Salon: Faux claims to have broken the Bush* DUI story (Fair & Balanced)

[kskiska]

Rewriting history

Ever eager to prove it's fair and balanced, the Fox News Channel brags that it broke the Bush DUI story in 2000. Warning: You've entered the spin zone.

Under continued scrutiny for the way its newscasts are tainted by a plainly partisan slant, some inside the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News Channel are fighting back, insisting FNC doesn't go easy on Republicans. A favorite talking point has become how it was the Fox News Channel that first broke the embarrassing news, during the closing week of the 2000 campaign, that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunken driving in 1976 when he was 30 years old -- an arrest Bush had never come clean about.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes crowed about the Bush DUI scoop in a recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, where he fended off criticism of FNC's news standards. And this week, FNC's chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, made the same point to the New York Observer, which noted that he "was the reporter who broke the Bush D.U.I. story." Said Cameron: "My relationships with Republicans in the 2000 campaign didn't stop Fox from reporting the D.U.I. story that Karl Rove said cost George Bush the popular vote."

The problem is that both Ailes and Cameron have had to rewrite history to make their DUI claim stick, because the tale of who broke the story is not as simple as they'd like to spin it. And the notion that the FNC crew -- Ailes, Cameron, Brit Hume, Tony Snow, Bill O'Reilly, etc. -- was hounding the Bush camp at the end of the election campaign and asking hard questions about Bush's drunken-driving past is pure fantasy. Plus, once the DUI story leaked out, FNC reporters, anchors and guests spent days spinning furiously on Bush's behalf in an attempt to downplay the story.

The truth is that it was a resourceful 27-year-old reporter at a local Fox affiliate, WPXT-TV in Portland, Maine, who uncovered the DUI story, not the Fox News Channel in New York or Washington, the partisan national network that's the focus of Robert Greenwald's new documentary, "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism." …

(snip)

So the truth is that Fox News knew other news organizations had the story and had no choice but putting its locally produced story on the air. Which means one of journalism's great what-ifs remains unanswered: What if Ailes' Fox News Channel -- and not one of Fox's local affiliates -- had discovered exclusively, just days before the 2000 election, that Bush had been arrested for drunken driving? Would Fox News then have aired that damaging report?

Anyone willing to make a bet?

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/23/fox_dui/index.html

[Downtown Hound]

1. Yeah, and I bet they also invented gunpowder

before the Chinese did and discovered electricity. And oh yeah, it was really them that broke the Watergate story, not those pinko commies Woodward and Bernstiein.