Fox News Gets Bad Case of Cronkitis

“I have a feeling that it [Osama bin Laden’s new videotape]could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I’m a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, that he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.”-- Former CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite on CNN’s Larry King Live, October 29, 2004.

Is anyone else flabbergasted at how many times Fox News has called Walter Cronkite “The Most Trusted Man in America”? I’m glad to see Debbie Schlussel hasn’t lost any time putting Cronkite back in perspective.

I hope Fox News will begin to see some pushback from their saner commentators. As a Fox watcher, I was already thoroughly sick of the wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage, but at least Jackson didn't betray American GIs. I anticipate a long week of surfing off of Fox every time the old footage comes on of Cronkite crying during the moon shot. (BTW, get a load of the look on Wally Schirra's face as he endures Cronkite's ego during some of the old moon coverage.)

Fox News exists largely thanks to its faithful viewers’ appreciation for a news alternative to a liberal media establishment of which Cronkite was the founding father. The leftist media’s biggest historical triumph is still having forced America to lose in Vietnam, and Cronkite was the journalistic icon of that defeat. Every time an MSNBC or New York Times reporter said we were losing in Iraq, he had to pay Cronkite a royalty.

Cronkite got the “most trusted man” handle in 1973, when he ranked ahead of the president and vice president in a national poll.
As if beating out Nixon and Agnew was a tough assignment in 1973, the year of Watergate, Agnew resigning, and the American decision to bug out of Vietnam for good, a tragic decision we’re still paying for.

At the time, Americans were OK with that decision because we’d been fed a steady diet of Cronkite’s version of what was at stake. In other words, 1973 was the lowest point of one of the lowest decades in American history. Trusting someone like Cronkite was only a part of the pathology.

Fox picking up and repeating that "most trusted" handle without context--and without challenge-makes as much sense as calling Obama “The One” because the slave media does so without apology.

As can be seen from Cronkite's stupid statement about Karl Rove quoted above, he lacked a balanced perspective, or even common sense. He also shared the fatal flaw of liberal journalism, which is the belief that the whole world agrees with his opinions, except for a few hayseed dummies (like the dopes who watch Fox News).

Is it just a desire to boost ratings that has Fox News trying to out-CBS the mainstream media's lionization of Cronkite?

'Someone Get Me Paula Zahn!'

Damn! It really is September 10, 2001!

Chandra Levy is back in the news.

For five months in 2001 leading right up through the evening of September 10, the cable news producers, the worst offenders of whom were at Fox News, were positively addicted to running empty stories about the unsolved murder of Chandra Levy.

The stations only had a handful of facts, few of them fresh after months of repeating them, and a total of maybe 28 seconds of video, (Chandra doing dishes, Rep. Gary Condit with his sports jacket slung over his shoulder); but they looped the footage incessantly, sometimes dozens of times every evening, until sensitive types like me were going out of our minds.

It took the 9/11 attacks to get Fox News to drop it.

Who knows? If they actually can go back and re-start history where it lay on 9/10 by finally charging Ms. Levy’s killer, maybe they can go back now and catch bin Laden.

Headlines Unclouded by the Facts

Us Weekly ran an incendiary cover about Sarah Palin last week that’s clearly aimed at coloring the thinking of lots of grocery-shoppers glancing at it on their way through the checkout lane. Megyn Kelly of Fox News took the editor to task for the misleading headline, and the sloppy story inside that the editor insisted was a very balanced account of a “big news story.”

In short, she gets it done.

As the interview makes plain, the editor didn't seem too concerned that the "big story" Us Weekly had to rush to get on its cover wasn't about to be slowed getting into print because of worries about, you know, facts.

How Obama Spun O’Reilly

“I think history will show [that Iraq’s] the wrong battlefield, okay? And I think that you were perspicacious in your original assessment of the battlefield.” -- Bill O’Reilly during his interview with Barack Obama. (3:41.)

Right after Governor Palin’s shots heard ‘round the world on Wednesday, Barack Obama decided to relent in his boycott of Fox News and sit for an interview with Bill O’Reilly.

Some accused Barack of doing it when he did to bogart John McCain’s acceptance speech on Thursday. I don’t believe so, as the interview ran more than 90 minutes before McCain spoke, and Obama’s advisors would have known that.

But I do believe Barack made the decision in direct response to being so badly exposed by the Axis of Cheerful on Wednesday night (Giuliani--Thompson--Palin) as a man whose election would be as effective a guarantee of foreign and domestic policy disaster as the country can imagine.

I also believe that Barack knew that he had little to fear from O’Reilly. I’m sure Barack’s decision to grant a mutual audience with O’Reilly had been vetted long before he finally agreed to face him, with full reassurances from his crack political analysts that O’Reilly--in spite of being the figurehead of all the fascist lineup at Fox News--had plenty enough blind spots to allow Obama to escape serious damage. There simply are things that O’Reilly doesn’t get, and Iraq is one of them.

