Fox News "on the job"
John Bolton, Jay Sekulow and Walid Phares have one thing in common. They regularly appear on Fox News as analysts. Bolton and Sekulow, in fact, are Fox News "contributors." They have something else in common, too. They are all part of Mitt Romney's campaign team, advising on foreign policy, national security and legal matters. The third thing they have in common is that Fox News never tells you of their connection with Romney even when these analysts are telling viewers how great the presumptive Republican nominee's ideas are and how crappy those of the Obama administration are.
Ben Dimiero and Eric Hananoki over at Media Matters say this failure to disclose violates journalistic ethics. Yeah, well, sure, but that's Chapter 275 in the 10-volume series on Fox's violation of journalistic ethics.
After all, during the last election season, dozens of Fox's top "news" personalities engaged in fund-raising or campaigning for Republican candidates or organizations in more than 600 instances. Some of them even assisted in initiating pro-Republican fund-raising organizations. If I had done that when I worked for the Los Angeles Times, I would have been sent packing the instant my editor discovered it. Because that is what news organizations with real ethics codes do.
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But if this were legally actionable, even the world's dumbest lawyer could get around the problem by pointing out that the "news" part of Fox News is just a brand, not an accurate description. Stipulated, counselor.
My colleague Hunter wrote a week ago:
Having the insert-Republican-backed-thing-here be a product of one of their own paid employees, though—that's a step above. Karl Rove is paid by Fox to do "analysis"; in his non-Fox job, Rove's Super PAC cuts an explicitly partisan ad; Fox News gives free air time to the spot ad nauseum, gushing over how terribly brilliant the thing supposedly is; Karl Rove is paid to come on Fox News programs and talk about how brilliant his ad is. Journalism!
The question is not whether the unjournalistic Fox violates journalistic ethics. The question is whether it serves as an unregistered super PAC providing in-kind services to the Romney campaign. Even registered super PACs aren't supposed to
cough-cough interact with a candidate's campaign operations. But that is about as enforceable in practice as journalistic ethics (or any other kind) at Fox.
So we not only have Rove, who runs his own super PAC for Romney, commenting on Obama and being praised by Foxy others for an ad trashing the president, we also have John Bolton appearing at Romney endorsement events and advising him on foreign policy while appearing on Fox to call Obama's foreign policy "confused and incoherent and incompetent." We have Romney endorser and legal adviser Sekulow claiming on Fox that Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board are unconstitutional. And we have Romney special adviser on national security Phares criticizing Obama over Syria.
These are nothing more than campaign ads masquerading as analysis. Not ads that sponsors must pay for like those for reverse mortgages. Not free "house" ads either. Fox pays these guys to shill for Romney and sneer at Obama. Exactly what super PACs do.
As Hunter has written, "[e]ven Super PACs have more legal and ethical restrictions than Fox News does..." All the more reason to recognize reality. Fox is a super PAC and the Federal Election Commission ought to be phoning Roger Ailes to inquire when he is going to get around to filling out the papers.