Today's Sunday Loon Watch focuses on Fox, which rolled out Karl Rove to defend the cable broadcaster against the Obama administration's characterization of Fox as a partisan media outlet.
Rove made two basic points:
- No White House should ever attack specific media outlets.
- It would be horribly unfair use MSNBC's "over-the-top, left-wing hosts" an excuse to attack NBC News, which has a separate news operation.
Naturally, it turns out the Bush White House did exactly what Rove now says they never should have done. Roll the video (full transcript below the fold):
The letter Perino refers to is this one, in which White House advisor Ed Gillespie attacks NBC News for "blurring" the lines "between the 'news' as reported on NBC and the 'opinion' as reported on MSNBC."
Between Gillespie's letter and Perino's statement that the Bush White House was "fed up" with NBC News, we've got a clear-cut case of Karl Rove accusing the Obama White House of doing the exact same thing to Fox that the Bush White House did to NBC.
But there's one more thing that's important to point out. The so-called reporter who asked Perino the softball question reciting the accusations of Gillespie's letter and wondering whether NBC had responded was none other than Mike Emanuel of Fox.
Yep, the same Fox that now claims to be on an "enemies list" because the Obama White House had the temerity to accuse it of partisan bias was uncritically repeating Bush talking points that attacked NBC News.
So back then, Fox was working alongside the government to attack a news organization, and today they whine and howl like little babies when the current administration points out that they have an obvious partisan bias.
Oh well. It's their right to have a partisan bias. That's what the First Amendment is all about. But the mere fact that they have a right to broadcast conservative propaganda does not mean other news organizations -- or the White House -- have a responsibility to treat them like a serious news organization.
Transcript of Perino video:
MIKE EMANUEL (Fox News): On the back-and-forth between you guys and NBC News, one of the issues Ed Gillespie brings up is NBC calling Iraq a civil war for a period, and then Ed notes that it stopped around September of 2007. Then Ed asks in his exchange with NBC, "Will the network publicly declare the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?" I’m wondering if you guys have gotten a response on that matter, and if not, are you still calling for a response from NBC?
DANA PERINO (WH Press Secretary): We have not heard back from them on that specific matter. We anxiously await any response that we would get on it. But I think it’s quite telling that they have been silent.
The reason that we sent the letter yesterday is because we had gotten fed up with the way that the President’s policies are being mischaracterized, or the situations on the ground weren’t being accurately reflected in the reporting. We had complained before. And it just reached a boiling point when things had boiled over when we believed that NBC News specifically edited out — intentionally edited out — something that the President said in response to a question in an interview regarding Iran, and that it mischaracterized the whole interview because of it.
As regards the civil war, I remember very distinctly how there was quite the pomp and circumstance when NBC, on the Today Show, decided to declare — that they were declaring that Iraq was a civil war. But since then, after the surge and things certainly improved in Iraq, NBC has never had a corresponding ceremony to say that Iraq is not in a civil war. I was just curious to find out what they believe.
And the same goes with the economy. When we got the numbers just two weeks ago on the GDP for the economic growth, it said that we had grown at 0.6 percent. And yet the anchor that night decided to disavow that number. We’re just curious what part of the official government data that’s been coming out for years do they not agree with. So we haven’t had a response on that.
And just another point on this is that President Bush is going to continue to state what United States policy is for the next eight months, and certainly during the six months that there’s an election going on. If, for example, if tomorrow President Bush says that he believes that the tax cuts should be made permanent, that doesn’t mean he’s attacking anybody; he is stating his policy. And we just want to make sure it’s really clear that we’re not going to allow the President’s policies to be dragged into the ‘08 election unnecessarily and unfairly.