news came in second at 23 percent, followed by CNN (17 percent), PBS (12 percent), and Jon Stewart’s the Daily Show (8 percent). MSNBC trailed the fake news show with just 5 percent of respondents describing it as their most trusted news source.

  In his Baltimore Sun piece, Zurawik urged the media establishment to stop ignoring Fox News’ success and, “start seriously trying to figure out how and why it has come to pass that Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly matter more to Americans on election night than Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer—way more than the latter two.”

  When the Obama administration dismissed administration scandals as Fox News stories, the mainstream networks were inclined to stay away, while Fox led the charge to investigate what happened at Benghazi (where the administration initially trotted out a ludicrous story, blaming the death of the American ambassador to Libya as a violent reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube video) and in the IRS targeting scandals and much else besides. A White House aide told me, while I was working on a column about Benghazi and citing a Fox story, “you know that can’t be trusted because it’s Fox News.” That’s the line the White House peddles to reporters all th
e time.

  “I think one of the reasons for this latest evolution of ratings dominance might be that Fox was a far better watchdog on the Obama White House than any other TV news organization,” theorized Zurawik in his Baltimore Sun column. “It took the heat and the blowback from an administration that showed an enmity for the press not seen on Pennsylvania Avenue since the dark days of Richard Nixon, but it stayed the course. And now with viewers seeing the contempt this administration had for them and the truth, they respect what Fox did the last six years.” As for Fox critics who insist the only people who watch Fox are stupid partisans, he warned, “we shouldn’t let our biases blind us to the serious media criticism [of other media outlets] that demands to be done.”

  Fox News has shown the virtues of resisting the intimidation and demonization by government officials, media elites, and even a self-described media watchdog group that can’t tolerate dissent. It should be disconcerting for every true liberal that so many of their own media outlets have been content to be led and used by the Obama administration, and to use their power to try to silence others.

  SEVEN

  MUDDY MEDIA WATERS

  [T]he only security of all, is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.1

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1823

  “Making government accountable to the people isn’t just a cause of this campaign—it’s been a cause of my life for two decades,” then-Senator Barack Obama said during his 2008 run for the White House.2 On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly denounced the Bush administration as “one of the most secretive administrations in our history” and vowed to be a different kind of president.3 Shortly after his inauguration, the White House announced that, “President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history.”4

  Instead, Obama’s White House has appalled reporters with its Nixon-like secrecy, lack of transparency, and hostility to being held accountable by the media. Veteran ABC News Reporter Ann Compton told me in January 2015 that the Obama administration has “flunked” the “test of transparency.” She explained that to the Obama White House “transparency” seems to mean little more than an avalanche of administration “photographs and videos and blogs” posted online—in other words, government created “news” that is little better than propaganda. As Compton explained, reporters “are looking for transparency about how the president comes to . . . policy decisions.” Instead transparency, to this White House, is simply another means to spin the media.

  Compton has covered every president starting with Gerald R. Ford. The most open West Wing, in her experience, was Ronald Reagan’s. Reporters had easy access to Reagan’s top three advisors, Mike Deaver, Edwin Meese, and Jim Baker. She also thought the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton were often open with reporters. The George W. Bush administration, by comparison, tightly controlled its media message and limited the press corps’ access. The Obama administration, however, took that several steps farther. “Obama is the first [president] to have his own videographer. His shop goes out aggressively with a message. Much more so than Bush,” Compton noted. “But [when it comes to] the thought process, the consultations that go into making domestic policy, I felt I had better access with policy teams under Bush than under Obama. When it comes to what I thought mattered most . . . hearing what was happening with policy creation, I felt I had it in the [George W.] Bush years.”

  At the end of Obama’s first term, presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar crunched the numbers.5 She found that over four years, President Obama held a total of 79 press conferences. The “most transparent administration in history” was beat out by George W. Bush’s 89, Bill Clinton’s 133, and George H. W. Bush’s 143 press conferences in their first terms. As for short question and answer sessions with reporters, it was even worse. President Obama opened himself up to such questioning only 107 times in four years, compared to George W. Bush’s 354 and Clinton’s 612.

