I watch PBS have a fit about this tonight.
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
What Ailes the Press?
Ideology and jealousy are behind the kerfuffle over a Fox News exec's letter to the president.
Friday, November 22, 2002 12:01 a.m.
Just after the terrorist attacks of September 11, we have now learned, Fox News president Roger Ailes sent a letter to the White House. This scoop, revealed in Bob Woodward's new book, has sent the ethicists of the national press into a tizzy.
They are apparently stunned that a journalist gave advice to a politician. And that's without anyone knowing what the letter actually said. Ace reporter Woodward evidently didn't see the contents of what he describes as an "important-looking confidential communication."
Our own policy is to give advice to politicians every day in these columns. But let's all be candid and admit that this Ailes kerfuffle has nothing to do with ethics. What's really going on here is that the news executive in question happens to be a conservative and heads the successful Fox News Channel, which built its success on offering an alternative to what everyone understands is the dominant liberal media. We can't recall hearing similar press outrage, for example, when Rick Kaplan, former head of Fox News rival CNN, slept over at the White House.
The Ailes letter has also been a chance for the also-rans to whack its leading competitor. Fox News now beats CNN in prime time, even though CNN is carried in far more markets. Mr. Kaplan's former network has flogged the Ailes story so hard that he soon may get more air time than CNN gave the sniper, or Robert Blake.
The current expressions of horror directed at Mr. Ailes would probably have come as a surprise to Lester Markel, late editor of the Sunday New York Times. In "The Kingdom and the Power," Gay Talese reports JFK's annoyed response to a meeting with Markel. Markel hadn't come down to Washington to interview him, Kennedy complained, he had "come down to tell me what to do as President." The next time Markel wanted to stop by, press secretary Pierre Salinger tried to dissuade him by saying that several other Times-men had recently been in to see the President. To which Markel replied, "I do not wish to be treated as a New York Times-man. I wish to be treated as an adviser to Presidents."
At least Mr. Ailes makes no such claim; he merely says that he is a citizen first, and a news executive second. We've come a long way from the trauma and fury immediately after September 11. But not so far, perhaps, to have forgotten the nearly universal passion on the part of Americans to do something. "Just tell me where to sign up, Mr. President," CBS's Dan Rather publicly asked--an expression of allegiance and grief every American understood. In the same way, Mr. Ailes wrote to the President--as a citizen in time of war, not as some media boss angling to be a Presidential crony.
The hair-tearing and solemn meditations on Mr. Ailes's alleged offense will likely sputter to an end fairly soon without costing Fox any viewers. Americans don't take seriously outbreaks of babble about violations of media orthodoxy, in part because they know how large a part politics plays in the selective notice of these alleged crimes, and in part because they recognize the inflation of trivia when they see it. |