As seen above from O’Reilly’s words when he raised the topic of Iraq, it turns out that the most powerful man at Fox News holds the identical opinion that Iraq is “the wrong war at the wrong time” as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Nancy Pelosi. How could O’Reilly possibly confront Obama effectively about the latter’s policy judgments on Iraq when he shares the same errors himself? Obama knew all this about O'Reilly in advance, because O'Reilly's been repeating his "wrong battlefield" opinions for a couple years now. Obama had no fears that on the one foreign policy issue on which he is most vulnerable, he would risk nothing by facing O’Reilly.

Can you imagine anyone who understands the peril we face from global Islamic jihadism describing Barack Obama as “perspicacious”? Did I really hear O'Reilly say that after all the sturm und drang our country has been through over Iraq, Barack Obama was the only one who got it right?

O’Reilly also blew it when he let go unchallenged Obama’s statement that Iran was not part of the same network of Islamic enemies that America has been trying to respond to since 9/11--merely because there are differences between Shia and Sunni. Nor did he slap down Obama’s ridiculous contention that the Bush administration hasn’t been working hard enough with the Europeans when it comes to Iran. Both statements were demonstrably false, and they went by unchallenged.

'Second Grade Teacher Wanted'

We are extremely happy that Gillian Gibbons has been returned to the safety and sanity of Christendom.

(By the way, for those of you who ridicule or even disapprove of the notion that such a realm as “Christendom” exists, over what borderland do you think Ms. Gibbons has just returned to safety and sanity?)

Anyway, I wouldn’t ridicule Ms. Gibbons for the world. She is now answering interviewer questions about how she feels about her recent ordeal, and she is clearly unwilling to say anything negative about her captors, i.e., the Sudanese government, the Sharia court, and that country's religious mobs, nor its religion.

It may just be she's one of those mild-mannered types who simply are not capable of taking offense. She may also be concerned that if she says anything negative about Islam her Western colleagues back at the Unity School might be lynched, the way she very nearly was. She must be well aware that the religious leaders in Khartoum have explained the teddy-bear incident as a western plot to insult the Prophet.

So I don't want to make fun. I just find it interesting that Gibbons would use her moment of international fame--peaking as the entire civilized world is breathing a collective sigh that she has escaped her captors--to use her fame to say:

she didn't want her experience “to put anyone off going to Sudan - in fact I know of a lovely school that needs a new Year Two teacher.”

(I can just imagine the first Western interviewer for that job. “Yes, that salary sounds quite acceptable, and the school is lovely! Oh, and, by the way, does that secretary still work here, you know, the vindictive one who dropped a dime to the Sharia Gestapo about the last teacher in this position?”)

Yesterday I noted that Fox News reporter Steve Centanni claimed similar benevolent feelings towards Islam, even as he was describing being forced to convert to the religion at gunpoint. (“I have the highest respect for Islam…I learned a lot of good things about it”).

Then, like Ms. Gibbons, Centanni made this similarly weird recommendation of Gaza on the very heels of his own horrifying experience of being kidnapped:

I hope that this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover the story because the Palestinian people are very beautiful and kind hearted…The world needs to know more about them. Don't be discouraged.

(Actually, thanks to Centanni’s experiences there, the world’s knowledge of Gazans has been dramatically enlarged).

But in view of his invitation to journalists everywhere to come visit beautiful Gaza, I do point out that Centanni, the former Fox News international correspondent has been, ever since then, Fox News national correspondent.

Lately, the closest he’s been willing to get to known terrorist hangouts is to report from the UN--and even then he reads his notes safely on the far side of First Avenue.)

Nor do we blame him one bit for staying safely in the United States, and the hell out of Gaza or any other parts of the Dar al-Islam.

And if he doesn't want to attack Islam or Gazan terrorists for what happened to him, I guess he has his reasons. But why tell other journalists to come back and pretend that journalist kidnappings and murders don't happen? why must Ms. Gibbons advise other mild-mannered schoolteaching naïfs to come to Sudan as if it is a perfectly safe and lovely place?

Blame it on the Stockholm Syndrome, I suppose.

They Don't Send Us Flowers Any More

What is it with the Democratic Party and Michigan voters? Is it ingratitude? Is it that they're so confident Michigan is so “safe” a Democratic state they can take Michigan voters for granted? (If so, I wonder what Michigan Democrats have ever done to deserve that kind of treatment?)

Or is it that Michigan’s problems are too real, and too complex, to just throw slogans at, the way Democrats loving throwing slogans around about “health care,” and “climate change,” and “energy alternatives.”