  Moreover, the president avoids serious journalists. In 2013, Politico noted that “The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and others in years. These are the reporters who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.”6 The president would rather appear on the View.

  While the Obama administration’s top strategy team held briefings every few weeks where a senior administration official would meet with selected reporters, the briefings soon became essentially useless because they were off the record and the officials spoke in generalities, leaving reporters feeling, as Ann Compton said, that “they had learned nothing.” The briefers said “all the same things they said on the morning talk shows.”

  Politico further reported in “Obama: The Puppet Master,” that, “President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.” Calling it a “dangerous development,” veteran reporters Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei noted that, “the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government.” One troubling development that differed from past White Houses was “extensive government creation of content (photos of the president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama aides), which can then be instantly released to the masses through social media. They often include footage unavailable to the press.” Brooks Kraft, a contributing photographer to Time magazine added, “White House handout photos used to be reserved for historically important events—9/11, or deliberations about war. This White House regularly releases [day-in-the-life] images of the president . . . a nice picture of the president looking pensive . . . from events that could have been covered by the press pool.”7

  By the end of 2013, dozens of America’s leading news organizations had become so frustrated they signed a letter hand-delivered to then-Press Secretary Jay Carney to complain about “limits on press access” so pervasive as to “raise constitutional concerns.” The letter, signed by outlets such as ABC, CBS, NBC, Bloomberg, CNN, Fox News, Reuters, and thirty others, said in part, “Journalists are routinely being denied the right to photograph or videotape the president while he is performing his official duties. As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the Executive Branch of government. . . . You are, in effect, replacing independent photojournalism with visual press releases.”8

  Put another way: the Obama administration is staffed with masters of creating government propaganda and making sure there is nothing to compete with it. When Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, she gave one interview—to the Orwellian-sounding “White House TV.” Guess who produces that? Obama aides.9 When questioned about reporters’ lack of access to the president, Jen Psaki, the Obama campaign’s traveling press secretary, told Politico’s Allen and VandeHei: “The goal is not to satisfy the requester, but doing what is necessary to get into people’s homes and communicate your agenda to the American people.”

  Bill Clinton’s former White House press secretary, Mike McCurry, told me in a 2015 interview, “What has defined so much of Obama strategy is to self publish, to create content to deliver to people they are trying to reach. It is aimed at a base they are trying keep strong, not the middle.”

  While the administration disdains on-the-record interviews with actual journalists, Obama regularly grants them to people like Stephen Colbert, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, Steve Harvey, and even an online satirical interview with goofball Zach Galifianakis and meet-ups with such YouTube video blog sensations as comic GloZell Green (3.4 million YouTube subscribers), movie and music commentator Hank Green (2 million subscribers), and makeup and home decorating advice teen Bethany Mota (8 million subscribers). There is
nothing wrong with the president trying to reach different audiences. But no one should confuse chats with these entertainers as being held accountable by the Fourth Estate.

  In early 2013, Paul Farhi of the Washington Post decided to investigate just whom the White House deemed deserving of an interview with the president of the United States. Wrote Farhi: “Entertainment Tonight scored [an interview with the president] last year. The New York Times did not. The View has gotten several. The Washington Post hasn’t had one in years. Albuquerque radio station KOB-FM’s Morning Mayhem crew interviewed [President Obama] in August. The last time the Wall Street Journal did so was in 2009.”10

  Farhi concluded: “Obama may be the least newspaper-friendly president in a generation.” Jackie Calmes, a White House reporter for the New York Times told Farhi, “It used to be taken as a matter of course that the major newspapers would get an annual interview. Now I take it for granted that it’s not going to happen.” How can there be transparency and accountability if the president refuses to speak to the country’s most influential dailies?