Objectivity is lost to Fox News’ barbs

“There’s a see-ya-later-buddy quality to this.”

-- Brit Hume, Fox News Channel anchor on the collapse of Iraq’s regime

*

TV pictures of Baghdad’s fall included a U.S. soldier briefly draping an American flag over the head of a 40-foot statue of Saddam Hussein that was about to come down.

“No doubt, Al Jazeera and the others will make hay with that,” “fair and balanced” Fox News Channel anchor David Asman said on Wednesday, expressing his disdain for the Qatar-based Arab satellite channel famous for its opinionated, non-Western news perspective.

When Fox reporter Simon Marks suggested from Amman, Jordan, that Arabs “on the street” may still regard Americans as invaders who manipulated these images, not as liberators, Asman snapped: “There is a certain ridiculousness to that point of view.”

Whether he was right or wrong, the day’s symbolism was historic on a level unrelated to politics or nationalism. When the statue of Hussein fell, an era of TV news appeared to topple with it.

There was a time, years ago, when even a network news anchor’s raised eyebrow was correctly denounced as commentary. How quaint and musty that code of objectivity now seems as the war in Iraq winds down.

And viewers face Fox’s swirling sands of spin.

Fox is not the only cable news channel that seamlessly stitches opinion to news. It happens regularly at CNN, the self-anointed “most trusted name in news,” where prominent anchor Lou Dobbs is easily irked by opinions he doesn’t share and is allowed to slap down interviewees who express them. And some of MSNBC’s minions are not far behind.

Yet story slanting and bombast have soared stratospherically at Rupert Murdoch’s 24-hour Fox channel under the guidance of former Republican political operative Roger Ailes since it was founded in 1996, ostensibly to combat bias in news. “Liberal” bias, that is.

Clearly, Fox is doing just fine in the eyes of many Americans, having passed older CNN in the ratings and made stars of some of its people.

A recent viewers poll by Murdoch-owned TV Guide found vamping, hyperventilating, tabloid-bred Shepard Smith, of all people, tied with ABC’s Peter Jennings, just ahead of CBS’ Dan Rather, for second place in network anchor credibility behind NBC’s Tom Brokaw.

And that self-inflating gasbag Bill O’Reilly and his “O’Reilly Factor” are now something of a national institution. He is a real hoot, at times rising to exquisite self-parody, as when interviewing Princeton’s Peter Singer, who equated the lives of slain Iraqi civilians with those of Americans fighting there.

“I believe you are on the wrong side of this politically and morally,” O’Reilly lectured him, “but I’m going to give you the last word.”

Then O’Reilly followed Singer’s last word with his own: “You’re doing a great disservice to your country, sir.”

Where should journalists draw a line separating news from opinion? Throughout much of Fox, the question never arises.

Although its field reporters play it mostly down the middle -- and that’s significant -- its New York anchor-interviewers are notorious for injecting their own views, nearly always conservative and supportive of the Bush administration. What’s more, at times they press field reporters to agree.

Add to that an overwhelming dominance of right-of-center pundits and guests, and the result is pretty much a wall of conservative opinion.

Greta Van Susteren is generally fair and not jingoistic while anchoring her evening program. And Fox does use some liberal-stamped pundits as regulars. But they are nearly always relegated to the fringes of its programming schedule.

An exception is moderately left-of-center talk-radio host Alan Colmes, but he wears a bull’s-eye on his chest. The hapless, sleepy, untelegenic Colmes is mowed down nightly by his forceful, articulate, camera-tailored, extreme-right counterpart, talk-radio star Sean Hannity, in their debates on “Hannity & Colmes.” Plus, Fox often visits Hannity’s radio studio to get his views on the day’s news, something it doesn’t do for Colmes.

In other words, Fox slants like a drunk who’s guzzled a couple of six-packs. If only it did so honestly, calling itself the “conservative alternative” or something like that, instead of pretending to be what it’s not by having its anchors deliver these relentless on-screen mantras: “We report, you decide” and “real journalism, fair and balanced.” Fat chance.

Instead, a sample day this week found these Uncle Sams tenaciously bashing the French, the United Nations, Al Jazeera and those in the media, especially the New York Times, questioning the war in Iraq. At Fox, that equals treason.

* “We report, you decide” on “Fox and Friends,” an early-morning show whose three hosts tackle news with schmooze: “I want to know whether the New York Times is putting a picture of this on its cover,” co-host Steve Doocy said about footage of Kurds celebrating the downfall of Hussein in northern Iraq. Meanwhile, co-host Brian Kilmeade wasn’t buying “British intelligence” cited in London papers reporting that Hussein probably survived the recent U.S. air strike aimed at him. “So-called” British intelligence, he called it.

* “We report, you decide” with Asman, a former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal: “What do you think of these armchair critics from the New York Times?” he asked a guest, adding about “gloom and doom” stories: “Have these news organizations lost all credibility for analyzing military strategy?”

* “We report, you decide” with anchor Neil Cavuto, who, like others at Fox, adopts White House and Pentagon war terminology -- “the coalition of the willing” -- to describe the U.S.-British-dominated war effort led by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “What’s to stop us from just telling the French and Germans, ‘To hell with you?’ ” Cavuto asked his pro-war guest. And exhuming a favorite Fox target out of the blue, he asked: “Would you have been able to see this kind of closeness in war between Tony Blair and Clinton?”

* “We report, you decide” with anchor John Gibson, wondering “what the French are gonna do to try to screw up” Iraq’s coming post-Hussein period. As for the U.N. wanting a central role in postwar reconstruction, Gibson added: “Americans think it’s an absolute joke that the U.N. is so presumptuous to think that it could run Iraq. The idea that we would turn it over to the U.N. to fumble seems incomprehensible.” When a Gibson guest argued that many Arabs oppose long-term U.S. involvement in postwar Iraq, he cut him off.

* “We report, you decide” with Smith on a U.S. tank killing two journalists and wounding many others when firing into Iraq’s Palestine Hotel, where hundreds of foreign journalists were based: “I think it’s now pretty clear ... that snipers were on that roof ... and by design, and in effect, journalists are being used as human shields,” he said. That contradicted German freelance reporter Chris Jumpelt, who was working for Fox and on the line from Baghdad after being in the hotel when the blast came. The Pentagon claimed the tank was taking sniper fire from the hotel, something Jumpelt and other journalists disputed, but something Smith accepted. As if to undermine Jumpelt, Smith pointed out that the reporter was being “minded by Iraqis [who monitor] what he says.” If true, then why ask Jumpelt about this in the first place?

As for those London press reports that Hussein likely survived the recent air strike, Smith didn’t like those much either. “What do we know about this paper, the Guardian?” he asked about the famous daily. Later, he announced that it and another London paper, the highly regarded Independent, were “decidedly antiwar,” implying that they slanted their news reporting.

He must have confused them with Fox, where objectivity is routinely dispatched like images of Saddam Hussein. See ya later, buddy.