First, in May, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Barack Obama, all dropped out of September’s Democratic candidates’ debate in Detroit, for the highly-principled reason that it was being broadcast by Fox News, and moderated by the notorious right-wing bombthrower, Brit Hume. (“Why Buy the Cow When You Can Milk It for Free?”).

Now, we learn today that “Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson are withdrawing from Michigan's Jan. 15 primary ballot, dealing a blow to this state's hopes of having Michigan's issues heard in both sides of the 2008 race.” (“Clinton stays, four Dems quit Michigan presidential race”).


As the headline says, Senator Clinton is the only major candidate to keep her name in. The four candidates say they “are pulling out because Michigan, like Florida, has violated national Democratic Party rules by moving up its primary date in a challenge to the traditional monopoly on early voting held by Iowa and New Hampshire.”

Barack Obama’s spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said “This is an extension of the pledge we made, based on the rules that the DNC laid out…We still hope that Michigan Democrats can adopt a process that meets DNC rules and, if so, look forward to fighting for the votes of men and women across the state.”

Got to follow those rules, guys. Can't go against the party leadership. Especially if you want to job of leader of the free world, proving to the UN and the World Court and foreign dictatorships that you’re no one to be trifled with.

Then the News reports this astounding bit:

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick agrees that it's a dangerous strategy, his spokesman said. He said Clinton's decision to stay on the ballot recognizes Michigan's importance in the national campaign.

But he disagrees with the decision by the others to withdraw.

“We aren't just going to stand with Democrats just to be Democrats,” said spokesman Matt Allen. “Given the position the state is in we definitely need to hear from both parities.

“If the Democratic candidates choose not to address the issues facing Michigan, it could be a big win for the Republicans.”

Did we readthat right? Democrats treating Michigan as flyover country could actually make Democrats wake up and vote for the other party? (Are you hearing this, Republicans?)

Even reporter Gordon Trowbridge gets a little bit edgy when he talks about the attitude the Edwards campaign :

Edwards' manager David Bonior, who was a long-time Michigan congressman, defended his campaign's decision to boycott Michigan.

“Michigan is a great state with some of the finest Democrats in the nation, but it's important we respect the role that the four early states play in the nominating process,” Bonior said in a prepared statement issued by the campaign.

“In Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada voters can look their candidate in the eye and determine who is best to bring about real change in America. In these early states issues matter more than money, celebrity and advertisements.

“Voters want and deserve a candidate who represents real people, not corporate special interests, and this primary process will help ensure that's exactly what the American people get.”

It was unclear to whom his criticism was intended -- the Republicans, Clinton or another target.

Except it’s not unclear at all, Mr. Trowbridge. Bonior's target was Michigan Democrats, his former constituents, who have no stake in “real change,” because so many of them happen to work, (or used to) for “corporate interests,” (or what we around here call, “the auto industry”). Edwards has much bigger "real problems" fish to fry, like delivering the White House to the American trial lawyers, and seeing how fast he can get the US out of Iraq. But when it comes to tackling real problems of real productive industries, like we have in Michigan, it's no secret that the Democratic Party doesn't know jack squat. So, say Edwards and Bonior, Michigan voters just need to shut up and let the Mommy Party talk grown-up business with the man at the door.

Those of you from outside our state may remember David Bonior, Michigan’s own “Lord Haw Haw”. One of the last official acts of former Rep. Bonior, was, along with Rep. Jim McDermott, to travel to Baghdad in 2003 as a last ditch effort to protect the Iraqi dictator from inspections, (“Baghdad Bonior”), or otherwise accounting for his unaccounted WMD (I know, I know: but if you can’t tell us where they are, please don’t repeat where they aren’t: they had to go somewhere, or are you one of those who rejects science in favor of blind faith?).

Bonior’s feelings before we invaded Iraq were, ``I think you have to take the Iraqis on their value--at their face value.” But, he had no hesitation saying he thought the American president, “would mislead the American people.”

We are so lucky to have him as one of our former Congressmen.

And we’re not sure why Bonior’s promised talk show on Al-Jazeera fell through. But since he was already so close to the bottom, it was an easy career move for Bonior to attach himself to the campaign of John Edwards.

As is becoming more apparent here in Michigan day by day, (literally), Democratic solutions don’t hold any promise for Michigan’s “real people” and real problems, (e.g., rising taxes, wrecked school systems, fleeing businesses). Republican solutions, like lower taxes, business-friendly policies, school vouchers, could transform Michigan, if Republicans could ever figure out how to reach dissatisfied Democratic voters.

We noted last May that the Democratic candidates were treating Michigan voters as if they were safe, predictable, and could be counted on to vote Democratic in November 2008 regardless of how bad the party treats them. I still think that’s the case, and I still think Michigan voters will turn out for the Democratic candidate. There is just too much party loyalty, especially in the cities and amongst government employees.

But when even a party creature like Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick implies the state could end up voting against the Democrats, things are getting serious.