I saw a recent Fox afiliate newscast in which one of the commentators was reporting on the NYTimes report that the RNC was pulling money out of, among other campaigns, DeWine’s campaign. The reporter basically said something along the lines of “well, consider that the source is the ultra-liberal New York times there’s no reason to believe it.”
Maybe I’m not up on the progression of right-wing hysteria, but are the NYTimes news pages really so “ultra-liberal” that they can be dismissed out of hand as if they were from a tabloid? And done by a person at least posing as a journalist no less?
FOX is run by News Corp, which owns the NY Times main competitor, the New York Post, which on Friday ran this cartoon, a mere two days after the subject of the cartoon died in a plane crash.
Much as I loath Rupert Murdoch and his world-championship levels of dishonesty and hypocricy and believe that almost everything produced by his media empire should be viewed as a hate crime against intelligent people, I do have to say that that cartoon is pretty funny.
Well, the way the Times handled the whole “Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction” story during the run-up to the war didn’t exactly help their credibility, but it wasn’t exactly a case of “ultra-liberalism” run amok.
Yeah, the attitude mentioned by the OP is silly. For one thing, it conflates editorial outlook with journalistic standards for news reporting.
I know that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is quite conservative/libertarian and I generally disagree with its positions. But would it make sense for me to assume that therefore its news reporting must be completely unreliable and in thrall to conservative ideology? I don’t think so.
I’m also puzzled as to what specific statements in the NYT article the Fox reporter was declining to believe. That national Republicans are no longer running pro-DeWine ads in Ohio? That Republican party officials suspect that DeWine is headed for a defeat? That Ohio Republicans are concerned about DeWine and other Republican candidates being “dragged down” by the unpopular Republican candidate for governor, Kenneth Blackwell?
I mean, if someone wants to allege that the NYT is just making shit up, they ought to provide some evidence that the facts are different from what the Times is saying. Otherwise, it sounds like just a desperate attempt at spin.
Weirdest thing, I consider the NY Times to be objective and mostly well written and researched with a liberal bent. I consider the Wall Street Journal to be objective and well written and researched with a conservative bent. Fox is a shrill shill of a news agency and the NY Post is nothing more than pretty good sports, comics, a lot of ads and poorly written and barely researched filler.
I am a moderate Republican.
I agree. I consider the editorial pages of the NYT to be pretty liberal, but their reporting is top notch. You mentioned the WSJ, where the situation is much the same, although the editorial section is pretty conservative.
Note, however, that the OP and others in this thread have made that very mistake (emphasis added):
Any bias one might find in the NYT is more likely due to the fact that it’s a big city news paper and the reporters have mores consistent with people who live in big cities, and which differ in many ways from the mores one might more typically find in rural areas. I would consider that more of a cultural than a political bias, but those two things are often seen as linked. The NYT’s own public editor did an interesting piece on that issue a few years ago.
Granted, it’s harder and harder these days to draw a line between what’s offered up on TV as straight news and what is commentary, but I think most of the folks who post on this MB should be able to sort that out fairly easily.
Maybe there is some secret code I didn’t recognize, but the guy making these observations wasn’t billed as “hey, we invited yet another unchallenged Republican pundit to give their side of things” but was a newscaster, dressed like all the other newscasters, talking matter of factly. If you got misled by me calling a commentator, John, sorry. I only meant that in the sense that he was making comments which isn’t quite the proper usage. But nothing labeled him as “partisan hack.” It was just another segment from another nameless local newsteam member.
I note that the Ohio GOP has denied that the RNC is pulling out, though something from the national RNC would be more convincing on that score. There are a million ways to try and spin things so that you can technically claim that the RNC is still involved or spending money (for instance, if the state party’s coordinated campaign spends money already on hand). The spin machine doesn’t seem very on message, because one Ohio RNC guy claims its all lies, while the other says that of course they are pulling out: DeWine is in such great shape that its a sign of their confidence in him!
I don’t think the commentator vs. reporter point is very relevant here. If Apos claimed Fox news was at fault because their reporting showed political bias, then it would be perfectly relevant, because it is acceptable for commentators to display political opinions in a way that is inappropriate for reporters. However, most of the posts here seem to be arguing that the Fox commentator/reporter/whatever is using a bad argument, i.e. that it is ad hominem, and inaccurate. Since it is poor form to make a bad argument as a reporter or a commentator, it doesn’t seem to matter terribly which it is.
Although I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to shift the discussion from “Was this Fox News statement wrong?” to “How wrong was this Fox News statement?”
Yes and no. We don’t have a link so we’re relying on the OP’s description which may or may not be accuate or complete. We might also ask if the Fox commentator was talking about a NYT news story which was reporting facts that a journalist had uncovered or a NYT editorial writer who was expressing an opinion. It would help to have a link or at least a more detailed review of what the Fox guy acutally said. If the NYT guy was a known partisan commentator, then “consider the source” might not be a bad comment. If it was one of their reporters, then it wouldn’t be.
In the OP, the Fox guy is called a commentator and then later the OP says it wasn’t clear whether he was a commentator or not. Which was it? Maybe the OP didn’t mean to imply that he knew the guy was a commentator, and was offering a correction. It wasn’t clear to me.
