E.J. Dionne: The End of the Fox News Era?

babylonsister

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Mon Jul-26-10 05:31 AM
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E.J. Dionne: The End of the Fox News Era?

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_end_of_the_fox_news_era_20100725/

The End of the Fox News Era?
Posted on Jul 25, 2010
By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable moment.” It is a time for action.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration alike must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its own propaganda to be accepted as news by persuading traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.”

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The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

Thus did Andrew Alexander, The Washington Post’s ombudsman, ask why the paper had been slow to report on, as he put it, “the Justice Department’s decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.”

Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: persuade Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, dismissed the case and those pushing it. “This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers,” she told Politico’s Ben Smith. “This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the {Obama} administration.”

Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He’s a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.

Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being “motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.”

This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense—and it’s nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting upon the difference between news and propaganda.