Media Hypocrisy

What I find so interesting about the general national media reaction to the whole bias issue is how blind and one sided many practitioners are toward the subject. The USA Today brings us a great example. It seems that Geneva Overholser, former ombudsman of The Washington Post, has resigned from the board of the National Press Foundation because it plans to honor Fox News anchor Brit Hume. Here is her explanation:

Hume, the ABC White House correspondent who joined Fox in 1996 and anchors a nightly newscast, doesn’t deserve the award because he and Fox practice ”ideologically connected journalism,” Overholser says.
”Fox wants to do news from a certain viewpoint, but it wants to claim that it is ‘fair and balanced,’ ” she says. ”That is inaccurate and unfair to other media who engage in a quest, perhaps an imperfect quest, for objectivity.”

Here is the funny thing, the award has gone to David Brinkley, Dan Rather, John Chancellor, Jane Pauley, Barbara Walters and Nina Totenberg in the past! Now you can see why she is so upset. Clearly Dan Rather and Barbara Walters are the pinnacle of objective journalism!

Notice too how she attacks Hume and Fox because they are supposedly deceiving the public about their bias instead of attempting objectivity; even if imperfect. This is the arrogance that Bernard Goldberg and others have noted, the elite media wraps themselves in the cloak of objectivity and decries anyone else that doesn’t fit their mold as biased and ideologically driven. It is OK for the New York Times to rehash liberal interest group press releases as news but Fox News is a tool of right wing cranks. The haughty, holier-than-thou, attitude of Ms. Overholser comes through loud and clear; me thinks she doesn’t like the success of a new point of view.

Not content to laughably accuse Fox of ”ideologically connected journalism” (laughable because of the supposed objectivism of Dan Rather, et al.) she claims to seek a discussion the elite media have ignored for years:

”I would welcome a discussion about whether objectivity really exists, which media seem the least fair and balanced, whether objectivity is desirable, whether it wouldn’t be better to have a more European-like model — in which media were straightforwardly ideologically aligned,” she wrote in an e-mail to fellow board members. ”All of those could be helpful to American journalism.”
”And I can applaud Fox for all sorts of things, but being deceptively ideologically aligned — being hypocritical about it — far from contributing to such discussions, makes them impossible to have.”

Yup, it is Fox’s fault that the issue of bias in news hasn’t been a topic of discussion. If I was seeking an example of hypocrisy it wouldn’t be Fox! What is amusing is that she seems to think that the New York Times hasn’t already assumed the European tradition of blatant ideological slant.

Perhaps, instead of resigning in protest Ms. Overholser could begin a campaign to debate this important question. I am sure there are a large number of journalists and readers who would love to participate. I am not so sure Dan Rather will be available, however, as he is convinced the issue doesn’t exist.