Frank Rich on MSM

Frank Rich of The New York Times exposes media bias toward partisanship (Fox News) and banal infotainment (MSNBC and CNN) in this week's column.

What would most drive Moynihan around the bend is another Fox innovation used by Hannity last week in connection with the foiled New York attack. For a “text voting” segment, he invited the audience to vote “if you think the Times Square bombing suspect acted alone” or with the Taliban or with Al Qaeda. The winner, he announced at the program’s end, was Al Qaeda. So what if the correct answer is the Pakistani Taliban? Fox viewers are officially entitled to decide their own facts. You’d think that if America is at war with terrorists, it might be helpful if we knew precisely which terrorists we are at war with. We’re still paying for having conflated Iraq with Al Qaeda after 9/11.

Then again, as egregious as Fox’s factual liberties may be, it’s often a pick-your-poison situation: on Saturday night CNN was as slow as MSNBC to jump from the revelers in Washington to the emergency in New York. The choice between news with distorted “facts,” Fox style, and the news-free “news” that can subsume its rivals is a lose-lose proposition, especially for a country at war. As we venerate the heroic street vendors who gave America its reality check last weekend, we should remember that they were the first to report what was happening in Times Square and that those covering and attending the White House Correspondents Dinner were the last.

--Ballard Burgher