Balkin on White House v. Fox News

Jack Balkin places the recent conflict between the Obama White House and Fox News in historic context.

We have been witnessing the return of a twenty-first century version of the party presses of the late 18th and 19th centuries. These party presses have no obligation to be journalistically objective, and they are not. They may say, as Fox News does, that they separate out news coverage from editorial writing, as the Wall Street Journal has done for many years. But do not believe it. Fox News is not the Wall Street Journal (or at least, the pre-Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal). It is a party press, and its editorial coverage affects its news coverage, which should be obvious to anyone who watches it for even an hour or so.

This new form of journalism is not, strictly speaking, a "party press" in the early 19th century mold because it is not owned and operated directly or indirectly by a political party. It is, however, a "partisan press," because it is unabashedly partisan in its purposes and its product, including both editorial and news operations. Indeed the two operations increasingly merge in the new partisan press, as they did in the nineteenth century party press...The new party press seeks to have it both ways: to be a party press and to participate in institutions that were designed for a mid-twentieth century version of so-called "objective" or middle of the road journalism. It seeks both to define news and to influence legacy journalistic organizations.

Balkin nails the problem I have with Fox News. The clear attempt to have it both ways is fundamentally misleading and, therefore, dishonest.

UPDATE: John Scalzi provides an interesting take on Obama's strategy in picking this fight.

The White House says Fox News is not a real news organization and is the propaganda arm of the GOP, Fox News throws a very public shit fit about it, which gives it higher ratings and an impetus to skew even more to the right in its presentation, and go out of its way to criticize Obama even further. Meanwhile the noise is all covered by multiple other news outlets, which in aggregate reach a much larger audience, which show Fox News anchors and personalities in the middle of ideological conniptions, confirming to the general population the proposition that, indeed, Fox News is more interested in politics than news, and reinforcing the impression that Fox News and the GOP are reading off the same page. Which makes the GOP look unreasonable in an era in which its popularity isn’t, shall we say, spectacular to begin with. To what end? Well, you might have heard there’s a health care debate going on.

--Ballard Burgher