Just An Average Joe: Regrettable Allies

Did The Mainstream Media Defend Fox News

All this past week, Fox News has been reporting how they are being ostracized and excluded by the White House, when it comes to interviews and receiving information for their news casts. In researching for this article I found many conflicting reports and observations. I have found that this is the norm for anything I write about when, it comes to Fox News and the world of the twenty first century Joseph Goebbals, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News.

I have found the ratings for Fox News is extremely high. Personally, I find this disturbing since any news from this network is always distorted to the point of outright lying. This network is nothing more than a propagandized mouthpiece of the Neo Conservative side of the Republican Party. The Male and Female Anchors are no better than Pimps and Prostitutes of disinformation, distortion of the truth and outright brainwashing by lying about the facts they report. I can only believe that the shock factor of degenerates like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity must provide an outlet of entertainment in the hectic lives of the people who listen to them. Only truly ignorant, uneducated and racist people will believe the filth they spew. If I am wrong, then our country is in far deeper trouble than any poor economy can bring. Being Patriotic means actually reading and understanding our Constitution and Bill Of Rights. Supporting our Armed Forces in time of conflict and knowing when it is time to come home. Not just flag waving, yelling at the top of your lungs about taking your Country back. I believe many of those people, not only have no understanding about what they are shouting about but, could be lead to foolish and irresponsible actions promoted by the brainwashing lunatic Pied Pipers of Hannitty and Beck.

The following is an article describing what I believe to be truth, to what really was going on, with the Media support of Fox News: http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/fnc/networks_refuse_interview_after_white_house_denies_fox_141065.asp
Networks Refuse Interview After White House Denies Fox
By Kevin Allocca on Oct 23, 2009 03:55 PM
The White House dispute with Fox News took a new turn yesterday regarding an interview with an administration official and the White House press pool.
The administration offered up "pay czar" Kenneth Feinberg for one-on-one network interviews to be shot by the pool, but tried to block Fox News. FoxNews.com reports:
But the Washington bureau chiefs of the five TV networks consulted and decided that none of their reporters would interview Feinberg unless Fox News was included.
The administration relented, making Feinberg available for all five pool members and Bloomberg TV.
While this could be seen as a display of solidarity from the other networks, a D.C. network insider tells TVNewser the news divisions were not necessarily taking a stand and siding with Fox when they refused the interviews, but that it was more of a financial decision.
The pool is paid for by and rotates between ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC, allowing each network to do quick interviews using the same camera crew. If the White House were to exclude one of the members, the other networks would have to provide their own crew for the interview.
There are financial and contractual arrangements and obligations between the networks when the pool is involved that would override any opinion the networks and bureau chiefs might have with the White House's position on Fox. Under that official arrangement, everyone has to be treated equally.
Of course, there are plenty of newsers and critics who have expressed discomfort with the White House getting involved in media criticism and singling out one organization.

The following article is from the New York Times giving an overall take on the White House, Fox News and the relationship in general between the Obama Administration and the News Media: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/us/politics/23fox.html
Behind the War Between White House and Fox
By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: October 22, 2009
WASHINGTON — Late last month, the senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Palm steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête.Skip to next paragraph
Mr. Ailes, who had reached out to Mr. Axelrod to address rising tensions between the network and the White House, told him that Fox’s reporters were fair, if tough, and should be considered separate from the Fox commentators who were skewering President Obama nightly, according to people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Axelrod said it was the view of the White House that Fox News had blurred the line between news and anti-Obama advocacy.
What both men took to be the start of a frank but productive dialogue proved, in retrospect, more akin to the round of pre-Pearl Harbor peace talks between the United States and Japan.
By the following weekend, officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level. The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration’s chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early fall — namely, past statements and affiliations of the White House adviser Van Jones that ultimately led to his resignation and questions surrounding the community activist group Acorn.
At the same time, Fox News had continued a stream of reports rankling White House officials and liberal groups that monitor its programming for bias.
Those reports included a critical segment on the schools safety official Kevin Jennings, with the on-screen headline “School Czar’s Past May Be Too Radical”; urgent news coverage of a video showing schoolchildren “singing the praises, quite literally, of the president,” which the Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson later called “pure Khmer Rouge stuff”; and the daily anti-Obama salvos from Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.
There followed, beginning in earnest more than two weeks ago, an intensified volley of White House comments describing Fox as “not a news network.”
“It was an amalgam of stories covered, and our assessment of how others were dealing with those stories, that caused us to comment,” Mr. Axelrod said in describing the administration’s thinking.
The heated back-and-forth between the White House and Fox News has brought equal delight to Fox’s conservative commentators, who revel in the fight, and liberal Democrats, who have long characterized the network as a purveyor of right-wing propaganda rather than fact-based journalism.
Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation.
Then, in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, the president went public. “What our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” he said. “And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another.”
In a sign of discomfort with the White House stance, Fox’s television news competitors refused to go along with a Treasury Department effort on Tuesday to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg that was to be conducted with a “pool” camera crew shared by all the networks. That followed a pointed question at a White House briefing this week by Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent, about the administration’s treatment of “one of our sister organizations.”
White House officials continue to interact with Fox News correspondents whom they have complimented as professional, including Major Garrett and Wendell Goler.
But Michael Clemente, senior vice president for news and editorial programming at Fox, said the White House was conflating the network’s commentary with its news coverage. That, Mr. Clemente said, “would be like Fox News blaming the White House senior staff for the Washington Redskins’ losing record.”
“I think we’re doing the job we’re supposed to be doing,” he said, “and we do it as well as anyone.”
Mr. Clemente suggested that the fight was part of a larger White House strategy to marginalize critics. He cited a report in Politico about a strategy session in August at which officials discussed plans to move more aggressively against opponents.
White House officials acknowledged that Fox News did come up at that meeting, although not, they said, as a central topic. A number of issues had been added to the White House’s list of grievances by then, including the network’s heavy coverage of some of the more intensely anti-administration activity at town-hall-style meetings on health care and Mr. Beck’s remark that Mr. Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people.”
The first real shot from the White House, however, came when aides excluded “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace” — which they had previously treated as distinct from the network — from a round of presidential interviews with Sunday morning news programs in mid-September.
“We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the deputy White House communications director. Later that week, White House officials said, they noticed a column by Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The Times, in which Jill Abramson, one of the paper’s two managing editors, described her newsroom’s “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” The Washington Post’s executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, had already expressed similar concerns about his newsroom.
White House officials said comments like those had focused them on a need to make their case that Fox had an ideological bent undercutting its legitimacy as a news organization.
Fox News Channel certainly seems to be enjoying a row it considers ratings candy, having devoted hours of news coverage and commentary to the fight.
But White House officials said they were happy to have at least started a public debate about Fox.
“This is a discussion that probably had to be had about their approach to things,” Mr. Axelrod said. “Our concern is other media not follow their lead.”