This weekend, a minor news story popped up that should probably get a little more attention than it will. Appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources, White House communications director Anita Dunn gave what Huffington Post's Sam Stein called, "a lengthy and brutal denunciation of Fox News, calling the cable outlet a vehicle for Republican Party propaganda and an ideological opponent of the president." Stein includes a few examples:"If we went back a year ago to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that was a time this country was in two wars that we had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election what you would have seen were that the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and a something called ACORN."
"The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological... what I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party."
"Obviously [the President] will go on Fox because he engages with ideological opponents. He has done that before and he will do it again... when he goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point. He is going on it to debate the opposition."
"[Fox is] widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news organization like CNN is."
The only real disagreement I have with Dunn here is that I don't know that I'd call CNN a "news organization." They report a lot of stuff, but they don't do a lot of journalism -- no cable news organization really does that. Maybe they're a "news-repeating organization." Otherwise, dead on. CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
