The Other McCain

Newt Gingrich tells the truth:

During a meeting with 18 Delaware Tea Party leaders here on Wednesday, Newt Gingrich lambasted FOX News Channel, accusing the cable network of having been in the tank for Mitt Romney from the beginning of the Republican presidential fight. An employee himself of the news outlet as recently as last year, he also cited former colleagues for attacking him out of what he characterized as personal jealousy.
“I think FOX has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said during the private meeting — to which RealClearPolitics was granted access — at Wesley College. “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than FOX this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of FOX, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of FOX. That’s just a fact.” . . .
“I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point [who] said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’ ” Gingrich said. “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches FOX.”

Four quick points:

1. Newt can say this, now that his campaign is $4 million in debt and he’s got zero chance of winning the nomination.
2. Newt used to work for Fox. I suspect he’s been talking to CNN executives about a future gig.
3. It’s not Murdoch who makes the calls, but Roger Ailes and top executives and producers who are the shot-callers at Fox News.
4. Scott Conroy does something here that annoys my inner copy editor, namely writing FOX in all caps, as if it were an acronym, which it’s not. The name originated as 20th Century Fox, a company that was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and re-branded, first as the Fox broadcast TV network and then in such cable spinoffs as Fox News Channel (FNC). But the word “Fox” is not an acronym, and people who want to write it “FOX” — evidently trying to match the acronyms by which other networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, etc.) are known — are simply wrong, and must be corrected, lest the erroneous example be imitated.

Scott Conroy has done excellent work in his career — scooped me on my own beat more than once — but that one little thing gets on my nerves so bad I could scream. However, I digress . . .

Having closely scrutinized coverage of this year’s campaign, I know what Newt’s talking about, and certain stipulations must be made: Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren were quite even-handed in their treatment of the GOP candidates. Sean and Greta both gave time to underdog candidates, including Rick Santorum and Herman Cain during the months when they seemed permanently stuck in the campaign purgatory of “second-tier” status.

Coverage of the campaign by the dayside programs on Fox News, however, seemed to be dictated by behind-the-scenes producers who exhibited a clear bias toward front-runners and even — as during the ludicrous Donald Trump faux-candidacy — toward certain Big Names that were merely the objects of ill-informed presidential speculation.

Let’s just say it, OK?

I love Sarah Palin, and would have loved to cover her campaign if she had run, but once Rick Perry jumped in (and remember, Palin had endorsed Perry in his 2010 primary against Kay Bailey Hutchison) it seemed blindingly obvious that Palin wasn’t running. The subsequent six-week will-she-or-won’t-she game struck me as a made-for-TV drama cleverly scripted by Roger Ailes for the specific purpose of boosting his own network’s ratings.

There: Now, I’ve said it.

In terms of political judgment, Bill O’Reilly is a nincompoop, his entire worldview shaped by his New York D’Amato/Giuliani Republican Party machine frame of reference. The commentators who appear most frequently on Fox’s D.C.-based programs — Chris Stirewalt, Stephen Hayes, etc. — all bring to the table their own prejudices. And the network’s reverential touch-the-hem-of-his-garment attitude toward Karl Rove makes me want to puke. Continue reading The Fox Factor: Newt, Sarah, Mitt, Rick, Bias and ‘The Mother of All Spin-Jobs’ →