Say Anything Blog

By way of explaining that they’re totally not declaring war on Fox News for refusing to give them the fawning coverage they think they deserve, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod were on the Sunday talk shows to explain how Fox News isn’t really a news station at all.

Emanuel:

Axelrod:

What’s interesting is that, for all their whining about Fox’s ill-treatment of Obama, a Pew study indicated that Fox was actually a lot more balanced in its coverage of Obama than any other cable news network:

As for Dunn’s complaint about Fox News’ coverage of the Obama campaign, a study by the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Fox News stories on Obama in the last six weeks of the campaign were negative. Similarly, 40 percent of Fox News’ stories on Obama’s Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, were negative.

On CNN, by contrast, there was a 22-point disparity in the percentage of negative stories on Obama (39 percent) and McCain (61 percent). The disparity was even greater at MSNBC, according to Pew, where just 14 percent of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73 percent of McCain stories—a spread of 59 points.

Now, I’ll not defend the folks at Fox as paragons of journalistic integrity.  To suggest that Fox doesn’t have a rightward bent is to deny reality.  But I don’t think Fox is as biased to the right as CNN and MSNBC are as biased to the left.

What Obama is demanding of Fox is not fair coverage but allegiance of the sort shown daily by news outlets like CNN and MSNBC.