As Campaign Desk has before him, Frank Rich in today’s New York Times bemoans CNN’s “casual abandonment of even a fig leaf of impartiality” by keeping James Carville and Paul Belaga on as hosts of “Crossfire” even as the two slave away as the newest recruits to the battalion of consultants flitting around the Kerry campaign.
Rich takes note of Carville’s and CNN’s defense that it doesn’t matter because “Crossfire” is “an opinion-mongering screamfest” and not a news program, but he isn’t buying it (and neither are we). The net effect is, as Rich asserts, that the show “and CNN itself are now as inextricably bound to the Democrats as Fox is to the Republicans. The network has succeeded in an impossible feat — ceding [Bill] O’Reilly the moral high ground.”
Rich contends that Fox News has succeeded not just because it’s a partisan channel preaching to the choir, but also because its rivals, like CNN, have been so weak at providing what might have been an alternative — namely, “hard-hitting, trustworthy news.”
He goes on:
What much of the other news media have offered as an alternative has not been an alternative at all. At some point after 9/11, the news business jumped the shark and started relaying unchallenged administration propaganda. … The notorious March 2003 presidential news conference at which not a single probing question was asked by the entire White House press corps heralded the broader Foxification to come.
The result, Rich says, “was that the entire press came off as Fox Lite. … The WMD flimflam was hardly the last time that government propaganda supplanted journalism. … there is a tendency to give administration-flavored fiction credibility first, often cementing the spin into fact well before the tough questions are asked (if they’re ever asked).”
Rich is well aware, as a Pew Research Center survey published in June showed, that the credibility of all news sources — newspapers, broadcast networks, cable networks, PBS, even C-SPAN — is slumping, and that CNN’s latest capitulation is no way out. “The only hope for a successful alternative [to Fox News] is not to fight Fox’s fire with fire in the form of another partisan network but to reinvent the wheel with a network that prizes news over endless left/right crossfire.” In the meantime, he concludes, “Carville and Begala, in keeping with the self-immolating tradition of the Kerry campaign, have handed the Bush campaign and its Fox auxiliary one hell of a gift.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves — if we already hadn’t.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.