Sullivan on Fox News

Noting the embarassment network staffers showed in a New York Times Magazine article at the mention of Glenn Beck, Andrew Sullivan fisks Fox News on The Daily Dish.

Compared with Sean Hannity, for example, Beck seems to me to be a relative innocent. Hannity is a cynical liar and cool propagandist. You can trust nothing he says and although I find it hard to diagnose the motives behind Beck's enthusiasms (money? fame? emotional instability? misplaced patriotism?), he is, compared with Hannity, a model of genuineness. He did, for example, criticize Republican spending and debt under Bush. I remember, because he invited me on his show when it was on CNN before the 2006 mid-terms and we agreed on a lot. Hannity never criticized the GOP for its spending and borrowing, while immediately turning on a dime as soon as Obama was elected. Shameless does not even begin to describe the man's public character.

Sullivan moves on to Bill O'Reilly who castigates President Obama as a "progressive" who is "moving further left." It is hard to see how O'Reilly squares this characterization with Obama's actual policy record including:

• Troop escalation in Afghanistan
• Escalation of drone attacks on al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan
• Retaining a number of Bush foreign policy initiatives (torture is the primary exception)
• Retaining Bush Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
• Refusal to nationalize the banks during the banking crisis
• Passing a very centrist health care reform law that kept private insurance intact and gave in on a public option
• Increased security personnel along our borders and brought down illegal immigration

Sullivan concludes:

Beck is in many ways a clown. But my own sense of him is that he is, at times, a genuine clown, not entirely fake. (I know many disagree, and I cannot judge the man's soul from a distance, but that's my hunch.) O'Reilly, meanwhile, is a propagandist - not as bad as Hannity - but dishonest and wrong. And his claim to balance, by having on the hapless, clueless, intellectually vapid Dee-Dee Myers as a rebuttal, is absurd. Mr O'Reilly, I know Fox has long had a blanket ban on having me on as a guest, but here's a challenge: allow me to debate this Talking Points Memo with you, and reveal what a completely half-baked piece of nonsense it was. I'm not Dee Dee Myers. I am not a progressive. And I think your version of this president is a caricature so unfair it deserves a real thrashing out on air, in public.

Happy Friday.

--Ballard Burgher